The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #77: Megan Marshall

"The hardest part of this book for me was believing that my personal experience could be interesting to others. I’d always hidden behind my well-known biographical subjects..."

Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.

Here’s the 77th installment, featuring Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Megan Marshall, author most recently of After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart. -Sari Botton

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Megan Marshall. Photo by Sarah Putnam.

Megan Marshall is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, professor of nonfiction in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Emerson College, and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Harvard Review, Slate, LitHub, and other publications. She is a recipient of the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization to a writer who has advanced the art and craft of biography, and a past president of the Society of American Historians. She grew up in Pasadena, California and has lived most of her adult life in Massachusetts, within easy driving distance of the homes of the New England women writers and reformers about whom she has written.

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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I just turned 70, and I’m feeling, as Willa Cather wrote when she reached this age, the great benefit to a writer when, in memory, “We seem to possess all the stages of our life at the same time.” Writing the autobiographical essays in my new book, After Lives, was a way of getting that kaleidoscopic sense of self down on paper.

I was an active journalist in my 20s, and then I gave my best energy to raising my two daughters in my 30s and 40s. My career as an author really began at age 50 when my first biography, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, was published. I’d worked on the book slowly all that time, but when it was finally done—well, it seemed like a miracle. The Peabody Sisters was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received awards I hadn’t even known existed (the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award). Soon I was back at my desk to write two more biographies during the next twelve years. I think this is a pattern that holds for many women—professional productivity comes after and often gets a boost from the experience of mothering our growing children.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart, published by Mariner Books in February 2025.

What number book is this for you?

After Lives is my fifth book—or sixth, depending on how you count! I published a book on how women in their thirties were handling inner conflicts about work, love, and family, The Cost of Loving, in 1984, the same year my first daughter was born. Then, starting in 2005, three biographies, including Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014, and Elizabeth Bishop, A Miracle for Breakfast, a biography of my poetry professor, which alternates biographical chapters with passages of memoir about my college years when I dreamed of becoming a poet. The parallel narrative lines—biographical and autobiographical--come together in a surprising way at the end. After Lives is the book I’ve written after writing those three lives.

During the pandemic I gathered the poems of my late partner Scott Harney, who died in 2019 after a long illness. He’d left behind a trove of fine poetry to be discovered on his computer and in boxes in our basement. I’m very proud of that book, The Blood of San Gennaro: Selected Poems of Scott Harney, for which I wrote an introduction recounting Scott’s life story and the story of finding his poems. One of the essays in After Lives is an elegy to Scott, a meditation on the loss of a beloved partner.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

I usually refer to After Lives as an essay collection, but the individual pieces add up to a memoir-in-essays, and essays themselves are often thought of as creative nonfiction. So—all of those? I use the “creative” techniques of fiction—flash back, coincidence, scene setting—but most of the essays derive from research into historical incidents or related subjects (left-handedness, why we care so much about things), and everything in them is true. I really love the kind of essay that lets the reader follow the writer’s thoughts as they develop. I’ve tweaked that by adding in the element of archival research, in this case most often letters and journals in my own family’s “archive” that I inherited or saved on my own.

In the essay “Free for a While,” I was able to write about my high school classmate Jonathan Jackson, who died tragically at 17 in the Marin County Courthouse shootout that led to Angela Davis’s arrest—because I’d saved, since 1970, the articles Jonathan wrote for our high school’s underground newspaper along with a lot of other high school memorabilia. I always knew I’d want to write about Jonathan and the effect his death had on his classmates and on the wider world. Black lives matter, to state the obvious, and this forgotten history calls out to be told.

I just turned 70, and I’m feeling, as Willa Cather wrote when she reached this age, the great benefit to a writer when, in memory, “We seem to possess all the stages of our life at the same time.” Writing the autobiographical essays in my new book, After Lives, was a way of getting that kaleidoscopic sense of self down on paper.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

I teach my students that the elevator pitch has to be one sentence!

“Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Megan Marshall turns her narrative gifts to her own art and life, reinventing the personal essay as a portal to the past with lessons for living into the future.”

One sentence in the first person (if I’m the one on the elevator!):

During a period of global uncertainty and personal loss, I started writing essays that look back to earlier anxious times—my grandparents’ lives under bombardment in WWI Paris, my childhood with an unstable parent, my years in an integrated public high school as Black Power politics emerged—to find comfort and understanding that I want to share with readers.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

I loved reading as a child, especially novels that made me cry, like A Little Princess, A Wrinkle in Time, and Little Women, to name just a few. I thought the most meaningful thing a person could do in life would be to write a book that would move readers to tears. I also read lots of biographies for kids, although they usually didn’t make me cry. They inspired me.

In college I thought I wanted to be a poet, and I’ve written about how that worked out in Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast. I didn’t become a poet, but in writing classes I learned how important it was to make every word count. And I studied with famous poets—Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop—and became fascinated by the “real” people who were writing such great literature. All of this pushed me toward biography, although I wanted to write life narratives that were moving to readers in the same way a novel can be.

My three biographies were all written under contract with deadlines I either did or didn’t make, and that pressure was too much after thirty years. And with the confusion following the 2016 election, and as my partner became sicker, I didn’t want to take on any long term projects. I began writing essays, one at a time, not thinking they might hang together in a book. But each one was an ambitious research project and told an important story. I didn’t want them to get lost in back issues of journals. I wanted to give them new life and richer context by linking them together.

After Lives has at least two meanings. It refers to the period after I’d written three lives. It also refers to the way a biographer’s subject stays with her after a book is done in a kind of afterlife, with haunting questions that you still want to try to answer. And of course all the important people in our lives who are no longer with us—family members, influential friends, as well as biographical subjects—have afterlives in our memories. When I put the essays together, I noticed that the word “afterlife” or the two words “after life” had come up independently in several of the essays. They do hang together!

Order the book…

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

I’ve been lucky to have the same publisher for all my biographies, now called Mariner Books, and I’m grateful for my longtime editor Deanne Urmy’s faith in me. The hardest part of this book for me was believing that my personal experience could be interesting to others. I’d always hidden behind my well-known biographical subjects, even if I was exploring questions of personal interest to me through that research and writing. My editor and publisher supported me in shifting gears, and I think that’s also because there’s a great deal of interest in memoir and origin stories on the part of readers these days. This book is in large part about how I became a writer, and a biographer in particular. There aren’t many books like that, and they saw a need that could be filled.

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

Many of the people named in these essays are no longer living. Those who are still alive have read the essays in which they’re named and they’ve approved. Often these were people I turned to while writing for verification of memories, or to gather information beyond what I’d experienced, and I’m grateful for their assistance.

In one instance, to protect someone’s privacy, I offered only sparse details and of course no name. It’s true, though, that individuals’ memories of events differ, and I write about this in my book’s acknowledgments, thanking those who have “been there” and might remember things differently for their forbearance: a gift.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

My colleague at Emerson College, Jabari Asim, writes fascinating, beautifully crafted essays that intertwine personal and family history with larger historical forces. His book, We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival, was influential when I started writing After Lives. There aren’t too many other essayists working in this way. I appreciate writers who’ve stepped aside from what’s expected of them to face a personal past, like Barry Lopez with his remarkable essay, “Sliver of Sky: Confronting the Trauma of Sexual Abuse,” from Harper’s, January 2013. And Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, like all of her books, inspires close attention to the details of personal experience, and is more essayistic than many growing up memoirs. Dillard is an inimitable stylist you can always learn from.

