the women's pages book review

Theresa Smith Writes

Delighting in all things bookish, book review: the women’s pages by victoria purman, the women’s pages…, about the book:.

From the bestselling author of The Land Girls comes a beautifully realised novel that speaks to the true history and real experiences of post-war Australian women.

Sydney 1945: The war is over, the fight begins.

The war is over and so are the jobs (and freedoms) of tens of thousands of Australian women. The armaments factories are making washing machines instead of bullets and war correspondent Tilly Galloway has hung up her uniform and been forced to work on the women’s pages of her newspaper – the only job available to her – where she struggles to write advice on fashion and make-up.

As Sydney swells with returning servicemen and the city bustles back to post-war life, Tilly finds her world is anything but normal. As she desperately waits for word of her prisoner-of-war husband, she begins to research stories about the lives of the underpaid and overworked women who live in her own city. Those whose war service has been overlooked; the freedom and independence of their war lives lost to them.

Meanwhile Tilly’s waterside worker father is on strike, and her best friend Mary is struggling to cope with the stranger her own husband has become since being liberated from Changi a broken man. As strikes rip the country apart and the news from abroad causes despair, matters build to a heart-rending crescendo. Tilly realises that for her the war may have ended, but the fight is just beginning.

My Thoughts:

Victoria Purman has really carved a niche out for herself, crafting engaging and quality stories about life in Australia during the mid-20th century. Her novels have a lot of social history woven into them, all the details about life, small and large, that create an atmosphere akin to stepping back in time.

The Women’s Pages covers a lot of ground and touches on a lot of issues. It’s quite a long novel too and I felt it wore its research a bit too heavily in the first half, likewise, it dove frequently into backstories, at times mid conversation, resulting in an adverse effect on the flow of the narrative. I struggled to pin down the actual story for a good portion of the first part of the novel. I did find this ease though once I was into the second half and I was a lot more engaged with the characters and their stories from then on.

As a qualified journalist myself, I found Tilly’s working life and everything to do with the reporting of the war utterly fascinating. That was the real winning storyline for me within this novel. What women have had to put up with, it defies belief. The loss of life from WWII, the POWs, the PTSD, the way in which wives and widows were treated post war; Victoria Purman paints a vivid picture of Australia within that era. Recommended reading for anyone with an interest in post-war Australian social history.

Thanks is extended to Harper Collins Publishers for providing me with a copy of The Women’s Pages for review.

About the Author:

Victoria Purman is an Australian top ten and USA Today bestselling fiction author. Her most recent bestseller, The Land Girls, was published in April 2019. The Last of the Bonegilla Girls, a novel based on her mother’s post-war migration to Australia, was published in 2018. Her previous novel The Three Miss Allens became a USA Today bestseller in April 2019. She is a regular guest at writers festivals, a mentor and workshop presenter and was a judge in the fiction category for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. To find out more, visit Victoria on her website .

You can also follow her on Facebook , Instagram and Twitter .

The Women’s Pages Published by HQ Fiction – AU Released 2nd September 2020

New Release Book Review: The Women’s Pages by Victoria Purman

Title: The Women’s Pages

Author: Victoria Purman

Published: September 2nd 2020

Publisher: HQ Fiction – AU

Pages: 416

Genres: Fiction, Historical

RRP: $29.99

Rating: 4 stars

From the bestselling author of The Land Girls comes a beautifully realised novel that speaks to the true history and real experiences of post-war Australian women.

Sydney 1945 The war is over, the fight begins.

‘I’m off general news. It’s about the women’s pages for me from now on, where I’ll no doubt spend the rest of my days covering weddings and flower shows and the chairman of the board’s wife’s latest charity fundraiser.’ Tilly heard the bitterness and disappointment in her tone and didn’t care.’

I consider Victoria Purman one of Australia’s leading storytellers in the field of historical fiction. In her latest novel titled The Women’s Pages , Victoria Purman brings to life a difficult transition period in our past, the post-World War II era in Sydney, Australia. The Women’s Pages looks closely at changed gender roles, ambition, careers, resilience, inner strength, love, relationships, friendships, family relations, trauma, loss and hope. Victoria Purman sets the bar high with this latest contribution to the Australian historical fiction genre.

