Megan Marshall Believes We Need Exemplary Lives

Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome to the Drafting the Past podcast. I'm Kate Carpenter, and in each episode, I interview a historian about how they research and write history. Today's guest thought her first biography might take her three and a half years to write. It took 20, and at times, she told me, she was afraid she might not finish. What a gift to all of us that she did, and has gone on to write three additional books. I was thrilled to be joined for this episode by Megan Marshall.

Megan Marshall 0:28
Thank you, Kate. I'm really excited for this particular podcast at this particular time because history is under assault, and we have to do our best to keep getting the stories out.

Kate Carpenter 0:39
Megan is a writer and biographer who got her start writing book reviews. Her first biography was The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. It was awarded multiple prizes and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and Memoir. Her second book, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life won the Pulitzer Prize in biography, and her third book was Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, a biography of the poet Bishop, interwoven with chapters from Megan's own life leading up to her study with Bishop. She has also been awarded the Bio Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization. She has also won many other honors that I won't list here, but suffice to say, those 20 years were well worth it. This year, she published a book of essays called After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart. It includes pieces on her family's history, her own encounters with historic events, and some further investigations into research that didn't make it into the other books. Our conversation was such a pleasure, and you'll hear from Megan about how she approaches the subjects and structures of her book, and what has kept her going. Plus, why she believes biography is essential now. Enjoy my conversation with Megan Marshall.

Megan Marshall 1:56
You know, I didn't necessarily start out to be a biographer, although looking way back when I was a child, my grandmother was the children's librarian in Pasadena, where I grew up, in the main library, and I spent a lot of time there with her. And I loved children's biographies, particularly of women, Amelia Earhart and Marie Curie, and I loved reading, you know, novels about brainy little girls as well. You know the the children's biographies were about brainy little girls or adventurous ones who grew up and did something, and then there were the, you know, Little Women and Little House books, and and I loved books also that made me cry because you know something moving took place towards the end, and I always thought you know I did want to become a writer. I thought it'd be the greatest thing possible to move somebody else to tears by reading something I had written. So it seemed like that was something to aim for, but I had no idea how to do that. And I was-I had skipped a grade in school, so I was always kind of a little behind. And if we were doing writing things, you know, mine was never the one put up on the board, and I never made it into the poetry club in high school. But by the time I was in college, I kind of I took some time off and came back as a transfer student to Harvard, where I was lucky to get into some poetry writing classes. And suddenly, poetry became the thing I thought I would do, particularly because you know I was always writing papers for classes, and it got you know these long, long things, and poetry seemed wonderfully short. But at the same time, I was an English major. We were studying American literature for the most part. That was my interest, and and it was in the era still of New Criticism where you didn't talk about the authors at all. But I found myself kind of secretly reading biographies of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and that sort of thing, just wanting to know what the lives of these writers was like. So I had that interest in their lives and letters that was kind of a subversive one. And then I had was taking classes, poetry writing classes, with some eminent writers, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and kind of getting glimpses into their lives. So when I left college at a time when there were few jobs in academe, I thought I'm not going to try that, and I began working as a freelance writer, writing book reviews. The thing I most enjoyed was, you know, looking, kind of analyzing books. How did they work? And I was writing some reviews for the New Republic of American history and biography, and and then I wrote a first book that was about women today. You know, single women who I considered the pioneers of feminism and the sexual revolution and the, you know, entering the professions. This was in the early '80s, and I thought this was going to you know make a big splash because this was news to everyone. What what were these women really doing? What and and in the end, I think the book came out too soon. It was, you know, misunderstood by a lot of people, and I thought, I'm going to just leave this women today thing behind. And go back to my interest in how people grew up to do whatever it was they did. I and I thought, you know, I was interested in at that time not just one woman but a group of women. How did they make the different choices that they did? And that led me to the Peabody Sisters, my first biography, which you know I had not done any kind of research in archives before, I was teaching myself on the job, and I was lucky to be based near the Massachusetts Historical Society, where there were very generous archivists as well as fellow scholars working on papers there. So you know, I was launched into this whole world of reading zillions of handwritten letters, and often they were from the 19th century that were in sometimes difficult handwriting and cross writing where they'd write across you know one page.

Megan Marshall 5:48
Anyway, I just fell in love with that process, and it took me a long time to finish that book. But I had found what I really wanted to do that brought together, you know, the brainy girls growing up to do something, the American literature, the biography that interested me, and and the kind of close reading that I had learned both in you know as an English major and in these poetry workshops where you know every word had to matter, so it all kind of came together, and I felt very good about what I was doing, but it was taking a very long time. I was raising kids, you know. I used to give a talk called "Writing in Waiting Rooms" because that was so much what I was doing. I would, you know, write when the kids were in school, and then, but a lot of the time they weren't in school. They're going to the doctor, they're having the physical therapy, or whatever the orthodontia, and that became my method really. So the trajectory: then a couple more books. Each one took less time because I had learned more, and I was also not doing the quite so much early, you know, first time through of the archive kind of thing. That, the people I was writing about afterwards were better known. So and their papers, many of them were in print in one way or another. So it was kind of easier to get through those, but the, I really learned on the Peabody Sisters.

Kate Carpenter 7:05
We are going to get back to all of that, but first I want to ask a little bit about the practicalities of your writing. When and where do you like to write?

