Leslie Brody is a creative writing professor, playwright, and biographer. She is the author of Irrepressible, her biography of Jessica Mitford, and Sometimes You Have to Lie, her biography of Louise Fitzhugh, author of Harriet the Spy. In addition to her works of biography, Leslie Brody has written a memoir, Red Star Sister, which received the PEN Center USA West Award, and co-authored a book of essays with Gary Amdahl, entitled A Motel of the Mind. She has held International Writing Fellowships at Hawthornden in Scotland and the Camargo Foundation in France. In the U.S. she’s been an artist-in-residence/fellow at the McDowell Colony, Centrum, Yaddo, Red Cinder Colony, Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Arts. Brody received her MA and Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. Since 1998, she has taught Creative Nonfiction in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Redlands.
EB: How did you begin writing in general and writing nonfiction specifically? What drew you to writing biographies?
LB: I’ve been a writer since childhood. I was one of those kids who wrote stories about her schoolmates and teachers. It was, I guess a way to get attention and stand out, since it came easily and no one else I knew had thought of it. I kept pushing the envelope and making up more elaborate stories, until my third-grade teacher, offended by my unlicensed output, accused me of lying. This was a brutal education in imagination and power. My mother encouraged me to keep writing, and now I have been at it for most of my life.
I fell into biographies because I really just wanted to know more about Jessica Mitford, the subject of my first book. I had no idea what kind of research it would entail or how long it would take—seven years, eventually. When I began, I also had no idea that there was an entire industry of Mitford books, with an impressive hierarchy of their authors. By the time I found out what writing about Decca meant, it was too late. I was in too deep.
EB: All of your books have been works of nonfiction—you’ve written two biographies, a memoir, and a collection of essays, correct? What is your writing process like when crafting an essay versus a book-length work? What about a biography versus a memoir? Is your approach the same or different?
LB: I think all my books start as memoir to some extent. I normally begin with my connection to my subject, where and how in history our interests and experiences may have intersected. Some of these subjects include 20th-century counterculture, outsiders, New York City, San Francisco, politics and poetry. By the final drafts of both biographies, I’ve taken out most everything of myself but my point of view.
EB: Let’s talk about Louise Fitzhugh! I loved reading Sometimes You Have to Lie because I was obsessed with Harriet the Spy when I was in elementary school, and even chose to put it in my curriculum years later it when I taught fifth-grade English. What drew you to writing about Louise Fitzhugh as a character? Why did you want to write her biography?
LB: I had been asked to write an adaptation of Harriet the Spyin 1988 for the Children’s Theatre Company. I had never read it before, and it blew my mind. I’m the same age as Harriet. I mean when Harriet was eleven years old, so was I. It was serendipitous that we were brought together at last. I always wanted to know more about her, but it wasn’t until 2016, when I started talking with Laura Mazer—a wonderful editor I’d met when I’d published with Counterpoint and who was working at Seal Press at the time—told me of her own fascination with Harriet. We were both amazed that apart from one short academic book, there’d still been no biography of Louise Fitzhugh.
EB: How did you tackle researching Fitzhugh? I was amazed by the number of rich details you were able to uncover about her life—which felt especially impressive for a subject who was notoriously private and had such intensely protective gatekeepers. Was your approach? I know you had a research assistant—how did you two work together on gathering sources?
LB: Regina White was my research partner. She’s a brilliant and imaginative literary detective. In the beginning we both just looked everywhere for references, read all the reviews and indexes of all sorts of books. These led to names of friends and publishing contacts to locate and interview. Once I began writing, I had a better sense of what to look for, and Regina found resources and buried treasures. I’m so grateful to her for her help. We had many lucky strikes, finding Karen Cook for instance, a journalist who had interviewed many of Louise’s friends for a Village Voice article in the 1990’s, and who permitted me to read those transcripts. Regina also located the court transcripts in Tennessee of Louise’s parents’ divorce. It was well over 2,000 pages. I wrote part one of my book about Louise’s childhood last and put off reading the transcripts for about six months, finally I dove in, and it gave me so much dialogue and details, it almost wrote itself.
EB: Which character from Fitzhugh’s life did you enjoy most writing about, in addition to Fitzhugh herself, of course?
