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Gail Godwin is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, including Violet Clay, Father Melancholy's Daughter, Evensong, The Good Husband and Evenings at Five. She is also the author of The Making of a Writer, her journal in two volumes (ed. Rob Neufeld). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gail Godwin lives in Woodstock, New York. Visit her website at www.gailgodwin.com
Gail Godwin's website
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Your twelfth novel, Queen of the Underworld, is based on some of your own
experiences as a young journalist just out of college. How much is Emma Gant
like you?
What was it like to re-live that time when you were writing the novel? Is it
easier or harder to write a novel based on personal experiences?
Two incidents from my reporting days on the Miami Herald lurked in my
imagination for decades before they finally bubbled up into Emma Gant's
determined pursuit of Ginevra Snow, the young ex-madam known as "Queen of the
Underworld."
The first incident was a routine story the Herald assigned me in 1959.
After the famous New York trial of her boyfriend and pimp Mickey Jelke, "the
oleo-margarine heir," the former call girl Pat Ward had quietly married an
osteopath and they lived in Hollywood, Florida. My bureau chief in Hollywood
asked me to phone the husband and see what I could get out of him about Pat's
latest suicide attempt. Well, the husband answered the phone and when I
identified myself, he said in a really kind but crushed voice, "I wish you could
understand how hard this is for us. I don't want to say anymore. Please leave us
alone." That's ...
It is a fact of life that any discourse...will always please if it is five minutes shorter than people expect
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