Megan Marshall 7:14
Ah, well, you know that's that's kind of a trajectory question too because it's changed so much over time. You know, I've always, almost always, since since my first child was born in 1984, had to fit things around whatever, you know, the schedule of the children. Or later, when I was teaching, the schedule of teaching. So it's very hard for me to say that I, you know, start working in the morning and take a nap in the afternoon, and in fact, that was I had some wonderful mentors when I was starting out. One of them was Justin Kaplan, the great biographer of Twain and Whitman, and I knew that he was subject to some kind of skin allergy, eczema, and so he would write steadily in the morning, and then he'd have lunch, and then he'd take a nap and then do other things, and it took him about seven years to write his books. And and when I signed up to write the Peabody Sisters, I thought, well, I'm not going to need that nap, you know. I'll say it'll take me three and a half years to do this book because I'm going to work morning and afternoon. And I I had my first child by then, and there's no way I could do that. So I guess the thing that might be helpful to say is, for people who are trying to fit a lot of things in at the same time, it's very hard to keep yourself from being distracted. And maybe that's the message I can give because there was constant distraction: how to stay in the chair and keep writing. It was easy for me to stay in the chair in the archive and keep reading manuscripts, but to stay in the chair at the desk and keep writing, my, a trick that I had, and it might not work for everyone actually, but was I had as a kid growing up and through college, I was a pretty serious musician, and I had been trained that you know you never, if you're at a concert, you never get up during you know somebody's playing something, and so if I, I used to think I had to work in absolute silence, you know, but I started putting on in the case of the Peabody Sisters, it was a recording of Chopin's etudes, and and I just had this feeling that you know once it was going I couldn't get up, I shouldn't get up, and I would start listening and again it was maybe it's the etudes the first one, the second one pretty soon I was engaged in the writing and you know it'd be at the end of the CD, which luckily there's more music on a CD than an LP you know, so I could I could fall into the concentration then. And the other thing I also developed a habit was I did a lot of printing out, and this was part of the writing in waiting rooms method because you know I would write at my desk while my kids were at school and while I was listening to the CD. And print out what I'd written, and you know, might be another-- and I would print out from the beginning of whatever chapter it was, or the section, and then I would take that with me as I was in the waiting room or whatever it was. And, or if I didn't have to go out, I'd take it down to the kitchen and read through that and make corrections and additions and that sort of thing, so that when I would start in again the next day, I always had something to do. I had that, those corrections to make. I wasn't looking at a, you know, at a finished paragraph from the day before. And ah, where am I going to go? So I think that's for me another great habit, and I still do that to the to this day. I print out a lot. I mean, I used to partly do it because computers were less reliable then, and they might, you know, collapse, and you'd lose whatever you'd done. And I just wanted to be sure I hadn't lost what I'd done. But, and you know, that can still happen now.

Megan Marshall 10:53
But I really think, and I try to get my students to do this: that reading, you know, if you're just reading on the screen, it's not you. Kind of fool yourself into thinking something's great, and when you print it out, for me, you print out and look at it. It's a whole different process. You're reading it to yourself the way you're reading a book to yourself, and and the rhythms or whatever, the clarity. There's so much that can be done that way, and then there's the kind of pleasure of, I'm fixing it. You know, when you're starting the next day, you're happy. I'm fixing this. I'm, I'm moving forward, and then the next words come. I also walk a lot, and I often find that, you know, sentences come to me as I'm walking. If I'm the middle of writing, or if I get to the point where I'm about to start writing, you know, the first sentence might come to me, and I have to get home or memorize it or something like that. Get home. So walking, walking, I find really helpful.

Kate Carpenter 11:46
Are you a writer who finds it important to write every day, or does it come in spurts?

Megan Marshall 11:50
You know, I wish I could write every day. I mean, when I'm, I mean, I, well, I guess to answer that, really, you know I rarely take a day off. So, but I'm not necessarily always writing. There's all sorts of other work kinds of things I have to do when I am writing. I mean, I've lately been writing essays and shorter pieces, and when one gets going, I generally don't like to take any kind of break of a day. You know, once it's got going, it's in my head, and I'm hearing it as I'm walking, and so I-I guess you know I can't any longer sit for hours and hours. I have some back trouble that I may have gotten while sitting in the archive so much, that sort of thing. But so I get up. I now actually work at a standing desk, and I'm talking to you now from standing up. But I, you know, I get up and I go read, you know, what I printed out at the table, and that sort of thing. So it just, you know, I need a lot of, I, you know, somebody might, if they were me, they were doing what I'm doing, they would say, "Oh, I have ADD, which I think is very terrible for people to sort of self-diagnose. But I, I think the breaking up some of of the rhythm sometimes helps to you know go off and do a crossword puzzle or put the laundry in the washing machine dishwash--in the--put the laundry in the washing machine. I don't have a dishwasher! And then you know it frees you up a little bit if you've gotten kind of written yourself into a corner.

Kate Carpenter 13:19
How do you like to organize your research?

Megan Marshall 13:21
Organizing my research, well, with the biographies, it's always, chronology is so important. I mean, you don't want the finished book to be reading sort of and then and then, but you need a chronological spine to follow, and so I've always, you know, there's sort of two organizing principles. One is organized by the archive that I've been to. You know, so that I'll have a, when I was working on the Peabody Sisters, I would go to, you know, there wasn't so much, or really hardly anything, nothing you could do online. So I was going all over the country to different archives in Ohio and Virginia and blah blah blah California, and I would make notes, you know, and bring them back. This was before there were portable computers, so it was all hard copy and typing things out. And I had a whole, you know, lateral file, two cabinet, two cabinet drawers of all these letters from different archives. And I knew I didn't want to lose where they had come from. You could do this on your computer by labeling these things. I didn't want to lose track of where they'd come from, and then, but then I realized I also needed to kind of shuffle them around the way you would, you know, with a printed book and you mark it up or something like that. So I made photocopies of all those, you know, couple 1000 pages of notes, and then I reorganized them chronologically, making sure that I kept track of what, you know, archive it had come from, so that I could go back and do the endnotes. But the chronological files, and for me, working from you know hard copy transcripts of letters, typescripts of letters, and and journals passages, I still really like it. I like to mark them up by hand, so. Chronology is very important, and organizing by archive so you don't lose track of where the thing has come from. And then you know once you put them all in order, you-- there are a lot of course when you're reading people's private letters, they don't always put dates on them. You know where, when when did they write this letter, and you can start figuring out from internal evidence that they all took place in a certain time, and and if you juxtapose all these letters, it just, you know, it's magic. Suddenly you you have you have a story that wasn't there before. It's it's it's organizing, but it's also creating the narrative, and that's another exciting part that I can, I don't need the CD playing to keep doing it.