During a period of global uncertainty and personal loss, I started writing essays that look back to earlier anxious times—my grandparents’ lives under bombardment in WWI Paris, my childhood with an unstable parent, my years in an integrated public high school as Black Power politics emerged—to find comfort and understanding that I want to share with readers.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

Start by sending out single essays for publication in magazines or literary journals. I had written whole books, but never essays like these, and it helped to work with good editors on the early ones. Beyond that, every writer has to find their way, and I wouldn’t want to say anything here that would discourage someone from following their own instincts. Write what you would want to read on a subject. Write to satisfy your own standards, and you’ll probably get there!

What do you love about writing? 

My favorite part of writing is revising, which I’m doing all the time, as soon as I write one sentence. It’s like combing snarls out of a child’s hair (except the words on the page don’t squawk!). Smoothing, clarifying, finding just the right word are all rewarding. I can’t move ahead until I’ve got the passage I’m working on right. And the process of clarification leads me on.

But I also like it when a fully formed sentence comes to me, usually the first sentence of the essay I’m about to write. Or I might take a walk when I’m stuck in the middle, and on the walk the sentence comes. Then I can’t wait to get home and write it down!

On a more fundamental level of motivation, here’s something the poet Louise Gluck wrote about her own work: “I wanted to turn experience, often disappointment or hurt, into an externalized form that, in its accuracy and beauty, would both separate me from the experience and redeem it.” I hope I’ve come close.

What frustrates you about writing?

How long it takes to get things right, to learn all I need to know before I can write! Still, there’s a lot of pleasure in the research, uncovering mysteries, and in the search for the right words to describe what I’ve found and make a story out of the discovery.

What about writing surprises you?

I’m always surprised when the complex story or subject I’m working on falls into place and finds resolution at the end. But it does! And that’s really satisfying.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine or writing at specific times? 

My routine has varied over the years. When I was raising my daughters, I worked as much as I could while they were at school, and printed out what I’d written to carry with me and revise in waiting rooms or parking lots by soccer fields. Now that they’re grown up, I have a routine of walking every morning and again in the late afternoon. Writing comes in between (and often draws on thoughts I’ve had on the morning walk), and goes on into the evening if I’ve really gotten sucked in, as can happen when I’m in the middle of an essay or the chapter of a book. I usually work through the weekend too. It’s quieter then, and the thoughts keep coming!

In the essay “Free for a While,” I was able to write about my high school classmate Jonathan Jackson, who died tragically at 17 in the Marin County Courthouse shootout that led to Angela Davis’s arrest—because I’d saved, since 1970, the articles Jonathan wrote for our high school’s underground newspaper along with a lot of other high school memorabilia. I always knew I’d want to write about Jonathan and the effect his death had on his classmates and on the wider world. Black lives matter, to state the obvious, and this forgotten history calls out to be told.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities do you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

When I used to live in a big house with a garden that I had to weed all the time, I thought of weeding as similar to editing my writing—being selective, letting what’s good stay. It was enjoyable to practice the same thing in a different setting—a bit like doing crossword puzzles, which I also enjoy. Now there’s walking, which so often allows new thoughts to pop into my head. I never listen to music or podcasts while walking. That would deprive me of some really fertile thinking time.

I play the piano, and it’s important to me to make time for making music. Sometimes I play certain pieces over and over during the course of writing a particular essay or book. Now I’m playing Schumann’s Arabeske, which flows easily, the way I’d like my words to go, and some simple pieces by an early modern French composer I just discovered, Melanie (“Mel”) Bonis. I like learning new things musically too.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

The Steinway piano I play on every night belonged to my grandfather’s family since 1907 when his father bought it for him. I recently discovered that the house in Concordia, Kansas where my grandfather grew up is still standing. I’d like to visit that house, and then the Altadena bungalow where the piano spent sixty years before coming to me in the late 1980s after my grandparents’ deaths.

The little stucco house my grandparents built in 1923 seems to have survived the terrible Eaton Fire, and I’d like to honor that. Maybe I’ll end up writing an essay about tragedy and endurance with the piano as the starting point. I guess that means I might write another book of essays!

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Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.