Britni de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D’Arcangelo are the authors of Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League, published by Bold Type Books.

De la Cretaz is a freelance writer who focuses on the intersection of sports and gender. They are the former sports columnist for Longreads and for Bitch Media. Their work has appeared in the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, espnW, Vogue, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, The Ringer, BleacherReport, The Atlantic, and more. They live in the Boston area.

D’Arcangelo writes about women’s college basketball and the WNBA for The Athletic. Her articles, columns and profiles on female/LGBTQ+ athletes have previously appeared in The Ringer, Deadspin, espnW, ESPN, Teen Vogue, The Buffalo News, The Huffington Post, NBC OUT, and more. She received a Notable Mention in the 2018 Best American Sports Writing anthology for her story, “My Father, Trump and The Buffalo Bills.” D’Arcangelo lives in Buffalo, New York.

EB: I have to start by saying that this is the first-ever Non-Fiction by Non-Men interview featuring two writers! I’m really excited about this. So, I’d love to begin by asking—how did you two meet and begin writing together?

LDA: Britni and I met in a sports writing group on Facebook for women and LGBTQ individuals. We started following each other on Twitter after that, and then would message each other with different articles, things we were working on, and questions we had. We just hit it off and got to know each other.

EB: That’s great. And have you both always been nonfiction writers?

LDA: This is my first nonfiction book actually. I come from a fiction and young adult background, but started doing freelance articles and essays.

BDLC: I’ve only ever written nonfiction. I am a completely self-taught writer—I was a blogger for a really long time. I had an anonymous sex blog when I was in college, which was fairly well read. But it was only after I got pushed out of my social work job while I was on maternity leave, and I was looking for ways to make money with an infant at home, that a Facebook friend of mine encouraged me to publish personal essays. I started as an essay writer, then I went to reported essays, and then just straight reporting. I pretended my way into a journalism career and it worked.

EB: Love it.

BDLC: When Lyndsey and I met, I was working on a column for Bitch, because I was a sports columnist there. It was about the current women’s football leagues, and I’m a history nerd—I always want to know about what came before—so I was trying to read about the history of women’s football and I’m looking for a book, and there’s no book. There’s lots of “hey ladies learn football to hang out with your man!” kind of books. So, I was messaging Lyndsey and complaining to her about there was no history book, and she said, you should write one.And I said, well, if I wrote one, you’d have to write it with me, because I don’t know anything about football—Lyndsey is the football writer. So it started as a joke. And now we have a book.

EB: When did it stop being a joke and turn into a real thing?

BDLC: We had a proposal that didn’t sell—a much more general book about all aspects of women in football. But then when we were researching for that book, we learned about this particular league, and when we had to regroup and redo our proposal, it became pretty clear that this league itself actually was the story and we needed to narrow our focus.

EB: I loved how the league was the anchor of the whole book! I’m so glad you did that. I’m curious about how then the actual writing of the book went—did you have Lyndsey sections and Britni sections? Did one of you do more research while the other did more writing?

LDA: We did a mix of both. There are chapters that Britni wrote completely and chapters that I wrote completely, and there are chapters with sections we each wrote and then intertwined. And we are both good researchers! We have different writing styles and that played a part. I was more interested in digging more into the history side of things—how women started playing, how far back it went, that kind of thing—and Britni sees things much more analytically than I do. We combined our assets. 

BDLC: When we started the project, we divided up all the teams in half and we each tried to find and contact people who played in each of our teams. But then it grew from there. Lyndsey is really, really good at writing characters and exploring personal narratives and stories, and I do a lot more criticism and analysis. I think our strengths worked really well together to make sure that the book never got too bogged down in either one.

EB: The book really had such a good flow—I loved the back-and-forth between the individual stories of the characters and the bigger narrative about the league. I was also just so impressed by how many people you interviewed and how much information you found. How did you figure out what to include and what to cut? I find that so hard. What are your research and writing processes like?

BDLC: Lyndsey is laughing right now because I’m a chaos Muppet and a procrastinator, and I write in spurts. I won’t touch anything for six months, and then I wrote 20,000 words of the book in five days. While Lyndsey diligently works on it every morning and was done with her part weeks before a deadline. What I really appreciated about Lyndsey was I’d always be apologizing and Lyndsey kept saying, look, I’ve read your finished work, so whatever your process is a clearly works for you, so I’m going to trust that we’ll get there, because I’ve seen that you have produced things. I really appreciated that patience because we had never written together before, and it all could have gone really poorly, and other people might have been super stressed, but it worked out.