Kate Carpenter 15:43
Where in that research process do you feel ready to start writing?

Megan Marshall 15:46
You know, I was just thinking about this today because I'm working on a shorter essay about my family and and their origins in Kansas in the 19th century in a small town, in Concordia, and I had gone out there last May and I'd been reading lots of papers, and I started, things started proliferating. You know, somebody I discovered a whole branch of the family that I hadn't known about or hadn't known how to contact, and I wrote to one of them who said, I mean, just to give a kind of an example, my great great grandmother had, I knew from the documents that my family had, had in 1866 attended a medical college in New York City, but we didn't know if she finished her degree. And these other people in Kansas said when I said, "Are you related? They said, "Yeah, yes, yes, and we have Letitia Truesdell's diploma from medical school." I thought, "Oh, that's great!" So I write back and said, "I'd love to see that diploma." And you know, these people weren't-they weren't like me. You know, they weren't going to scan the diploma, and she probably didn't even know where it was in her house. And she just said, "I'd love to see you." She's in Colorado now, and then she's in Kansas. I've only been to Kansas one time in my whole life, and I probably don't know if I'll ever go again. And I just thought, you know, I know now that she finished the medical school. Maybe, and this person isn't probably going to tell me too much more, and maybe I don't need to know much more. So maybe it's time to start thinking about writing this. So my answer to you is that you know, you come to a point where you think you have enough, and and you know that you're going to do you know some other research along the way, but but suddenly you get kind of sick of turning over these stones and looking under them, and and you want to say something. And I had even kind of come up, I was lucky to have a writing residency in Italy for two weeks in June, and I had decided I wouldn't take my computer. I would just try writing longhand, and I didn't want to be, because of my back, carrying a lot of heavy stuff around. So while there, I kind of came up with a beginning sentence. Not that I can tell you what it is now. I wrote it down, but you know, a way to, a way into this essay, and then I came back and all this sort of stuff and you know going through what I'd found in Kansas and trying to contact these people and I thought, but you know now I'm like eager to go back to whatever that sentence was with some apprehension in case it's actually no good or doesn't fit anymore. But you know that's a kind of mini example of it. I think in the, for the biographies, I I really did need to feel that I had gone through everything, you know, everything that I was going to refer to, and or organize it to some extent. I mean, in the case of Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Bishop, there were many of their letters and journals were in print, so I didn't do the same thing of photocopying, and and but you know I still, their materials were more or less chronological. And when I'm writing, I guess maybe this is helpful too. You know I always tend to always think that certain things are going to fit into a chapter. You know, and I I will in my document, enter you know usually a whole bunch of quotations that I think I want to get to from you know that help the narrative go forward, and inevitably I never get through all of them.

Megan Marshall 19:11
But then I have this kind of store of them that I transfer to the next document for the next chapter, and I can start in again and then adding on, and you know that's that's kind of fun too. You have to fool yourself into thinking you've mastered the organizational principle. You know this chapter is about this and it's going to end there, and that gives you the you know impetus to go forward because it's all planned out. But you might get there and well, you know it's not quite that. But I can see how that would start the next chapter or you know something like that.

Kate Carpenter 19:41
I know you've talked about how you like to to print pages off as you go and and do some work on fixing them and and getting them ready before you tackle the next part. Do you have an approach to sort of larger form revision once you have a draft?

Megan Marshall 19:54
I, that--as you phrase that, it's actually not, not the way I work, especially the last several books. I mean, the-- I don't have a draft and then go back. You know, I get it right as I go along, and in, it's not, it was not true entirely in the case of the Peabody Sisters when I didn't know what I was doing. I I did in that case, and actually the first book that I wrote, same thing. I I wrote a whole version of it before I had a vision of what the structure would be, and then I went back and wrote a new first chapter, and and then it was you know in both cases the first two books the non biography and the first biography you know what I end up writing after that envisioning finally of the structure was kind of a whole new book, you know, wasn't like I was fixing what I'd written before. It just wasn't right. So, in the case of the Peabody Sisters, which is about these three women of 19th-century New England, who one of them marries Nathaniel Hawthorne, and one marries Horace Mann, and the third is a kind of intellectual impresario who brings all these people together, and Thoreau, and Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, and all this stuff-very exciting and thrilling lives. And I had, as I was working on it, had thought I'd cover their entire lives from you know 1803, 1803 when Elizabeth, the oldest, is born and dies in 1893. You know, a huge thing. And I did research most of that, but and then I was writing, and actually my initial idea was to start with a chapter when their mother was dying in 1853, and that's when the three sisters were kind of set up. The marriages had taken place, and the older sister was on this kind of roving residence, she called it, peddling historical texts and stuff like that, and very amusing and entertaining and and anyway, and I wrote that and then I went back to the beginning and started writing you know their childhood, and I had gotten like 450 pages and they were still teenagers. I sent that to my editor. This must have been you know at about the 15 year mark I think and I had had by then she was my fourth editor for all this time. One, the first one who was wonderful died, Roby Macaulay, and then the others moved on to other things. This fourth person, she took, she didn't even read it for about a year and a half, during which time I, you know, I wasn't satisfied with it, and I had always hoped to write-- I had always thought this is too big a life to do in one book, and I thought, you know, but they wouldn't let me do two volumes on these obscure women. So I had this sudden vision in talking to a friend that I would, I don't really know how. I actually, I guess, I went with a friend to her. She was, you know, Megan. We were at her mother-in-law's country house in Vermont for a weekend where she was writing intensely, and I was thinking, "What am I going to do?" She said, "Megan, you know you could quit this. You don't have to do it. People, you know, change their minds all the time." And I thought, "Ah, you know, I can't. I cannot quit this. I'm, I'm just too in too deep. This is like 15 years in, and and I can't let them down. And I'd had fellowships. I can't let those people down." And and somehow in this moment, being away from my desk, and you know, this vision came to me of how I would frame it, which was to begin with the wedding of the, the first wedding. The first, I mean, these two weddings to the interesting guys took place within a year of each other, 1842 and 1843. But I thought I'll start with the first wedding, and then we'll cut back, and then we'll end with the second wedding, and that really covered their, the height of the transcendentalism movement and their involvement in it.

