138. Ursula Parrott — Ex-Wife with Marsha Gordon

AMY HELMES: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes.

KIM ASKEW: And I'm Kim Askew. Today's lost lady, Ursula Parrott, shot to fame in 1929 after writing the most talked about book of its day, a highly autobiographical novel titled Ex-Wife. It sold out at bookstores, right along with Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Eric Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

AMY: Yeah. Interesting that we all know those titles, but none of us know Ursula Parrott and Ex-Wife. She went on to write over 100 works, including other novels, film adaptations, and numerous short stories and magazine articles. At the peak of her career, she was earning the equivalent in today's money of $2 million a year. Parrott made headlines not just for her writing's sometimes-scandalous content, but also for its cautionary message: that the freedoms modern women had newly claimed came at a staggering personal price.

KIM: Sadly, you can see that theme play out in Parrott's own discontented life. She may have managed to grab the brass ring as an independent woman, but it didn't prevent her from living an endless loop of doomed romances before descending into a life of infamy, homelessness, and eventual obscurity by the time she died in 1957. Almost all of her writing is out of print, but we have McNally Editions to thank for bringing back Ex-Wife. It's out this week and it is so, so good.

AMY: Yeah, I think it might be one of my favorite books that we've covered on this podcast so far. It's achingly poignant, but also wildly funny and such a perfect, perfect snapshot of an era. I cannot rave enough about it.

KIM: Yes, and we are so lucky that there's also a brand new biography of Ursula Parrott (this is the one and only biography, by the way) to put Ex-Wife into context with the author's own gripping and daringly lived life story. 

AMY: We've got the author of that book with us today for the discussion, and we can't wait. So let's read the stacks and get started. 

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AMY: Today's guest, Marsha Gordon, is a professor of film studies at North Carolina State University. A former fellow at the National Humanities Center and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, her most recent book published just last month, is Becoming The Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life, and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott. Marsha, congratulations on this book and welcome to the show.

MARSHA: Thank you so much. I am so excited to talk about Ursula with you two today.

KIM: We're excited too. So let's get started by telling us how you originally discovered Ursula Parrott, and what was your experience reading Ex-Wife for the very first time?

MARSHA: Well, I think you and your listeners will really like this story because in some ways it gets to the heart of your podcast. So in 2015, I was acting on a tip from F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar Jim West from Penn State about some screenplays that the University of South Carolina archives had purchased at auction that people weren't really working with yet. And so I happened to go to Columbia (S.C.) to give a talk. And so I set aside a little bit of time, like 90 minutes, to go to the special collections and look at these Fitzgerald screenplays. And so since I had a limited amount of time, I had to just pick one to look at, and so of course I picked the one called Infidelity because it sounded the best, right? 

KIM: Yes.

MARSHA: And I will never forget the note that I wrote in my own notes as I was looking at this screenplay, which was, "Who is Ursula Parrott?" Because Ursula Parrott was the author of the story that had appeared in Hearst's Cosmopolitan that Fitzgerald was hired to adapt. And I thought, “Okay, that's pretty interesting.” So I started doing research into who Ursula Parrott was. And after about a year of thinking I was still maybe gonna do something with the Fitzgerald screenplays, I thought, “Okay, the real story here is this fascinating woman who was a prolific writer, lived a really interesting life that nobody is talking about.” So in order to read Ex-Wife, her first book, which was published in 1929, I had to buy a used copy on eBay. And what I ended up buying was the 1989 Plume reprint that Francine Prose did the introduction to. And basically, after I read the first sentence of that book, I was like, “Okay, I'm, I'm hooked.” And so from there, it was a digging game.

AMY: And I love that you did the digging. You could have just been like, "Oh, okay, interesting. It was some woman that wrote this story for a magazine." You know, it just takes that one little extra step, sometimes curiosity...

MARSHA: It actually was a big mental shift to go from, I'm thinking about this super famous, probably the most famous, you know, 20th century American writer to, “Okay, I'm actually gonna embark on a project about a woman no one's ever heard of who has no books in print.” And that that is a formidable challenge, I can tell you, from every angle, but I'm so glad that I took the leap.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: It's interesting you mentioned Fitzgerald, and we're gonna get into this a little later in our discussion, but that name kept ringing through my head as I was reading this book. (Not always in a positive sense, but we'll get into that in a second.) Before we dive into the discussion of the book, I think we need some historical context to help our understanding of it and why it was so explosive. So can you help us out with that?

MARSHA: Yeah, I think it helps to just think for a minute about Ursula Parrott's life trajectory. So first off, she was born Katherine Ursula Towle (so Ursula was her middle name, that became the first name of her authorial name) and she was born in 1899, so at the end of the Victorian era. And the years Parrott was growing up were a time of really kind of unprecedented and immense change in American culture, and I think especially for women, in terms of things like access to education, acknowledgements of female sexuality, and if you think about Sigmund Freud and the popularization of Freudian ideas. And also, I think, confrontations with the kind of fleeting, uh, fragile nature of life. So I'm thinking in particular of the influenza epidemics and World War I that were really a reminder, especially to young people, that you have one shot at life and it may not last very long, so live a big, exciting life while you can. She's coming of age in a period where the idea of being intentionally modern became really in vogue, and rejecting kind of prudishness and embracing openness and frankness and not worrying so much about what people think about you. This is the world Parrott is kind of coming of age in, and that certainly influences her first novel.

