Interview

How much research did author Laura Moriarty do for her book The Chaperone? Did she even wear a corset to precisely capture the binding details? Find out in this discussion with fellow author Curtis Sittenfeld.

Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of the bestselling novels American Wife, Prep, and The Man of My Dreams, which have been translated into twenty–five languages. Here she talks with novelist Laura Moriarty about her experiences writing The Chaperone.

Curtis Sittenfeld: You tell the story of two characters whose trajectories overlap—Louise Brooks before she becomes famous, and quietly complicated housewife Cora Carlisle, who serves as 15–year–old Louise's chaperone in New York in the fateful summer of 1922. Did you always know they belonged in a book together, or did you decide to write about one of them first?

Laura Moriarty: I always found Louise Brooks interesting. She was an icon of the silent–film era, and I knew she'd grown up in Kansas, and that she was smart and rebellious and sharp–tongued. But it wasn't until I learned that she'd first gone to New York as a teenager with a 36–year–old chaperone that I saw a story I wanted to write. I'm drawn to intergenerational tension, and it must have been strong in the 1920s: I wondered how Louise's generation of flappers appeared to the women who came of age at the beginning of the century—wearing corsets,...