Megan Marshall 23:33
I mean, not that it didn't go on after that, but anyway, and while I was there, I started to draft that first chapter, which suddenly had a very confident voice to it, and and from then on, I was able to you know basically throw out most of what I'd written before and and wrote the book in you know maybe five years time. In the case of Margaret Fuller, I had, you know, if I if you had asked me while I was working on the Peabody Sisters if I would write about Margaret Fuller, I said absolutely not. She was not nice to the Peabody sisters, and too many people had written about her already. But when I finished the book and I started saying, "Well, you know, these are the women of the transcendentalist movement that people, you know, are overshadowed by Margaret Fuller, people would say, "Well, who was Margaret Fuller?" You know, she'd been forgotten from the kind of she had a peak of of popularity in the you know 70s and early 80s. There have been a number of biographies, and scholars were working on her quite a lot between that time. But she was sort of forgotten by the public. So I had the thought of writing a a short biography of Margaret Fuller. That was my plan. After having written a very big biography of the Peabody sisters, I thought this is one person. She died at age 40 tragically in this shipwreck, and coming back from the you know Roman Revolution, in which she had been a foreign correspondent and a ran a hospital, and she'd fallen in love and had a baby and all the stuff. All were drowned. I thought this is this would make it just a great short biography and dramatic and and and it was around the close to her bicentennial year, which would have been 2010. I could do that, you know, and I signed up to do that, and of course it got bigger. But my- there, I in that case, and in the case of the Bishop, I had a vision of how I would structure it quite early on, and in the case of Fuller, you know, there had been these many biographies of her, but the very first one, which is much criticized, by her male friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clark, you know, people have criticized this for a number of reasons. One is that these people messed with the documents and you know edited them and then chopped them up, so it's hard now to reproduce what they were working with. And then they also wanted to downplay and her radicalism and her scandalous love affair. So you know they got a lot of criticism, but these were her closest friends, or some of her closest friends, and they had organized it in a very helpful way by the places that she had lived, for the most part. Anyway, I just thought I'm going to take the same chapter titles and kind of an homage to them. I'm not; it's not going to be the same book in any way, but that that somehow was very helpful to me, connecting me with her earliest biographies, biographers, and and it just seemed to make sense. And I also, I guess, very early on when I started to read wonderfully this fabulous editor of letters, Robert Hudspeth, who he published six volumes of all all of Fuller's letters, and after that, that was done in the early '90s. I think after that, he began publishing all of Thoreau's letters, which he just finished, and then he died recently. Very sad, but what a life of gifts to writers and scholars. Anyway, I was, as soon as I opened up book one. I wasn't even in the archive, but I opened up book one of her letters, and the very first letter she'd written to her father when she could hardly write. I did want to go see how it looked in the handwriting, which I did. But she says, "Dear father, it is a heavy storm. I hope you will not have to come home in it." He was off in Washington D.C. as a congressman, and I thought, "Wow, this is where the book has to start." I mean, because it foreshadows her death in a heavy storm.

Megan Marshall 27:24
I mean, how could any book start any other way? And it happened that there was somebody else working on a biography at the same time, I knew, and I thought, ah, you know, how could anyone not use that letter? And I was so worried when his book came out a year before mine that his can start in the same way, you know, but it didn't. It's you know just proves the truth that everybody sees the historical record, you know, differently or makes a different, will make a different story. But anyway, and then the Elizabeth Bishop was really an exciting formal experiment in that I had been a student of hers, so I knew I would, wanted to include some of my own experience with her, alternating with the biographical sections, and and this book was actually originally also meant to be a short book and a series of biographies that all had the form where you'd give the the author's name or the the subject's name, and then a quotation or some or something afterwards that would be illuminating. So I liked this book was called Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, which was the title of one of her two sestinas. She hadn't, you know. It's another reason I thought, she didn't, you know, only published about 100 poems in her life. I could surely do this short way, and it'll be somewhat personal, so it won't be like a big, you know, biography. But I love the sestina, and I love the title. And then, as I was looking at the sestina, I realized that the end words-- this sestina is a poem of six stanzas with the six lines each, and the end words of the first stanza, the ending words of each line, are repeated as end words in the following stanzas in a specific order, and I realized that the end words were ideal for for organizing her biography. So there was, I think, the the biography goes, balcony, which is there were some key moments on balconies in her early life, and it also sort of you know looking forward towards looking out towards the light, balcony, crumb, coffee, river, miracle, and sun. And then my plan was to use the way the sestina does use all the six words in its last little envoi of three lines or two lines, I guess it is. I wanted to use all the six words in the last sentence of the book, which I did, and so the whole thing, you know, really, I wrote that book much faster than any of the others. It didn't turn out to be a short book because it turned out that there were a lot of new materials to work with, letters that her last lover had saved, and and were full of explosive things. So it became another big book, but it still had that structure and and my own memoirish interludes as you know it has sort of a I guess you wouldn't call it quite a parallel track, but they were tracks that ultimately converged. My little story that kind of goes from my life growing up and meeting with hers in 1977, 76 and seven, and then she died in 79. So it was, worked really well. Very proud of that.

Kate Carpenter 27:25
I guess then, in some ways, it makes great sense that you went from that book in which you start to incorporate some memoir to After Lives that has often very personal essays, where a lot more of you is present than in your biographies. Why did you decide to write this book at this point?