KIM: So one of Parrott's first published articles is titled “Leftover Ladies,” which reminds me of The Extra Woman and Marjorie Hillis who wrote Live Alone And Like It. That was about a half dozen years later. Listeners, we did a previous episode on that book, which you can go check out later. But Marsha, what did Parrott mean by the term "leftover ladies," and how does it tie into these changing times that you're talking about in the 1920s?

MARSHA: Yeah. I'm so glad, Kim, that you invoked Marjorie Hillis, and, uh, of course you're referring to your former podcast with Joanna Scutts, her Extra Woman book, which is so good. And Marjorie Hillis encouraged women to embrace being single, right? So Parrott writes this story "Leftover Ladies," and it's a non-fiction manifesto (that's how I think of it) that appeared in December, 1929 in a magazine called The Mentor. And it is the opposite of Hillis. So if you wanted to put two pieces of writing together, you could put Hillis and Parrott’s “Leftover Ladies” together and have a nice comparison and contrast. So a "leftover lady" for Parrott was a divorcee. And keep in mind that when she got divorced in the late 1920s, she thought at first like, "Oh, I'm the only woman in the world going through this,” right? “This is such a tragedy." And she starts working because she has to support a child, and she realizes that every other woman she's working with is a divorcee. So she's like, “Okay, there's all of these women who are like me.” And then she's also noticing that there are these intentionally single women who have chosen a career over a marriage; this is the group that she classes as the leftover ladies. And her central argument in this piece, which was a kind of companion piece to Ex-Wife, it came out just a couple months after Ex-Wife was published, um, is that women could be educated, they could have careers or work --she differentiated between the two. They could behave in the same ways as men, including drinking, sexual adventuring and so on. They could support themselves. There were some really good things about that, the kind of independence and autonomy and self-reliance. But she also thought, you know, there's some really bad things about this that I don't think the feminists who pushed forward a lot of this agenda thought through. And she felt like she and other women like her were experiencing these, and she wanted to air them as a problem; to start a conversation about some of these things. It's like, "Oh wow, our lives just got a lot more complicated." 

KIM: I love how you have that line in your book from her, I think, that was about, um, you know, “Women are supposed to act like they're the pride of the brothel.” They weren't raised that way, so it was like there was that huge juxtaposition between how they were supposed to act in this modern world, but how they really felt, or maybe, you know, what they were kind of up against.

MARSHA: Yeah, I mean, in some ways she really feels like the same kind of roles, of like the “angel wife” and the “whore” are still in place. It's just the terms have shifted. And so it's like instead of leaving money on the dresser, she has a line, you know, “People bring you a bottle of scotch and some violets.” Like, it's the same thing. It's just the kind of, uh, judgment around it and the terms have changed. But women, she felt very strongly, were in the same disadvantaged position, nonetheless.

AMY: She's kind of playing devil's advocate a little bit like, Wait a second. There are things that are wonderful, but let's be pragmatic about it. There are a lot of things that are not so great in our end of the bargain now.

MARSHA: Yeah, she was not afraid of provoking. As a matter of fact, I think she really liked that part of the role she ended up playing in the culture. Saying things out loud that people really weren't saying quite the way that she was doing it. And, um, it got her a lot of attention. I think she was on a bit of a mission to speak questions that she thought like all of these women wanted to know the answers to, but nobody was asking out loud because they were kind of scary questions to ask.

AMY: Mm-hmm. So can you give our listeners a little overview of the premise of this novel Ex-Wife and our narrator in the book, Patricia?

MARSHA: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, Ex-Wife is published in late summer 1929, and actually it was published anonymously at first. That's kind of an important gimmick with the book. And of course, Parrott's name was attached to it soon after. But it's about the failure of a very modern marriage between two young moderns. Patricia, her life is pretty much exactly like Ursula's in terms of upbringing and education and the like. And Peter, whose life in the book sounds pretty much just like Ursula's first husband, Lindesay Parrott. They marry young, they move to Greenwich Village, they have and lose a child. (And losing the child is actually an interesting invention of the novel that did not happen in the way that it's described there.) But this couple drinks too much. They basically have mutual and equally meaningless infidelities, followed by a really awful breakup and divorce that comes fairly late in the novel, actually. But Patricia does not want this divorce. I mean, she works really hard for it not to happen. She wants to move on from the infidelity and be mature about it because they're living by this modern ethos, and her husband just can't let it go. And so, kind of the end of the novel is, “Well, life goes on. It's never what it's supposed to be, but it goes on.”

