5 Questions With . . . Lisa Cohen on Teaching and Writing



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A: Revise!
Read writing that inspires and challenges you.


Keep editing your work.
Be strict with yourself, but patient with your own process.



I realized that the book had to be a triptych, not a single portrait. These three women were all friends and contemporaries, so that choice made sense, but what really motivated me was the difficulty and interest of writing about three people whose work was at once central and marginal, concrete yet ephemeral—and whose work lives and love lives made it possible to think about transatlantic modernism in some new ways.

Book by Lisa Cohen.

Juxtaposing their stories also made it possible to argue implicitly against the idea of individual genius—of course I’m not the first person to do this. It also allowed me to keep asking questions—What is the most interesting way to narrate a life? How do we account for the traces that people leave behind? What is failure and what is accomplishment? What and who is important?—that interested me, and to ask them in different ways in each portrait. These were the significant questions that their lives raised so dramatically—and yet Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland themselves were not seen as significant people. Putting the three of them in the same book made it possible to tackle that paradox.

Q: What challenges did you face in your research? What surprising discoveries did you make along the way?

A: There were the challenges of time and money, of course—it took me many years to write the book I wanted to write. There was the challenge of doing the equivalent of research for three biographies. As for your second question: One makes surprising discoveries every time one walks into an archive. That has something to do with how one approaches one’s material—indeed what one considers one’s material. Two big discoveries: Finding a huge cache of Esther Murphy’s papers at the Library of Congress. Being given a trove of Madge Garland’s wartime letters to her brother, when I went to Melbourne to meet her nephew.

Q: What are a few of your favorite biographical works and why?

A: I have loved Hilton Als’ The Women; Julia Blackburn’s book about Napoleon on Elba, The Emperor’s Last Island; Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, about D. H. Lawrence and his own attempt to write about Lawrence; Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer; Georgina Kleege’s, Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller; Wayne Koestenbaum’s Jackie Under My Skin; Suzannah Lessard’s book about Stanford White and his family, which is her family, The Architect of Desire; Nell Irwin Painter’s study Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol; Brenda Wineapple’s double portrait of Gertrude and Leo Stein, Sister Brother. All of them are interesting experiments of one kind or another.

But I would also say that every biography, if it is not a rote recitation of facts (whatever they might turn out to be, and however you might construe that category), if it is an empathetic and critical and ethical and imaginative work, as it must be—if it is a work of “recreative” writing, as the biographer Michael Holroyd has called biography— is some kind of experiment. I am interested in people who write imaginatively about hard-won historical detail.

David Low