Megan Marshall 28:53
The After Lives book came together over a number of years, and it's called After Lives, two words. So that's one meaning of it. It's after I'd written these three big lives, after lives, and I also wanted to, well, I just began writing this in this shorter form of the essays. I guess the first one that's in the book I wrote, and and it was family history. I had been aware that my grandfather, my father's father, this is still again the Kansas family, although they ended up in California. That he had, I had a lot of family letters that had come to me that I really hadn't read. I was doing my own work, but I knew that he'd been in Paris during World War One, and I think I I think I had skimmed them enough to see that he'd found his way into the Chamber of Deputies when Clemenceau was announcing the armistice, the terms of the armistice, and it was a very moving moment. And he said, you know, everybody cheered and cried and sang the Marseillaise. And you know, November 11, I guess it was, in 1918. And I and I was thinking about this as we're coming up to the centennial of the armistice. So I had published a few things with the New Yorker, excerpts of the Peabody Sisters, and and I had had the ear of somebody there, and I said, you know, how about how about writing about this for the centennial? And that went through, and and I was really glad and and interested, you know, finding out a lot of things about my family's past that I hadn't known, and what what I had thought I would find was actually very different from my, what I did. My grandfather had been kind of a closed down person later in life, and I knew he'd had struggled with depression through his life. And I thought I was going to find out that he had you know experienced shell shock, but that wasn't what I found. I found the opposite. This was like the best time of their lives, even though it was very scary and bombs falling down the building across the street and and a lot of stress, but it was also the first year of my grandparents' marriage, and they were lucky to be able to both get to Paris before my grandfather was inducted into the AEF, so that they were living, you know, in a pencil with a view of the Eiffel Tower while all this was going on, and having their first child, and and it was after that that things kind of got dark. But I mean, not that it was obviously not happy all the time and going to the front, whatever. Anyhow, so that was the first one, and then my own partner died shortly after that, having been unwell for quite a while, and and you know that I was just derailed by that, and derailed then by the pandemic, which came so soon after, and that led to writing a couple of the other essays just as an attempt to write something at all, you know. And I think I finally had three of them, and I thought, oh, you know, maybe this would make a book if I did a few more. And it's a very interesting grouping of essays that are part. Some of them are family history. I guess another kind of. I mean, the the second one that I wrote had to do with really about my partner missing my partner and the and the pandemic and a period of time that I'd spent in Japan and and a hermit there who's you know 13th century hermit who was writing was like the whatever it was a kind of a experimental meditation that actually I'm really proud of but you know it also kept me going and then after that I recognize another important anniversary was coming up, which was the 50th, my 50th high school reunion, which was also brought to mind the 50th in in 2020, the 50th anniversary of the death of a classmate, Jonathan Jackson, the younger brother of the Soledad Brother George Jackson, who died in a very unfortunate effort to do a hostage-taking plan and free his older brother, who'd been in prison for 10 years on kind of ridiculous charges.

Megan Marshall 34:53
Anyway, Jonathan ended up killed, and this was a famous courthouse incident in Marin County, and he was using guns that belonged to Angela Davis. It's a big, if you were around then, or even not, you might know about this Marin County courthouse shooting. And so I thought I would write about that, and you know, something I had wanted to write about for pretty much as long as I'd been a writer or journalist, but hadn't really known how to find a way into it because it really was his story. I didn't want to appropriate his story, but it was also as I ended up writing a kind of parallel growing up narrative of my life and his in Pasadena, which was you know really an exemplary, an exemplar of communities that were going through you know bussing crises in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, the civil rights victories that then kind of turned into Black Power movement, all of which had their great idealistic successes, but also dramatic tragedies. So those were the three, and then I thought maybe there's some way I can keep doing this and write more about things I learned as a biographer and other meaningful experiences in my own life that that kind of reverberate with larger themes about historical writing, biographical writing, you know, a little bit like the theory behind confessional poetry that Robert Lowell originated with others like Sylvia Plath that you know your own experience is not, you know, I'm not saying I'm so important but my, what I experience has some is a window into the larger world of those times.

Kate Carpenter 36:34
Yeah, it's a it's a beautiful book. I I really enjoyed it. I'm wondering if you might be willing to read this excerpt for me from the beginning,

Megan Marshall 36:43
This is from the--it's not the first essay that that I wrote, but I, in fact, it it's one of the later ones. But it does have the title "After Lives," and like some of the some of the essays, it's drawing on material that I had learned, but didn't include in in the books, and it also is drawing on a very unusual experience that I had that sets this off.