LDA: What gave us a good clue that we could make this book work was having to do the proposal together first. We approached it the same way—Britni wrote certain parts, I wrote other parts, and then we both went through and edited and added stuff to each other’s sections. And that made us feel, okay, we can do this together.

BDLC: For the research, honestly, once you found one player from a team, so many of them are still in touch with at least one other player, that then it would just fall like dominos. And every team seemed to have one person who had saved every single program, every single uniform, had a full scrapbook of newspaper clippings

EB: That is so satisfying when someone has a whole personal archive!

LDA: There was also a lot of Facebook stalking. All the Boomers are on Facebook, and we’d find them and try to send messages that didn’t come across as too creepy like hey, I’m some random person who wants to write a book about when you played football in the 1970s.

EB: [laughter]

BDLC: In terms of what to cut and what to keep, I mean, we could have researched this book for a decade and still not have spoken to every player on every team. We just had to accept that this was going to be a partial history, and no matter what we did it was always going to be a partial history. We had to pick a stopping point and say hopefully someone else builds on this work.

EB: Right, or you can do like a revised edition in ten years.

BDLC: There is so much more to include! The week after we couldn’t edit our book anymore, these documents that we’d spent two years looking for showed up in my inbox. But we are running an excerpt with original material, and thinking creatively about how to keep telling this story.

EB: How did you keep all this research organized?

BDLC: I’m very visual so I literally printed out every transcript, every newspaper, every everything, and then I just spread it out across my bed and then it sat in a big pile on my floor for a year-and-a-half.

LDA: I have tons of different folders on my computer. I loved seeing Britni’s wall with their Post-Its and stuff, but it is just not something I would ever thing to do.

EB: What were your favorite interviews to do?

BDLC: I have two that really stand out for me. One was with D.A. Starkey who was on the Dallas Bluebonnets. We had suspected a lot of the players were gay, not to make stereotypes, but we’d seen some pictures on Facebook. So I get on the phone with Starkey, she’s maybe my second interview, and we’re like two minutes into the call and she says, wait, I have to stop you—and then she yells in my ear—you know we’re all gay, right? And I said, great, let’s talk about that! Every time I’d talk to Starkey, she’d be just as blunt as that and was always really excited to tell me about all of her conquests.

The other interview that was a really big deal for me was Linda Jefferson, who’s one of the main characters in the book and is considered to be the best player in the league. I spent almost two years looking for Linda—I started when I was writing that first Longreads piece that was the basis for the book—and I could not connect with her. I was messaging people who I thought might be her family members on Facebook, and nothing was coming back. I finally just left my phone number in the comments on her niece’s Facebook page and felt like that was my last chance. And then two months later I happened to be on a DIY writing retreat at an Airbnb in Salem, and I get this call from a Toledo number, and I never answer unknown calls but I did, and I answer, and this voice says, “Hi, this is Linda Jefferson. I heard you’ve been looking for me.”

EB: [gasp] What perfect timing!

LDA: For me, I think it was getting in touch with Rose Low of the Dandelions. She was really hesitant at first when I contacted her on Facebook, and only opened up after we’d talked to some of her teammates. Rose was so careful with who she wanted to trust to tell the story, and so the fact that she came around and put that trust in me and Britni meant so much to me. She started sending me care packages throughout the writing process, like just out of the blue! She sent me one of them, and when we finished the book—this little Wonder Woman business card holder. I know, totally adorable. But she also provided so much source material—video clips and DVDs of old footage of the Dandelions’ games and practices, this short NBC documentary. All these things that made me feel like I knew these women better than just people we were reading about. Rose also gave us the photo that is on the cover of the book.

There was also another player—Barbara Patton—who was a single mother and would bring her son, daughter, and nephew to practices with her. Her son, Marvcus Patton, grew up watching her play for the Dandelions as a linebacker, and he ended up playing in the National Football League himself as a linebacker for the Buffalo Bills, which is a team I grew up watching. I remember watching him play. It was such a cool circle for it all to come back around that way for me.

EB: So, writing a book is super hard. Who did you turn to for support during it?

LDA: I’m really independent, which is probably why I chose this career. I kind of enjoy muddling through the process… though I think Britni would agree on this, but we did a really good job of supporting each other throughout. Leaning on each other, venting, providing words of encouragement.

BDLC: Have a co-author—the best possible support! I’m working on a separate book proposal now where I don’t have a co-author, and I’m like, who do I talk to? What do I do?