AMY: And I think we should point out that the very first line of the novel is “My husband left me four years ago,” so it's not being told in chronological order per se. We know right at the beginning that she's a divorcee.

MARSHA: Absolutely. It goes back and forth, and I believe the next line is something like, “I don't know exactly why,” right? So it's trying to figure out not only why her marriage failed, but also try to understand this idea of the ex-wife as a category; an identity that people were having to embody in this age of kind of rampant divorce, especially in Parrott's social circle, right? Like rich, educated, white, urban. There was a lot of divorce going around in Manhattan, for example, which is where Parrott was at the time.

AMY: So, yeah, it's like that Shakespeare, "How camest thou in this pickle?" That's what you're starting with, you know? She's like, “Okay, how did this happen?” And, and then she takes you back in time to share the whole thing.

KIM: So we'd love to have you share a passage from the book, one of your favorites, if you can. I know that's a tough ask though. There's so many great moments. How do you narrow it down to one? But give it a try.

MARSHA: Yeah. Yeah, so I'm gonna read a passage actually from the new McNally Edition of Ex-Wife, which I'm so thrilled that they have republished. It's been a long time coming. And the context for this scene is that Patricia has this female mentor kind of who helps her navigate life as a divorcee, who is named Lucia. And Lucia takes her under her wing and into her apartment. And she gives this kind of extended lecture to Patricia, about women's fate in the modern age. Um, and I'll just read from it: “If you and your Peter had been young 50 years ago, you wouldn't have been unfaithful to him once because you wouldn't have had 20 opportunities for infidelity flung at you in a year. And if he were unfaithful to you, he'd manage it discreetly because he'd be socially ostracized if he didn't. And he wouldn't have told you to go your way blithely because there wouldn't have been any way for you to go. The principle thing that relieving women from the dullness of domesticity did was to relieve men from any necessity of offering stability in return for love, fidelity..” and so on.

And then I just want to read one more line from a paragraph after that. “The choices for women…” [This is actually apropos what we just were talking about] “The choices for women used to be marriage, the convent or the street. They're just the same now. Marriage has the same name, or you can have a career, letting it absorb all emotional energy, just like the convent. Or you can have an imitation masculine attitude towards sex and a succession of meaningless affairs. Promiscuity, the street that is taking your pay in orchids and dinner dates instead of money left on the dresser.” And so this is getting at that essential paradox of women's independence and self-sufficiency. And I just, I love the way she pulls no punches. This is so frank, and um, it's a little bit startling. And I suspect that readers at the time would've gasped a little bit about the truth behind these statements, right? I mean, she's speaking a very uncomfortable truth here.

AMY: It was not too long after her divorce, and to be able to have so much perspective, like to stand back and look at it and say “Where as a society did we go wrong?” or “How did we end up at this point?” It's pretty amazing.

MARSHA: Yeah. I mean I think it's fair to say in many ways she was a true philosopher of modernity that has never been taken seriously. One of the things I try to do in the book is to kind of pull these threads from her writing, from her letters, that really advance a pretty coherent imagination of modern gender relations in part.

AMY: For sure. So Ex-Wife is called a “confessional novel” in that a lot of the main character’s experiences parallel Parrott's own life, as we said. And I read Ex-Wife prior to reading your biography, Marsha, and I was just champing at the bit by the last page to get to your book and find out how it all lined up. What were the real circumstances? Who were the real people? Because it's so tantalizing. So could you tell us about some of the ways that Parrott's real life aligns with the novel?

MARSHA: Yeah. I read every single word that Parrott ever wrote or said that I could get my hands on. So that means I read every novel, every story, every interview, every letter. Fortunately, her agent George Bye, and the most significant lover she had, Hugh O'Connor (who's Noel in Ex-Wife, by the way) they saved her letters. So I think it's fair to say I'm the only person on this planet who has gone through this exercise, and that is to say I have a pretty good sense of how she used her life and her stories, and she drew from it very, very heavily. So in terms of Ex-Wife, outside of many of the characters and plot similarities, there are significant divergences like the death of her son, for example, but the most important alignment really has to do with Parrott's determination to live an examined life. I mean, apropos, Amy, of your comments a couple minutes ago about the amazing kind of maturity of being able to look at your life and examine it as a 20-something person, I mean, this was an intentional part of the way she lived her life; trying to learn from her mistakes, even if she kept making them. To be honest about the uglier aspects of modern living, like being stretched to the point of exhaustion by having such a busy life, of using sex and alcohol to kind of numb feeling, you know, of being brassy and funny instead of actually communicating how hurt you are about something. As a matter of fact, at one point in the novel, Pat tells Lucia that she doubts theirs will be a long-lived generation. And in that she was speaking to these kinds of hedonistic excesses that were kind of taking the place of more substantive aspects of what she perceived, at least, of earlier times. There's another idea that I think Parrott really kind of brings to bear from her life to this, and that's the idea of detachment. She really tried to look at even the worst things that happened to her with a sense of detachment. So in the novel on page 74, she's telling Lucia, “I'd like to be harder inside to try to take all this sort of thing as men are supposed to. Take it for the adventure, for the moment's gaiety, perhaps for warmth and friendliness and anesthesia against feeling so alone.” She's really trying to live like a modern, but it's just not working out, like, she can't just do the things that she saw the men around her doing and feel the same way about them. All of that tension between conventional romances and marriages and kind of modern, free, open sex relationships. Those were really at the fore.