Megan Marshall 37:10
Dead men tell no tales. But dead women do—at least to me. They speak in questions. Una Hawthorne—the eldest child of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, whose puckish disposition as a girl had been grafted by her father onto little Pearl, Hester Prynne’s willful out-of-wedlock daughter in The Scarlet Letter—was the first and most insistent. Una would not let me go.
I’d given two decades to researching and writing a biography of the Peabody sisters, the youngest of whom was Nathaniel’s wife, Sophia, a promising artist at the time of their wedding in 1842, active in her studio through their first year of marriage. That’s where my book ended, with Una’s birth in 1844, the year Sophia turned thirty-five and Nathaniel, forty. By then the Hawthornes and Sophia’s two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, were well launched, along with the bold intellectual and social movement—transcendentalism—they’d done so much to initiate. As an aspiring writer who struggled to make time for my work while raising two daughters, I’d been reluctant to face Sophia’s renunciation of her talent in motherhood, her decision, as she once wrote to a wealthy friend who’d offered to pay for a nanny after the birth of Una’s baby sister, Rose, Sophia’s third and last child, so she might return to her easel: ‘painting—for the present must go by the board--& what is more, shall go.’ Her children would be ‘the best pictures I ever painted.’ Sophia Hawthorne never completed, or even commenced, another work of art.
Now, on a warm evening in late June 2006, a year after my book was published, I was facing both mother and daughter in death. The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, New York, an order of Catholic nuns founded by Rose, who’d taken vows in midlife, had arranged for the transfer of Sophia’s and Una’s remains from Kensal Green Cemetery in London, where they’d been buried in 1871 and 1877—Sophia at sixty-one, Una at thirty-three. The two women were to be ‘reunited’ with Nathaniel, as the Dominican Sisters thought of it, on Authors Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a popular tourist site in Concord, Massachusetts, where the town’s famous literary families were interred: the Emersons, Thoreaus, Alcotts, and Nathanial Hawthorne, whose wife and children had died too far off to keep him company in the afterlife.
We were seated on folding chairs in a small, windowless assembly room at the interior of Rosary Hill Home, the hospice for impoverished cancer patients Rose had established in 1900 and the Dominican Sisters still operated, Sophia and Una’s first stop on their way home to Concord. Sister Mary Joseph, the Dominican Sisters’ public relations officer, had invited me and a fifth-generation representative of the Hawthorne family, the poet Alison Deming, to witness the Hawthorne women’s return to the United States. A plain wood casket—child-sized, Sister Mary Joseph said—lay before us on a table. She slipped out of the room, the white skirts of her habit rustling as she shut the door, telling us, ‘You can look inside if you’d like. But you won’t find much, just bits of bone and cloth. It’s been a long time.’ More than 120 years.
Raised Unitarian in a family that prefers cremation and long-delayed ‘celebrations of life’ for our dead, I’d never attended a wake or viewing the ritual I assumed Sister Mary Joseph was permitting us to enact in private. The undeniable curiosity I felt was mixed with dread, despite the assurance there would be no skeletons. I deferred to Alison, the blood relative. She lifted the lid.”

Kate Carpenter 41:23
Thank you for reading so much. I just I enjoy your writing in these essays so much. So I'm glad to treat listeners to it a little bit.

Megan Marshall 41:30
It's also a pleasure to read and reminds me of while I was writing. I'm always reading over, and lately I've gotten more into actually reading aloud to myself sometimes if I'm particularly perplexed by what I'm trying to say, does it make sense? So, anyway, I'm used to used to hearing hearing it in my head.

Kate Carpenter 41:49
As a biographer, did it feel strange to write these essays with yourself as as part of the narrative, or was it freeing?

Megan Marshall 41:58
Maybe a little bit of both. I think I've always felt, I mean, I think all writers write from a personal motivation to be heard. You know, they weren't listened to when they were kids, or they experienced things that they couldn't speak of. And it's that delayed wish to to tell and to be heard that motivates. And so, even while I was writing about the Peabody Sisters. I was, you know, their stories reverberated with me, and that's part of what I write about in the introduction to to this collection of essays. That I mean, I don't think necessarily. I mean, I don't, I work very hard not to let my own connection with the subject affect what I'm going to present about, I mean, inevitably they're the things I'm interested in that maybe another person wouldn't be, such as you know the first letter in the Margaret Fuller story. But I'm not, I didn't pick that because I, you know, knew somebody who drowned or anything like that. I was, or I had almost drowned. It's just to me, you know, as a writer, that was a way way to start. But you know, I think there is an urge to tell and to bear witness, I guess, and I think that was behind the stories in that are personal in my book, but they're mostly not about me. They're about people whose lives I witnessed that you might not think to know about, such as my grandfather, or whose life I didn't really know about, but can now tell about because it was representative of the kinds of lives that were living. You know, people who were living through a just a global crisis in as that war broke out, and how did they go from the kind of settled times into this just huge, you know, worldwide calamity? And I think that reverberates with feelings we have now. Same with the story of Jonathan Jackson. You know, you you witness this wrong in his case, the wrong done to his brother, and what what is he to do? You know, the desperation that sent him to. How are we to think about and understand that? It's very contemporary. So I think I think I I felt comfortable doing this because I was doing it the way a biographer would, and I was in archives or in you know sometimes in my case actually because of a move I had to make most of the letters I was reading and working from that were family letters were actually in archives because I'd had to find a place for them. I didn't, you know, feel safe transporting them from one place to another endlessly. So it it felt in some ways the same, except of course I was discovering things about my family, and and I guess I didn't put all of them in because you know they weren't all of interest to the reader, but they were all of interest to me.

Kate Carpenter 44:42
You wrote an essay for the New York Times last year. I'm going to quote you here. You said, "Part of the thrill in visiting the past through books comes from learning about its physical makeup, its inhabitants, customs, and ways of expressing themselves, feeling as if you are there." In this passage you just read, I think, you certainly do this. You know, you make us you make us feel as though we're there. But it's also true in in your biographies that you really you're not just sort of recounting to the reader, but you make us feel as if we were there in the setting and alongside the characters. What are your strategies for writing in that way?

