The Pequot Library of Southport CT hosted a Marmee & Louisa talk as the book came out in paperback, joining its companion, My Heart Is Boundless, a paperback original.

Other bloggers have been doing interviews on the two Alcott books. View Q&As at:

http://bit.ly/17LbK0a

https://read.rifflebooks.com/list/115499

The Improper Bostonian, in its Best of Boston issue, named Marmee & Louisa this year’s Best Nonfiction Book by a Local Author. Dennis Lehane’s novel Live By Night, which “has Hollywood executives all but offering lap dances for the exclusive movie rights,” got the fiction honor, so we’re in great company. 

From improper.com:

“Behind every great woman is her mother, or  so argues Eve LaPlante’s 2012 dual-subject biography of Little Women author  Louisa May Alcott and her mother, Abigail May Alcott. LaPlante, a Brookline  native and Alcott descendant, draws on new documents that contradict the popular  assumption that the 19th-century writer owed her then-uncommon literary success  to her father. Instead, this scrupulous ancestral study reveals that it was  Abigail’s progressive thinking that influenced her daughter’s writing.  Skeptical? Read the book yourself.”   

                                         

Gina in Spokane — a grandmother of 14, quilter, former nurse, and booklover — asked me to answer a few questions in advance of her book group discussion of Marmee & Louisa, and I decided to post our exchange here.

Q: How do you organize your day so you can find the time to research, write, re-write and re-write & then promote books? Which part do you find the most satisfying or enjoyable?

A: When my kids were small (the youngest is now 12), I worked only when they were at school or daycare (part-time) or with a babysitter (very part-time), so I had only 15-24 hours a week in which to think about my work. That lack of time focuses the attention! Now I have more freedom because they can keep themselves alive. I’m fortunate that my husband does all the cooking and food shopping for our family. A few years ago, for an essay collection called Why I’m Still Married, I wrote an essay about our marriage entitled “18,260 Breakfasts,” which has been reprinted in the textbook The Aims of Argument. On the rare occasion when I’ve had to spend a week in England to research a book (which happened with Salem Witch Judge and American Jezebel), my husband took a week off from work to be with our children. A freelance writer with a family needs a spouse with a salary, unless one of them has a trust fund! 

As for which part I find the most satisfying, I enjoy all aspects of writing, from research to promoting books and talking with readers. One of my favorite times is toward the end of the actual writing, when you are really inside the book and can see it whole but it is not quite there yet. The book itself takes on a life of its own, in a way that it doesn’t have once it’s published. 

Q: Writing about interesting ancestors, I can understand that, but why did you write Seized? 

A: In the thirty years I’ve been writing nonfiction, all my articles and books have been motivated by the question: What do people do, and why do they do it? The subject of Seized was a brain disorder linked to personality change, which fascinated me. The fact that many famous artists — including Dostoevsky, van Gogh, and Lewis Carroll — had been diagnosed with the disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, and used it in their creative work, was also a big draw.

Q: Of all the writings of Abigail and Louisa, do you have a couple of favorites?
 
A: I love Louisa’s Eight Cousins, Jack and Jill, some of her stories (such as “My Contraband”), and her journals, which are published. From Abigail’s writings, which were published for the first time last year, I love a letter she wrote at age eighteen to her parents, informing them, “I am not willing to be found incapable of anything.” She sounds so much like Jo March! I love reading her many letters to her brother and great supporter, Rev. Samuel Joseph May, which are in My Heart Is Boundless, the companion volume to Marmee & Louisa. My Heart Is Boundless contains the collected papers of Abigail May Alcott, never before published, which have been hiding in plain sight for more than a century.

Q: What’s next on your writing agenda?

A: I wish I knew. Some writers have the next book proposed and sold before the last book comes out, but I’m not that type. Having just finished a triptych of sorts, on three ancestors, I am looking for a new subject. Any suggestions?

Thanks so much for reading and discussing my books.

Here's the link to the Mother’s Day story on the Alcott women in the Christian Science Monitor:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2013/0506/Mother-s-Day-why-we-should-be-thanking-Louisa-May-Alcott-and-Marmee

The Christian Science Monitor will publish an essay I wrote about the Alcotts for Mother’s Day, in its Books section.

“America’s White Slaves” is an essay I contributed to a book on tolerance that will soon be published by Facing History & Ourselves. The title comes from a quote by Louisa. In 1885, when she was in her early fifties and in poor health, she learned that people were saying she had abandoned the cause of female suffrage. She wrote to Woman’s Journal, “It is impossible for me ever to ‘go back’ on woman suffrage…this most vital question of the age ... I should be a traitor to all I most love, honor, and desire to imitate if I did not covet a place among those who are giving their lives to the emancipation of the white slaves of America.”

The skillful reader of the audio book of Marmee & Louisa is Karen White. Please check out her post at
http://karenwhiteaudiobooks.com/2012/11/13/marmee-louisa-by-eve-laplante/
and enjoy the audio book.

To read the YANKEE review of Marmee & Louisa and My Heart Is Boundless go to:

YankeeMagazine.com/issues/

and search for "First Light: In Review: The 'Mother Fiend' & Her Daughter," by Tim Clark.

I've just learned that Marmee & Louisa has won Library Journal''s Best Acknowledgments Award for most "Elegant Thanks of 2012"! Who knew? Thank you, Library Journal! 

Margaret Heilbrun selected the winners, at reviews.libraryjournal.com/2013/01.

The March 6 Princeton Alumni Weekly and the March/April Yankee Magazine contain nice mentions of Marmee & Louisa and My Heart Is Boundless. The PAW piece, "A Mother's Influence," by Kathryn Beaumont, ends, "During her research [for Marmee & Louisa], LaPlante found so much new material that she simultaneously was able to publish My Heart Is Boundless, a selection of Abigail's writings, which offer a unique look into the mind and world of a 19th-century American woman." 

Talking about Marmee & Louisa and My Heart Is Boundless today with Shelley Irwin on WGVU-FM's Morning Show in Grand Rapids, and with Paul Perrello on Metro Networks in Philadelphia. Next week I'll be on KCMN-AM's “Tron in  the Morning” in Colorado Springs. What a pleasure it is to chat about these books. And what a privilege it was to write them.