Eve LaPlante
  • Home
  • About the Author
  • Works
  • Appearances and Interviews
  • Resources for the Reader
  • Contact
  • Blog

‘Marmee & Louisa’ available in paperback

11/20/2013

2 Comments

 
Picture

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

2 Comments

Chatting with Gina’s book group in Spokane, WA

6/18/2013

3 Comments

 
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.
3 Comments

Jewish History of the Alcotts

5/30/2013

1 Comment

 
The wonderful Jewish Daily Forward has just published my travel story, “Discovering Louisa May Alcott’s Jewish History on Portuguese Tour,” based on our trip to Lisbon and Coimbra last fall. Click to read:

http://forward.com/articles/177159/discovering-louisa-may-alcotts-jewish-history-on-p/
1 Comment

Mother’s Day, Louisa May Alcott, and Marmee

5/8/2013

0 Comments

 
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
0 Comments

America’s White Slaves

5/3/2013

1 Comment

 
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.”
1 Comment

Read Yankee's review, "The 'Mother Fiend' and Her Daughter"

3/4/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
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.

0 Comments

YANKEE and PAW feature MARMEE & LOUISA and My Heart Is Boundless

2/26/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture

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." 

0 Comments

Talking about Marmee & Louisa in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Colorado

1/30/2013

1 Comment

 
Picture


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.

1 Comment

MARMEE & LOUISA is Washington Independent Review's pick of the week!

1/25/2013

1 Comment

 
The Washington Independent Review has picked Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother as its book of the week. The review, by Susan Ware, general editor of American National Biography, begins, "Generations of readers have cherished gentle Marmee, the steadfast mother in Little Women who holds together her family of four girls while the father is off at war. According to Eve LaPlante, the real woman is much more interesting. Abigail May, an intellectually ambitious young woman, was thwarted by 19th-century gender expectations. Locked in a challenging marriage to a man who disdained the idea of making money, Abigail often had to fend for her family by herself. LaPlante emphasizes Abigail’s previously underappreciated role as Louisa’s muse, mentor and emotional lodestar, and reveals Abigail as an interesting character in her own right."
1 Comment

Marmee & Louisa goes into a third printing

1/10/2013

0 Comments

 
Bn.com has sold out of MARMEE & LOUISA, which is in its third printing! Both it and MY HEART IS BOUNDLESS were named best books of the year, the former by NPR and Salon and the latter by The Seattle Times.
0 Comments
<<Previous

    Author

    Eve LaPlante is the author, most recently, of the biography Marmee & Louisa and the editor of My Heart Is Boundless.

    Archives

    April 2021
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2017
    October 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    January 2016
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    March 2015
    August 2014
    March 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012

    Categories

    All
    Abigail May Alcott
    Anne Hutchinson
    Best Of Boston
    Improper Bostonian
    Little Women
    Louisa May Alcott
    Marmee
    Marmee & Louisa
    My Heart Is Boundless: Writing Of Abigail May Alcott

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.