Megan Marshall 45:17
I think it comes out of a kind of a philosophy of what biography should do, or what I want to do with biography for the reader, which is to help them feel as if they're living through life with this person and seeing life through their eyes, and and it's a way of I can getting to essentials in my view, but also stripping away some of the in the case of the Peabodys and Fuller and even Bishop, you know, people could say negative things about these people. They were-I mean, not that I'm ignoring the negative-but Fuller and some of the Peabodys really rubbed people the wrong way because they were strong women. Elizabeth Bishop was a shy person and and not easily known. So if you can use their words, which luckily I had them, you know what they're saying. And and in the case of the Peabodys and Fuller writing in this period, they were writing letters and journals in a time, you know, before Freud, where they weren't necessarily examining their thoughts for subconscious motivations. They just wanted to get it out there. Their inner lives. They had this term, the innera, that they took from German. You know, my innera, my inner self. You know, and so there was a lot of confessional stuff and a lot of effort, very powerful effort on them on their own part to say really what it was they were feeling or thinking. You know, it wasn't when biographers get together. They talk a lot about how can how can you trust letters or journals? Are they presenting a self, you know, different self to others? And you know, there's I felt very little of that from them. They were trying to get their true self out onto the page. In the case of Elizabeth Bishop, she was a closeted. Well, on what term she would have used, I don't know. You know, lesbian loved women, and when she was writing to those women, she was being very authentic. And she was writing to friends who, with whom she could trust that secret, she was being very authentic. And you know, I just, I just anyway, I was lucky to have that kind of material I could work with. One of the great finds that made my book get bigger about Bishop was a series of letters she'd written to her psychoanalyst in 1947, I think it was. So she was 36 years old, and and you know, it's as if it's hard to know the motivation, you know why she wrote these letters. But it was sort of as if maybe the analyst said, you know, you're better at writing than talking, so why don't you write out what happened, you know, or some key moments and a and a little, not a little, you know, kind of psycho history. It was just astonishing, and you know, very she, you know, wasn't hiding things from this. I mean, obviously, probably she was in some way, but some of the things were just so out there that, you know, only things she would only say to the analyst or to her closest friends. So anyway, trying to get back to answering your question, my philosophy of biography of you know showing showing letting letting the reader kind of be in the shoes of the subject and see the world through their eyes, and that of course brings a lot to to this feeling that you are there and you had the material to do that, and also you know evoking the places. Places are extremely important, and then finding out lots that I can about you know Margaret Fuller visiting a mesmerist to deal with her pain in her shoulder because she has curvature of the spine. Well, what was mesmerism, and what was that treatment exactly like? Or the same with Sophia Peabody, who had various illnesses, and luckily, my God, her the physician she saw and relied on most, Dr. Walter Channing, had written a book later, you know, later in his life called "Bedcase" about nurses. Then what we he didn't call them; they were bed cases. Women who took to their beds, and and Sophia was bordering on that at times. She was a bed case, and I had not just his book about women who were experiencing that. This was before the later 19th century, you know, rescue stuff.

Megan Marshall 49:30
This is a different view that he had very early on. But you know, I also had letters in which she described what kind of treatment he offered her, and I don't know all these just miraculous things that came together, or that her she was also an artist, and I knew her drawing teacher who thought a lot of her, and and you know you'd think well maybe these men were kind of discouraging women, but quite the opposite. In fact, this drawing teacher. I'd written a novel about a woman artist, and so I was able to find this novel in the Widener Library, and just the whole picture shifts the more, the closer you get to the books they were reading, the places they lived. You know, I just very I went to all of them. In the case of Fuller and the Peabodys, I didn't quite so much. In the case of Bishop, because some of the places I had been to previously myself, and then I also she described them. She was quite known for description, so I didn't really feel I needed to go to Brazil to describe the Brazil that she saw. But I did go to some places that she didn't describe because, or didn't describe at at length because she was ashamed of them, and one of them was her house where she grew up in where she was living with an aunt. She was essentially an orphan and raised by aunts and uncles, and she was living with an aunt and uncle in Revere. And this is the place. This is the balcony store, balcony opening chapter the an abusive uncle who once hung her over the railing of of a balcony by her hair and so I went to find that place and then I also went to the apartment house she lived in in San Francisco where her after her partner Lada had died by suicide and she was there with a younger lover, and you know I don't think anyone had gone to see those places, but they meant a lot to me because they were you know private and places of some torment for her.

Kate Carpenter 51:33
Writing biography well takes a long time. In the case of the Peabody sisters, 20 years, but your other books were not were not quick turnarounds. How do you keep the faith as you know life keeps continuing to happen to you as as the project is still in a very nebulous form? How do you how do you keep going?

Megan Marshall 51:51
Well, one thing that I did as I as soon as I started on the Peabody Sisters, I didn't know it would take me 20 years. As I said, I thought it would take me three years, but or three and a half, half of seven, but because I wasn't going to nap. But I had, yes, I had had a kind of lunch group of women writers that I had been in for a while, who were novelists or poets, whatever. But I thought I wanted to start a group of women biographers that would meet regularly once a month, and I, I already had a friend Susan Quinn who'd written a biography of Karen Horney, the pioneering psychoanalyst who refuted Freud's penis envy thing. Wonderful biography, and she was working on Marie Curie, and between the two of us, we came up with, I think, four other people. One, most of us were working on women's lives, but one person was writing about Rodin, the sculptor. Anyway, and we started meeting every month. To initially, we did share our work and read to each other now and then. But over time, and this group is still meeting. It's changed the membership slightly in the early years because somebody moved away or other person finished the book. But I think we've had the same members for about 20 years now, and it's so 1985. This is a 40-year group, so that was really really helpful to me. Sometimes on a practical level, but also just because I had a place to go and talk about this, you know, what I was worried would come to seem to my daughters and to my husband like an obsession that was just you know they were sick of it. So I you know I think that was it was a good idea, and it was very helpful. But I also think that it was kind of a woman's thing to do to sort of hide out with my passion. Whereas I once heard about Martin Sherwin, who spent 30 years on the biography of Oppenheimer, that he ultimately joined forces with Kai Bird to publish to get it finished, and he evidently it was just kind of a joke in the family. He was, you know, never going to finish it. I was in his office all the time working on this, and I, I don't know if I were a guy, and I if I had he was like a tenured professor at Tufts, and so it was kind of a joke. Whereas for me, this was the only thing I was doing. Was I really doing anything? You know, it was very painful, and to me, a lot of the time, that my sense that I wasn't, maybe I would never finish. I really had that feeling until quite near the end, actually, because you know that's the way it is. If it's not finished, it's not finished. And so the the group was really very helpful. And and one of the members of the group was part of a a kind of collective of women in the Boston area who every May would rent a large house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on the beach and share the cost of it. And use it for a kind of writers' retreat. And I went there a couple of times. Once our whole biographers group took it over for for a week, and and those were really important times too. So I guess looking back, I'm glad I did it. I think I would have been less furtive about it. Almost should have been, but you know, life teaches you a lot of lessons.

