Dear Nancy,
In the tumultuous fall of 1939, with war looming in Europe, Ursula Parrott wrote to the writer Alec Waugh (whose papers are at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas), that
“the 1920s and the 1930s with no tomorrow ever guaranteed [and] the bombs always bursting in the not too remote distance, have probably been as exciting an era in which to live one’s life as any since time began. We saw so many things without faith in anything. We loved so many people, meaning only to love one—the one we usually never met. We spent a lifetime’s emotions in twenty years, and had the twenty years, after all.”
Her summation—equal parts reality check, regret, and gratitude for having been part of an unprecedented age—seems like a fitting way to close the year. It is certain that 2023 was my year of all things Ursula Parrott.
I did 12 podcasts about Ursula and the 13th will come out on in January.
I did events in Raleigh (NC), Cary (NC), College Park (MD), Greenbelt (MD), Washington DC, Silver Spring (MD), Chapel Hill (NC), Bloomington (IN), Cleveland (OH), Milwaukee (WI), Madison (WI), Los Angeles (CA), Hollywood (CA), Westwood (CA), New York City (NY), Astoria (NY), Lansing (MI), Chicago (IL), Durham (NC), and Boston (MA).
I published 2 Ursula articles, one in LitHub and the other in The Conversation.
BIG REVEAL #1: “Becoming the Ex-Wife” will be coming out in Paperback in late summer/early fall 2024! I’m so grateful to my editor, Raina Polivka, and the folks at UC Press for caring so much about my book and Ursula’s legacy.