AMY: That's one of the things that I made a note of, these swings between her being so cynical, the narrator, but then turning and being so emotional and kind of acknowledging that yes, women have soft hearts and that's not a bad thing, and it's not a bad thing to want to fall in love and to find the love of your life. And I think that is also conveyed in her own life story too, 

MARSHA: Yeah. And it's impossible, right? I mean, that's the tragedy as she saw it; that she tried so hard to bottle up her feelings. She says over and over again in stories and in her correspondence, “I'm just gonna put on a good face for this.” Whether it's an abortion or whether it's a breakup, I mean, whatever it is that she had to suffer through, she would try to not let people know how devastating it was. And she felt that that was part of what it meant to be modern, to not be bothered by things that would have been proper, tragic events in the life of women before this period of time. And I mean, you know what? It was not healthy, right? I mean, it was very destructive, personally to her, and I mean, she's not the only one of this generation who abused alcohol, right? You brought up Fitzgerald earlier. You know, so many people just drank themselves to death in this period of time where life was supposed to be so great and freeing. And so we should probably think about why that is. And I think Parrott explains a lot of that in her writing.

KIM: I was just thinking about, you know, even, um, the rape that happens, it's devastating to her, but she kind of just picks herself up and almost just numbs herself afterward to kind of get over it and it's like, wait a second. Oh my God! That's terrible! 

MARSHA: I think that rape scene in the novel is so powerful and so devastating. Um, the way that Parrott writes it, just in terms of the experience, I mean, it pulls no punches on the one hand. On the other hand, that part where the next day she starts to question if it even happened, and she has to notice wounds on her flesh in order to say, no, it actually happened. Because she's already, Patricia in the novel, she's already trying to move past it. Like, what's the point of dwelling in it? Well, she was just raped, right? This is another really awful traumatic experience that she doesn't give herself a second to process. There's no conversation. It's just moving on to the next thing. And so, yes, so many of these experiences that she pushes past and that she sees other women around her pushing past and the novel are so specific to women's experiences of like, kind of these hazardous conditions of modern life, outside of the conventions of a kind of, um, domestic arrangement where a man would've tried to protect you from these things.

KIM: Yeah, she got herself up, put on a beautiful outfit and went back out

MARSHA: That's right. Went to work! 

KIM: Went out the next night or went to work. Yep. 

AMY: Oh, and speaking of beautiful outfits, we get such a description of these flapper clothes throughout. She does not leave out any detail. The purse, the shoes, and that, that seems superficial in light of everything else we're talking about, but it's … this is a Jazz Age novel, and I think because she's drawing from real life, it's just such a genuine window into a woman's life from this era. And that is what gets me back to Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby and why I kept thinking about that while I was reading it, because I don't wanna throw shade at The Great Gatsby, but I never connected to any of the female characters in that book. And I think a lot of women would probably say the same thing. They're not compelling to me. And don't even get me started on Ernest Hemingway's novels, you know? So I'm not saying that this book should be compared to theirs, it's different, but I was just finding myself becoming irritated that this book was out there. I mean, until recently, hard to find, but it was out there too, and I didn't get to know about it until now. I went to an all- girls high school and we read The Great Gatsby sophomore year, and I thought, " What would it have been like as a young girl to read this and have this be the Jazz Age novel you're introduced to and to see these perspectives?" It's kind of infuriating that so many great books that focus on women's experiences just get dismissed.

MARSHA: Yeah, Amy. Uh, yeah, you are singing my song right now. It is absolutely true. May it change, right? I mean that's why we do this research and writing and, you know, efforts to recirculate women's stories that have been marginalized. It's because there's a value in them that has not been recognized. And I think there's no reason that we shouldn't put Parrott alongside Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Why would we not? The reasons her book fell out of print and the reasons it hasn't been taught all these years include the fact that we have an exclusionary, systemic, unabashedly kind of sexist canon formation history. You know, which authors are studied, what books are in print, what is taught in junior high school, high school, college. These are decisions that have been made based on criteria that really predated women having a real voice in canon formation and in the scholarly community. And this is precisely what makes everyone know Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and very few people knowing Parrott. And you know, I talk a bit in the book about how Parrott was completely unfairly pigeonholed as a romance writer and a magazine writer. And I have news for you: F. Scott Fitzgerald was a romance writer and a magazine writer. They are the same in so many ways. They just had been treated so differently. Does anybody say, “Oh, who's your favorite romance writer of the 1920s and 1930s? Oh, it's F. Scott Fitzgerald.” No, he hasn't been categorized that way. He's been categorized as one of the great American writers of the Jazz Age. And I think Ex-Wife is every bit as much a complex snapshot of the 1920s as is Gatsby. And it's a hundred percent more compelling engagement. 