Kate Carpenter 55:26
At the very start of our conversation, you you mentioned being pleased to be on this podcast because of the importance of history and needing to defend it in this moment. I know you've been really involved with Biographers International and helping to promote biography as as other people write it as well. How do you think about the importance of biography right now?

Megan Marshall 55:48
You know, I think thinking about the historical profession, we've kind of emerged from a period where biography was frowned upon. You know, you don't want to look at individual lives, privilege the individual life, and really you need to do kind of population studies and look at movements, and and I think we really need exemplary lives to inspire us now. I think we always do, and regardless of the times, you might find different things in a life depending on what urgencies are around you and that you're feeling personally, I was really, really pleased to be asked by the Smithsonian to the Smithsonian Magazine to write a short profile of Margaret Fuller for their semi-quintennial semi whatever it is the 250th issue this summer, which was and is did come out about American innovators, and they included Margaret Fuller, they included Frederick Douglass, you know, and Lonnie Bunch wrote this really you know brave opening statement about the importance of learning all of history, everything we can find out, and I just felt so happy to that you know we'd been talking about this piece for since before the election of Trump, and and they were able to hang on to this vision of what the 250th could be in their publication. So I really recommend to everyone to to look at that while it's there. I don't live in D.C. but there's an organization called Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian. If you live in D.C. find out about them, and they are now doing some actions at the Smithsonian as we're speaking now. It's just after that wretched statement by Trump that he wanted to put warning signs all over the place about the language in the placards. Margaret Fuller is currently featured in the National Portrait Gallery. I was so pleased to see that last summer when I was in D.C. and I I had to wonder would would that stay? She's in a room with Douglas and and other forget whether they're called resistors or you know, you know, can that room stay? And she's aside from that, I was so happy to see this. She's her portrait, which only recently was donated to the portrait gallery. They had it had been on loan, and you know, it's so important to me that it's there. It's the only portrait oil in oils of her that exists from when she was in Italy, but as you're you know wandering about, there are various guide things on the walls in the hallway, and there's a you know reproduction of this portrait saying you know think about portraits. What do they tell you? What what mood did they convey? And they chose Margaret Fuller's. What do you think she's thinking? What do what can you tell about what she's wearing? About what the times are, and and what do you see in the background? You know, you see Italy. Ah, why is that? You know, she's American. I'm just so happy about that, and I I dread the thought that that might be painted over. We don't want a revolutionary like Margaret Fuller, who you know said I'm. I'm getting towards the end of her life, which ended at age 40. You know, I'm. I'm becoming more and more of a socialist. She writes. You know, this is probably not something that the current administration wants featured. So anyway, I think biography is, you know, supremely important and well told and well researched, carefully researched. You know we're always revising and understanding our subjects newly, and and the thought of new visions being squelched is just very very discouraging. So go out and buy biographies, and if you're a writer, write biographies and take heart.

Kate Carpenter 59:44
That's a marvelous note to end on. But I, I do want to know: Are you working on another biography?

Megan Marshall 59:50
Well, I think I really found I like these the essay form, and I do an enormous amount of research to write any of these essays. You could tell the part part. That I read, I was I was reading. I thought, whoa! I did a lot to find out. Just you know, the Rosary Hill home and then this and then that. But I've been I live very near Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, and I walk there a lot. And I've become fascinated with certain groups of people. Not like they're not all buried in the same spot, but you know different biographical narratives that I could derive from that, for example, there's an enormous obelisk marking the grave. It just says Cushman on it. You know, everybody would know what that was at the time when Charlotte Cushman died, but nobody knows now. Charlotte Cushman was this fabulous Shakespearean actress, American, but had a career in America and Europe, and and a cross dresser, and had a menage, a more than a salon, because they were often living there in Rome with women sculptors, and some of whom were her lovers at various times, and and some of them are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, and one of the sculptors, Edmonia Lewis, who was part of that group, a black woman sculptor who's being revived now. There's a sculpture by her in Mount Auburn Cemetery that honors the first woman doctor in Boston, Harriet Hunt. And then, aside from that 19th-century story, actually, there's another sculptor and her partner, who they died in late 19th century, early 20th. They are buried together with their names on this same tomb or same stone, which was a really unusual thing to do. These two women, and in Massachusetts, you probably know that Massachusetts was the first state where same-sex marriage was legal, and there are a number of stones now. I mean, this was in 2004, I believe it was. I'd have to check that. But one member of the partner has died of the marriage has died. One spouse, and soon both will have, I'm sure. But in the ones I've seen just one dies and they put up a stone or a inscription on the wall that gives the names and and the date of death of the person who's died and and the date of the marriage that's you know within a few days of the when that ruling became official in May of I think it was May of 2004. I think maybe the ruling was in 2003, but it took six months to, you know, be cemented, something like that. So anyway, I just find that very moving. The the continuum of the history that you can find in the cemetery, which was, you know, founded and begun in 1831, the first garden cemetery in the United States, modeled after the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, so it's a beautiful place. There's a lot to write about there. So I might, I'm hoping to write a collection of essays, biographical for the most part, about interesting people there.

Kate Carpenter 1:02:55
That truly sounds like delight. So I, I hope you do. I can't wait to read it, Megan Marshall. What a pleasure for me! What a treat to get to talk to you about your writing process. Thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past.

Megan Marshall 1:03:07
Well, thank you, Kate, for such wonderful questions and close attention, and and the opportunity to talk about my work.

Kate Carpenter 1:03:15
Thanks again to Megan Marshall for joining me on this episode of the Drafting the Past podcast. You can find links to her books and other things we mentioned in the show notes. If you haven't already, check out the newly redesigne draftingthepast.com. Read all about how Megan Kate Nelson and I are creating a space for reviews and writing dedicated to nonfiction history books. Subscribe to the newsletter while you're there so you don't miss any of the cool things that are coming. Thanks for being here and for listening. Remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.