Bestselling author Victoria Purman returns with a novel that takes a closer look at life on the home front in Australia, with a particular focus on women’s experiences during the post-World War II period. Despite the relief of the war being declared as officially over in 1945, many women in Australia lived in limbo. Awaiting word on the return of their prisoner of war husbands, the strength of carry on in these trying times remains pertinent. Many women during this time also struggled to readjust to their post war lives. For lead protagonist of this tale, Tilly Galloway, life as an exciting war correspondent must be cast aside for a new role in reporting for the women’s pages. Tilly finds the fashion and make up side of things a bore in comparison to her war correspondent duties. But Tilly is also preoccupied by thoughts of her husband who has failed to return home after the war. Tilly invests her energies in trying to locate he husband, while also looking into exposing an exclusive story involving women workers who are facing wage restrictions and longer hours. Those who surround Tilly are faced with their own struggles. Tilly’s best friend Mary is dealing with her husband’s PTSD following his imprisonment in Changi. While her father is struggling on the wharf with trade union issues. It becomes clear that for many citizens left behind during the war, Australia faces a new battle and every one must do their part.

With a delay in release, it is wonderful to see The Women’s Pages out there in bookstores for readers to appreciate. I have the feeling that Victoria Purman will gain some new fans thanks to this new release and she also provides her loyal army of fans with a great new historical fiction title. I loved the focus on the post Second World War period in The Women’s Pages . I also appreciated the rich focus on the female experience of this tumultuous and trying time period.

Tilly Galloway is a fabulous lead protagonist. Tilly displays her vulnerability, but also her tenacity and resilience throughout the progression of this story. Tilly exuded plenty of inner strength and I found this inspiring. This giving and ambitious soul injects plenty of life into The Women’s Pages . The interactions that take place between Tilly and her colleagues, friends and family were presented well by the author. I appreciated viewing how relations on the home front during this period impacted so many facets of life. There were many changes, adjustments, strains and opportunities that came about due to the impact of the war. I feel that Victoria Purman presented these everyday moments of life clearly. There is no doubt that Victoria Purman has devoted plenty of time and research to The Women’s Pages . I came way feeling educated, informed and more than little inspired. These were tough times, but so many ordinary Australians made of it what they could.

Victoria Purman presents her readers with a full and involving narrative. We see everything from post-traumatic stress disorder experienced by returned soldiers, to trade union difficulties, tensions experienced by the wharfies, the demise of marriages and family life due to strains of war, economic conditions, housing shortages, employment conditions, political movements and rationing influencing day to day living in post war Sydney. What I found illuminating was Purman’s focus on the female experience. From changed gender relations, employment opportunities, the heightened anxiety of lost loved ones, increased freedom in sexual relations and the challenges faced by women trying to retain roles and pay conditions they achieved during the war. Through the character of Tilly, we see how the media industry, journalism and reporting was forever changed by the effects of the war. These were incredibly hard times, which was very much evident as I made my way through The Women’s Pages .

There is sadness, sorrow, loss, significant change and eventually hope to look to as the characters of The Women’s Pages must learn to negotiate a new Australia. The Women’s Pages is a rich historical fiction title that leaves a strong imprint on the reader, reminding the audience of the struggles faced by our ancestors in the post-World War II period.

The Women’s Pages by Victoria Purman was published on 2nd September 2020 by HQ Fiction – AU. Details on how to purchase the book can be found here.

To learn more about the author of The Women’s Pages , Victoria Purman, visit here.

*I wish to thank Harlequin Australia for providing me with a free copy of this book for review purposes .

The Women’s Pages is book #95 of the 2020 Australian Women Writers Challenge

A Tea Break with Mrs B: Petronella McGovern

A Tea Break with Mrs B: Jacquie Underdown

"The Women's Pages tells a rare story about Australian women that will get your book club talking."

When World War II ended, a joyous cry of relief erupted across many parts of the world, including Australia.

But in reality, more days of hardship and perseverance were yet to come.

This moment in history is where bestselling South Australian author Victoria Purman 's beautifully crafted new novel The Women's Pages sets its scene, on that historic day in 1945 in Sydney when the war was declared over, but a different kind of a fight had just begun.

The Women's Pages is told through the eyes of Tilly Galloway, whose husband Archie has been away at war for four long years, with news of his whereabouts becoming murkier since he was declared a prisoner of war.

Having started out as an assistant at the Daily Herald newspaper in Sydney, the smart and dedicated Tilly has pursued her dream of becoming a journalist and war correspondent. However, at the time, it was an industry where female journalists were still not allowed to sit on the same floor as their male colleagues, let alone easily share the same newspaper pages as them.