AMY: Yeah, more entertaining. 

KIM: And more real! More real, like, you're feeling. You're actually getting a real window into what it was like instead of a fantasy, which is The Great Gatsby.

MARSHA: Yeah. And part of it is the textures. I mean, the textures of women's lives are there in the book. I mean, the fashion stuff, it's not inconsequential, right? It's part of the way women experience their lives. In the book, Patricia writes advertising copy for a department store, so she's immersed in this world. That's a great job for women in the 1920s, is writing advertising copy. That's how Ursula Parrott got started as a writer. So, um, you know, now that the book is back in print, what I would say to the listeners of your podcast are like, read the book, study it, publish about it, teach it. Let's get it back in circulation, and let's create a context where maybe somebody makes a decision one day to teach Ex-Wife instead of The Great Gatsby. I don't think there's any tragedy there. It's about making space for things that have been marginalized.

KIM: Absolutely. Hear, hear!

AMY: One other note that just occurred to me, too, is her male characters are fully fleshed out. Even the most peripheral character (because obviously Patricia is going on the series of dates, that's kind of how the book unfolds) as she's just going from date to date to date, all of these men have such interesting backstories and that she's really, um…

KIM: They're vivid — vivid personalities.

AMY: Yeah. So it's not like this is just a “woman's book.” 

MARSHA: Absolutely. And yeah, there's a section — you're probably referring to it, Amy — that um, that is, I don't know, eight or 10 pages I think, of describing the different men she's dating and their stories; their tragedies, their losses, their hopes and dreams that have been dashed. So yeah, thank you for bringing that up, because I don't wanna give the impression this is a completely female-centric novel. As a matter of fact, it's really all about the relationships between men and women. It's just told from a woman's perspective.

KIM: There is a pity and a tenderness for the men, too. It's not just like "men are terrible." It is also feeling sorry for the men and the position they're in as well and what they're struggling with and suffering from. So what was the reaction at the time to this book? I'm guessing it sort of ran the gamut.

MARSHA: Yeah. Well this was kind of the “water cooler” book of the season, and even the kind of reviewers who dismissed it as sordid or sensational, even those people had to acknowledge that everybody was reading and talking about this book. There were a lot of newspaper op-eds, a lot of interviews with Parrott. I mean, you could say that this was like the trending book of its moment. I was also really struck by how many reviewers misunderstood the novel as a celebration of hedonism and immorality. Because it seems so obvious to me that the book is about mistakes and regrets, that it's not like, “Oh, look how amazing my life is.” It's like, “Wow, my life would've been so much better had we both acted a little bit more maturely.” And, you know, the New York Times reviewer for the book, who did not have much love for it, um, but really credited Parrott with putting her finger on the pulse of the culture with this idea of the ex-wife as a new type of woman. And of course, he had to admit that, you know, he left the book out and his wife and all of her friends immediately picked it up and started reading it. And so he kind of says “Okay, there's like a line of women standing behind my wife to read this book right now.” So, yeah, and I think I'm very curious to see how reviews of the McNally reprint, um, what they're like. Because when Ex-Wife came out in 1989 in that former Plume edition, I was just looking at the Publisher's Weekly review from that, and it ends, um, that “Parrotts work's contemporary quality is eerie and disturbing. Although the scenery has changed, behavior patterns have not." And you know, if you think about binge drinking and hookup culture and burnout, I mean, Parrott kind of has like the hot takes of 1929 on these subjects, but they're still with us today. So I, I really hope that people respond to the novel still the way I did. And it, the way it sounds like you two did.

KIM: Yeah. It feels very relevant to now in a lot of ways too. Absolutely. Absolutely.

AMY: Yeah. And just introducing each of the men that she winds up going on dates with is very “Sex in the City.” You know, Carrie Bradshaw trying to make her way.

KIM: Yeah, and Ronna Jaffe's The Best of Everything. I was gonna mention that, too.

AMY: Yeah. This book to me though, reached like a whole nother level of greatness when she starts to weave in George Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue.” You could hear the song in your head as you're reading it. She literally puts the bars of music in between the passages where she wanted you to be thinking about this song as the action is playing out. It's just such a perfect moment in the book.