EB: [laughter]

BDLC: I also went through a divorce while writing the book—actually, my interview with Starkey was part of the catalyst, talking about the lesbian bar scene in Dallas, and I realized I was obscuring the pronouns of my husband, major red flag—but now I have a partner who I’ve been with two years now, and he’s a football fan and he would be so excited to talk to me about my book-writing process. I had never before dated someone that was so interested in my work and thought it was cool, and so he was really good for talking things through, especially when I was trying to write out football gameplay. I also have a group of writer friends who would read different parts for me, or who would send me nudes if I hit my writing goals—whatever motivates you, right? But I think having a co-author was really the biggest motivator. I knew I couldn’t blow my deadlines, because I had somebody else with the contract with me. I didn’t want to let them down.

EB: Now I wish I had a co-author for my book.

BDLC: It could have gone really wrong. I’ve heard horror stories. We have the same agent, and when we started working together, she made us sign a contract about what would happen in case it all fell apart.

LDA: I forget what it was called, but it basically said we both had to promise to finish our parts of the book, and if one of us failed to do, the other could take over the book.

EB: That’s so intense.

LDA: But this book couldn’t have been written without each other. There would have been too many missing pieces. There were things that Britni found that I never would have found, and vice versa.  

BDLC: It would have taken a lot longer if only one of us was writing it, and it would also be a totally different book.

EB: You’ve already mentioned some of the challenges of writing nonfiction—what do you think is the hardest part? And what do you think is the most rewarding?

BDLC: It depends. Right now I’m in a writer’s block phase, because I’m burnt out after writing a whole book this year. But while writing, the hardest part is taking all the research, interviews, sources, and trying to figure out a coherent format. Structure is definitely my biggest weakness as a longform writer.

And most rewarding? At least with Hail Mary, it feels like a once-in-a-career story, when you find a thing that nobody else has written about. I don’t know how we’re not already watching the A League of Their Own football version of this movie. What a privilege to be able to tell this story, and I feel like I will never find another story like it in my career and just how grateful the women have been that someone is writing about them. I feel really lucky that we got to be the ones to record it.

LDA: I agree with that 100%. Structure is always hard especially when you’re working in nonfiction, especially long nonfiction. With fiction, you can make shit up. You can set certain scenes, and really rich it up. Sure, you can do that with nonfiction, too, but you have to stick to the facts and do it in a different way. But overall, I really enjoyed the whole process of it, and I feel proud I was able to produce this with Britni, and I’d be interested in doing it again.

EB: Are you two going to write another book together?

BDLC: I’m currently working on a proposal for a personal essay collection, which is a very different experience. That’s where my energy is right now.

LDA: Butwe’ve talked about it and we obviously work well together and write well together. So, if the right project comes again, I’d love to.

EB: Any advice for nonfiction writers looking for the right project?

BDLC: I think the thing that ties my work and Lyndsey’s work together is how we both try to tell stories of people that we should all know about but don’t. I’m always thinking if we don’t know about a thing, why don’t we know about it? Like the women in this league were not the first to play football—dwe have a whole chapter dedicated to the women who have been playing football for as long as football American football has been a sport.

LDA: If you just come up across a topic that moves you and leads you to unearthing more and more about it, then you know that there is something there and could sustain a book-scale project.

EB: I totally agree. If you find yourself thinking and reading about a thing all the time, it’s probably a good sign you want to commit to writing a whole book about it. I’m so happy for you both and thrilled to see this book out in the world.

LDA: I mean, it’s awesome for us, but, really, it is cool to see these women get the shine they never got.

EB: One of my favorite lines in the book was where you wrote, “If there’s no one there to tell the story, did it ever happen at all?” I love that.

BDLC: Right—like there weren’t even Wikipedia pages for these teams. These players’ names are not on the walls of any stadiums or anything. It’s almost like a form of gaslighting. Did this really happen? Did I make up this entire experience?

EB: Well, I’m glad you’re setting the record straight. Finally, do you each have a favorite line or two of nonfiction written by a fellow “non-man”?

BDLC: “It means there’s potential and possibility. It means you are… always in scoring position. It means you’re just ninety feet away from change. It means you can come back, and that hope isn’t totally lost.” Stacey May Fowles on having a runner on third base, Baseball Life Advice: Loving the Game That Saved Me.

LDA: From The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls:

“Things usually work out in the end.”
“What if they don’t?”
“That just means you haven’t come to the end yet.”