LB: I loved reading about Louise’s friends, both in school and later in Greenwich Village. All her girlhood friends were uniquely independent. They became writers, artists, librarians, journalists, even those thwarted by absurd expectations surrounding southern girlhood in the mid-20th century. Louise’s circle of adult artist friends was something else entirely, extraordinary, brilliant, every single one worthy of a book. I loved writing about Sandra Scoppettone, who wrote Suzuki Beane, which Louise illustrated, and with whom Louise co-wrote Bang,Bang You’re Dead.
EB: I also loved how you were careful to include important events happening in the world as Fitzhugh was growing up and writing Harriet the Spy—Jim Crow and Vietnam War protests, popular songs and books at the time. How did you decide what felt important to include? Why did you want to capture the era and not just focus on Fitzhugh’s life?
LB: Many biographers treat a writer’s life though their literature, others through history. I love writing about the mid-20th century—I love reading and writing about beatniks and hippies and radicals, especially peaceniks and civil rights activists. I know that world and it was important to me to see how Louise’s personal life and literary production intersected with those historical currents.
EB: One of my favorite moments in Sometimes You Have to Lie is the author’s note at the end, where you explain your parallel experiences to Fitzhugh in Long Island. I love moments like that—when people realize they may have overlapped with someone without knowing it. Why did you choose to only bring yourself into the story at the end?
LB: In fact, I had many more of those scenes throughout, but slowly they merged with Louise’s larger story. Because I wasn’t able to quote many of Louise’s own words, I had to tell the story in my voice, so I really am in the story everywhere—the storyteller.
EB: Writing can be a pretty solitary task. So, who do you turn to for support? Who makes up your writing community?
LB: I have some long-suffering friends who will read what I send them. I try not to abuse the privilege. I don’t belong to a writer’s group—I’ve never lasted long in one. Although I might start off with high hopes, I am not really a reliable group person.
EB: Similarly, what other writers do you admire or turn to for inspiration? Any particular books or authors who you feel shape your approach to writing biography?
LB: Two of my favorite biographers are Richard Holmes and Nancy Mitford. In Holmes’s 1985 book Footsteps he takes similar journeys to those of several 19th century travelers, writers and thinkers like Robert Louis Stevenson and Mary Wollstonecraft, writing of their stories as his own unfold. I can’t think of a better book than Footsteps for capturing youth and early ardent devotion in both author and (multiple) subjects. I love the way Holmes comes to recognize how submerged he is in his work when one day he dates a check 1772, instead of 1972. Voltaire in Love by Nancy Mitford is a joint biography, history, love story about two of Western civilizations greatest and most original thinkers: Voltaire and scientist Emilie de Chatelet. It is charming in every sense of the word. You often feel, reading this book, as if you’re moving through a salon of brilliant friends and frenemies. Here’s critic Raymond Mortimer on Mitford’s narrative style: “so peculiar, so breathless, so remote from what has ever been used for biography. I feel as if an enchantingly clever woman was pouring out the story to me on the telephone.”
EB: What do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction, and what do you find most challenging?
LB: It is funny that I do write nonfiction. Because in fact I am a kind of careless person. I often get facts and names wrong, so it is a challenging form for me. The fact checking at the end is probably the part that takes longest and is hardest. I think I am improving book by book though… In fact, I am more drawn to writing fiction, but that does not make me a very good fiction writer. For some reason my storytelling is inevitably stronger and better when I’m writing about others. It is rewarding to add to the way history is understood. To contribute my point of view about a place and time. It’s weird how sometimes telling someone’s story you can feel you hold their life in your hands. Not in terms of mortal death, but in terms of legacy, reputation, what is significant and what is remembered. It is really a sacred charge. So easy to get wrong and so important to write in truth and without bias. Writing biography well isn’t for the faint of heart.
EB: What is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man” writer?
LB: There are so many—here’s something I came upon while researching the life of Louise Fitzhugh. The words are by choreographer Martha Graham, as quoted by Agnes De Mille in her biography of Graham. Louise used to keep it on a paper in her wallet:
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.
Author photo: Emily Tucker