MARSHA: Yeah, you know, I wish I knew the why. I wish I knew the context for that, I mean, I would say, radical formal innovation in the novel. To include the notes on the page, um, to kind of infuse the entire chapter with the energy of that song. It really does speak to the moment in ways that words do not, but I also think it's really cool to think about the way it brings this kind of exciting new technology of the moment, the phonograph, into the novel, right? Because the whole point is that Patricia and Lucia can play the record over and over and over again. This is also very contemporary, right? Like thinking about, you know, hitting the Spotify song over and over again that you love, that just came out. And, um, I think it speaks to that kind of great ear that Parrott had for the moment. I mean, I think her language (and in this case, beyond language, right?) kind of captures the frenetic energy of a young person in New York at the time. And, you know, since you brought up this interesting innovation, I wanna bring up another stylistic observation about the novel, which may not be as obvious, for first time readers, which is Parrott's use of parentheses. Across the body of her writing, she uses parentheses to bracket off the sincere emotion and feeling that characters will not say out loud. So at the most wounded, difficult moments in Patricia's life, you will see parenthetical phrases that tell us how she (and I will also say with confidence) how Ursula Parrott felt about these particular moments in her life. And I think that's so interesting because it gives us a visual marker of that idea of flippancy, right? Like so it's the things you say out loud are on the outside of that, but the things you're thinking and the things you're feeling are contained in this marker on the page. And so again, I think it's another thing that we can point to when we talk about what a fascinating and innovative writer Parrott was.

AMY: I love the way we see Patricia in the novel make a transformation over time to the point where she can finally say “There are no villains in the piece.” I mean, we kind of discussed that a little bit before. She manages her own version of closure by the end. In real life though, Parrott continued over and over to make really poor decisions with respect to the men in her life.

MARSHA: Yeah. Um, you know, she did not wanna be a leftover lady. What she wanted more than anything was a life partner. But she also had her own terms, right? It wasn't just that she wanted any husband, obviously, because she was married and divorced four times. She had multiple engagements and multiple serious affairs. But you know, she wanted to keep her writing career. She loved travel. She wanted to raise her son the way she wanted to. She had no interest in a replacement father for her son. That was her project. That was her job. And so she was not looking for a conventional husband or a conventional family. And I think, you know, you can read her serial relationships and failures cynically, or you can read them as I do, which is she is the most relentless optimist I have ever encountered, right? Like, “this marriage is gonna work. I figured it out. This marriage is going to work. I'm gonna give this another try.” I mean, that is kind of extraordinary, right? To not give up at some point. I mean, she really kept thinking that she was going to crack the nut on this. And so, I like to think of her in the optimist, even if slightly delusively, the Optimist Club.

AMY: And speaking of delusional, she has Hugh O'Connor who is kind of like the great love (in her mind). He's not really treating her that great though. You know, he doesn't wanna commit. He's happy to just kind of get what he can get, but also have his freedom. Um, so at one point she makes what I would call an Indecent-Proposal-style proposition to him. Can you talk about that?

MARSHA: Yeah. So he's making less money than her, right? Everyone was at this point. And she offers him what she calls "a year of his life;" that she will pay basically more than his salary for him to do what he wants, write his great novel, whatever, but he has to marry her. 

AMY: For one year. 

MARSHA: For one year, right. So there's the hook of, like, you have to do this, but at the end of that year, if you don't wanna be married to me, I'll give you a divorce. But I want to be able to say, I had the respectability of being your wife and not just your mistress.

KIM: "Starring Kathrine Hepburn and..."

MARSHA: Yes, exactly. I mean, I have no doubt that that was the plot that Parrott wrote in her mind when she imagined this scenario. And, you know, he did not take her up on the offer, but part of her point was like, men do stuff like this all the time. They use money to buy their mates, why shouldn't I be able to do that? That blows my mind. I really think that that is such a radical act. And she saw it just like that. She saw it as tit-for-tat. This happens all the time, why shouldn't I be able to do this in this age where supposedly there's no difference between the way men and women act?

KIM: Didn't work, but good for her for trying. Is it true her first husband wrote a parody of her novel called Ex-Husband? There is a novel called Ex-Husband. Did you read that?

MARSHA: Um, yes, I have read all the parody novels. There's no way that Lindesay Parrott wrote that novel. He was a very serious gentleman. But it did become a bestseller. It was published anonymously, just like Ex-Wife. There were also books called Ex-Mistress, Ex-It, and my favorite Ex-Baby. The fact that there were so many parody responses, I think, gives you a sense of what a sensation this book was. That anything that is copied this much that can also become a bestseller, right? That tells you about cultural impact. And I think it's an important thing to remember when people are trying to understand the circulation of a novel like this and how it resonated in the culture at the time.

AMY: So we've already talked a little bit about how Parrott used flippancy and humor to mask the things that troubled her most, and it's also making me think of the abortion scene in the book, which is really gripping to read because she does put in those parentheticals. 

MARSHA: Yes. 

AMY: What was the response to that abortion in the book?

MARSHA: Yeah. Um, that's a great question. I haven't read a single review that singles out that scene. I don't think that would've been considered something that you would write about, although when people are offended by the book, as being “tawdry” or “sordid,” no doubt they are thinking about that abortion scene. Which by the way, I think is one of the most powerful scenes in a novel of the 20th century. I mean, I'll just say it. That chapter is phenomenal. Um, her narration of it, Pat's narration of it in the novel is very flippant, but Parrott reveals her flippancy to be a coping mechanism, right? So it's not that the novelist is flippant about it. The character is flippant about it because basically she doesn't wanna undergo this procedure in the first place. She wants to keep her marriage and have her baby. Um, and second, it's re-traumatizing because she's lost a child earlier in the novel. And, as you know, there's all of these parentheses used in a section where the real feelings are buried. So the doctor, for example, ends up asking her if she's nervous and, uh, Pat says, “Oh no, let's just go ahead and do the procedure.” But her parenthetical thought is “Hell, I just feel dead.” That almost brings tears to my eyes. That is how she felt. That is the pain and suffering of undergoing this procedure. And she's being told by her soon to be ex-husband, “Is that even mine? I don't want anything to do with it.” He won't pay for it. He is glib about it. He is a jerk about it, right? So I think again, in terms of what makes this novel remarkable and important, that scene to me is like one of the top three aspects of the novel. I just think it's powerful. It's moving, it's devastating to read that, the details of the waiting room and how she's looking around and observing the other women around her, and then how she feels after.

AMY: We almost see an echo of that scene when they are in the divorce court in a way because it takes on the same tone of like a death and, uh, you know, the finality of it and that she doesn't really want it. Um, and the same kind of humor yeah.

MARSHA: Absolutely. Not only that, there's an explicit reference to it in the court scene, because she says she remembers someone else telling her about a procedure that would only take 20 minutes, and that's the abortion. But again, as with everything else, that's awful that happens in her life, after the divorce, what does she do? She goes home, puts on her work outfit, and goes to her day job and just keeps on going. So there's no mourning, there's no crying, there's no experiencing the real sadness of the situation.

KIM: So Hollywood quickly came calling to her after the success of this book, and I think if I'm right in the film version of the book, they left out the abortion plot, right? So that gives you some indication of the response to that part. It was like not ready for Hollywood, but her writing was. Her fame obviously helped too. Do you wanna tell us about her time as a screenwriter?

MARSHA: There's a couple big sections of the book about this, but there were nine films that were adapted from Parrott's work during her lifetime. She's actually only credited for work on one screenplay, that's for “The Divorcee,” that first one from 1930. But that doesn't mean she didn't work on any of the other ones. It's just the only one she got screen credit for. Basically in 1930, she was hired by Paramount, who as with every other major studio, still had New York offices and New York studios. So they were still making films outside of the city, it was not just Hollywood. And Parrott was writing stories for Claudette Colbert and Ina Claire and Clara Bow. Fox hired her to write a scenario for her gangster novel. (Yes, she wrote a gangster novel called Gentleman's Fate.) And in the spring of 1939, she went to Hollywood for the first time and she hated it. She hated the sunshine. She hated the gossip. She really wanted to be back home. And part of the reason is she was kind of mourning this disintegrating relationship with Hugh O'Connor and she kind of just wanted to be back in his orbit. But part of it was she really had a New York sensibility. She recognized the kind of value of Hollywood. She knew that her ideas about modern relations could reach millions of people by participating in creating stories that she really felt could help people have better marriages and better relationships by being honest about modern life. And she was really committed to doing that when she went to Hollywood to try to write female characters that she felt were not impossible throwbacks to an earlier age. So yeah, she has some great experiences, um, uh, entertaining, I should say, experiences while she is in Hollywood. And she went back a couple of times, but she had no great love for being there.

KIM: So later in her life, she started to make headlines for all the wrong reasons. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened?

MARSHA: Yeah. So all of the things that she had been doing to kind of manage the difficulties of her life caught up with her, not surprisingly. As the line I referred to earlier that “we would not be a long-lived generation,” right? She had a lifelong struggle with alcoholism. Um, it seems pretty clear to me that she had bouts with depression in addition to writer's block. That she would just not be able to write a word, and have days where nothing would happen. She was a spender. Those clothes she describes in Ex-Wife and the price tags? Those came from the heart of Ursula Parrott. She loved good fashion and nice cars and vacations and furs and jewelry, and she loved that she could buy things for herself, and she did. So she would overspend herself and then have to get a story out and try to meet a deadline, and everything was kind of catching up with her over the course of the 1940s. And, you know, she ended up in a really dark place. This was especially, I think, hard for her when her agent, who was with her for so long, finally in the 1940s said, “I can't do it anymore. It's just too much histrionics, too much missed deadlines.” Like, “you're so talented, but you've squandered so much. And I think it's better for our friendship if we part ways.” And he was, I think, her closest friend, and he was the person who could tell her, “Look, you need to get your act together.” As maybe she saw from the beginning that this kind of life was not going to end well.

KIM: Yeah. She lived fully. 

MARSHA: This was a common way to live if you were part of the literati in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. You spent every ounce of your energy and every dollar you had on the pleasures of life. And you often ended up with very little or nothing.

AMY: And listeners, we'll let you read Marsha's book to get the full deets on this one particular story. But let's just say, Ursula Parrott has a sort of Bonnie and Clyde situation that she finds herself in where she is facing federal conviction because of some antics that she got into, which is almost like something out of a novel. Not even almost, it is like something out of a novel. So to hear that whole story, check out Marsha's book. I mean, Ursula was homeless towards the end of her life, right?

MARSHA: Yeah. Yeah. As Walter Winchell broadcast in his column, she was sleeping on the subways. She did try to pull herself out of that tailspin, and really fought. Really fought hard. And I, I think it was just, she was too far gone. Um, one of her ex-husbands really tried to help her in the end. It's very moving. You shouldn't cry at your own book, but there are some parts towards the end that you know … I have this great sympathy for this woman who I really admire in so many ways. And, you know, it's really hard to imagine that suffering and the loneliness and, just, you know, she fell apart in the end. 

AMY: Yeah, she was her own worst enemy in some ways, but I think she was also being this Cassandra for culture and saying, "I don't think anybody realizes the unintended consequences of this newfound freedom." And it's almost like the things she was warning against is ultimately what took her down. 

MARSHA: That's right. That's absolutely right. And she saw it. She saw it, right? Like so she was not unaware, kind of, of being entrapped in the things that she saw. She didn't say, “Oh, I have the answer. I know how to solve the problem.” She just said, “I see there's a problem. Let's talk about it”

KIM: Given how much we loved Ex-Wife, Amy, and I, are there any other books by her that are still in print or that we can easily track down that you recommend we read next? What are your favorites?

MARSHA: It's such a great question. So first off, the bad news is there is nothing else in print, but, um, I will say that I am doing my very best and if there's any listeners out here who wanna help me in this quest to have more of her work republished, there is to me the gem of her writing, it's a serialized novella, it's called Breadwinner, and it's about a young widowed mother with career ambitions who becomes a very successful screenwriter. It's set mostly in New York, so you've got all the great New York locations, but it's really about how working women were struggling to balance careers with romance and with family. And it's about how men were really struggling to accept competition from women in the working world, and I think it might be the first kind of female work-life balance novel. I just love it. And it's short, so it's, you know, like novella length under 50,000 words. So a very quick and affordable re-publication opportunity. And, um, I would love to also put together something with her short stories and interviews and non-fiction writing. Um, I've got a lot of ideas about that, but if you are feeling adventurous, like a eBay or Abe books kind of, Next Time We Live from 1935, which was also serialized in The Los Angeles Times, is really interesting. It's about a career- oriented couple, a journalist and an actress, who can't seem to find time for each other because they have these careers that suck all of their energy away. And this was adapted into a film with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret O'Sullivan. So I would say, grab your copy of Next Time We Live if you can. And maybe that one will be republished too.

KIM: Those all sound great. I definitely wanna read the Breadwinner one right away, so I'm gonna have to find it online somehow.

AMY: Some more titles have to come out just given how much we loved Ex-Wife and how good it is. It's just, it's unforgivable to keep these under wraps anymore. Some of these lost ladies… we've covered so many on this show, and some that we feature really stick in my heart more than others. And I think Ursula Parrott is one that I'm going to think about often, long after this episode. Something about her life just really spoke to me. Her story made me sad in many ways, but I think she always held onto hope, which is why I loved, loved, loved, loved the quote from Parrott that you included toward the end of your book. It felt like she was kind of speaking to us across the generation, would you be able to share that prediction that she made?

MARSHA: Absolutely. So she said "Women like me will be better off in a hundred years. We hunt about among the wreckage of old codes for pieces to build an adequate shelter to last our lifetime. And the building material's just not there. I do believe that out of all this will come a comradeship between men and women, fairer to men, fairer to women, but not in time for us." I mean, the prescience and self-awareness of that, it's so moving to me. She was such a fighter. That relentless optimism, that sense that she was really trying to figure out how to solve this problem that her generation had created for itself. That's really there. And you know, I say in the book, I have to agree with her. I think if she had been born a hundred years later, she wouldn't have seemed like such an outlier. She would've seemed very much in, you know, the cultural swim that we all exist in. And I think she would've had an easier time. Her ideas would've been recognizable within a culture that has really radically changed. It's thinking about gender roles and work-life balance, et cetera. But let me add, a lot of these problems and questions she raised are still with us. We are not living in some magical fixed paradise of gender equity. And you know, I think Parrott would have been an interesting voice in all of this. She would've been doing the #MeToo tweets about her experiences. Some of these things are not gone, right? 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. Well, we just think it's amazing that you did the hard work of bringing her story back into focus. And listeners, you won't regret picking up this biography. Ursula Parrott's life was quite a life. Um, thank you so much, Marsha. We loved having you. 

MARSHA: Well, thank you for having me, and let me just say, your podcast makes such a contribution to this project of correcting the historical record about women's contributions to literary culture. So thank you for all the work that you put into it.

KIM: That means a lot. So that's all for today's podcast. If you enjoyed it, consider giving us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It's a really good way to help us find new listeners. You can stay up to date on all things Lost Ladies of Lit via our Facebook forum where listeners and guests get a chance to connect.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.