The end of the war brings on a new set of challenges for Tilly, her family and her housemate and best friend Mary, who has been patiently waiting alongside Tilly for the last four years for her husband Bert to return home from war.

After being overlooked at the newspaper in favour of returning men, who are seen as the breadwinners of their families, Tilly begins to look into the stories and lives of the underpaid and overworked women who live in Sydney.

These are women whose courageous service to the war effort has been brutally overlooked. Using her journalistic talents, Tilly begins championing the way they sacrificed their own dreams and way of life for their country, away from the battlefields.

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The ‘Can I Bring My Partner’ Formula

Throughout her novel, Victoria Purman’s words firmly encase you in the world of Tilly and her fellow women as they continue to push on with their lives as their city changes. As a reader, you are by their side through food shortages, career upheavals, strikes, tear-inducing family reunions, new romances and husbands who return from the war as a shell of who they were before.

Just as she did with her acclaimed 2019 novel The Land Girls , which is based on the real-life women who worked in the Australian Women's Land Army, The Women's Pages draws inspiration for its storylines and characters from the Australian women who came before us, making it even more gripping and poignant.

Purman was inspired by the trailblazing careers of real-life female Australian war correspondents in World War II, whose achievements have never been given their proper due in the spotlight, but whose careers were chronicled in works such as Jeannine Baker's Australian Women War Reporters: Boer War to Vietnam.

Purman has a personal connection to that era as well. In her 2018 novel T he Last of the Bonegilla Girls , she tells the story of her own mother's migration to Australia from Europe in the early 1950s.

Thanks to its rich Australian history, multi-dimensional characters and a story of love, ambition and resilience that will sweep you away, The Women's Pages is the one new novel you need to share with your book club, family and friends.

Unfortunately, in terms of equality, many of the issues faced by the characters in The Women's Pages we still find ourselves fighting against to this day.

But, as the novel reminds us, the most powerful way forward is by sharing each other's stories.

The Women's Pages is available to now at all good bookstores, as well as instore and online at BIG W , The Women’s Pages is also featured in What To Read This Month from Apple Books and in audiobook on Audible .

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The Women (Review, Recap & Chapter Summaries)

By kristin hannah.

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for The Women by Kristin Hannah, a intimate historical drama about a young woman who enlists as a nurse in the Vietnam War.

In Kristin Hannah's The Women , Frankie McGrath is a young woman from a wealthy family who decides to enlist as a nurse in the Vietnam War after her older brother is killed in action.

In doing so, she leaves her sheltered and comfortable life in California to serve in a war-ravaged country working under dangerous conditions. When she returns, the atmosphere in America is hostile to veterans, dismissive of women's contributions in the war and she struggles to reassimilate.

In a story about patriotism, friendship, remembrance and defying expectations, The Women tells an often-overlooked story of the courageous women who served in Vietnam.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

The two-paragraph version: Frankie McGrath is a young woman from a wealthy family who enlists to serve in Vietnam and becomes a skilled surgical nurse over the course of two tours of duty. She becomes close with a doctor, Jamie, who is killed. She falls in love with a navy pilot, Rye, but he is killed just before returning home. When Frankie return home, she struggles to assimilate. Her service to her country is dismissed -- as being un-ladylike and because she was a non-combat veteran. She has a mental breakdown, but with the support of her friends and fellow former nurses Barb and Ethel, Frankie is able to find her footing as a surgical nurse again, reconcile with her parents and begins seeing a nice man.

However, when the war ends and the POWs arrive home, she realizes Rye is alive -- but that he was married and with a child the whole time. Distraught, Frankie goes on a downward spiral, getting suspended from work and taking pills, while she starts secretly seeing Rye who insists he will leave his wife. Frankie finally realizes Rye has been lying when his wife delivers their second child, and Frankie accidentally overdoses on pills. Frankie is taken to a treatment facility and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. When she leaves, Frankie starts over in Montana, buying a farmhouse which she turns into a ranch called The Last Best Place to serve as a refuge for women who served in Vietnam. In November 1982, she attends the unveiling of the Vietnam War Memorial and sees Jamie there who apparently survived his injuries.

In Part One , in May 1966, Frances "Frankie" Grace McGrath , 20, is a young woman from a wealthy family with a decorated military history whose brother Finley is about to ship out to serve in the navy in the Vietnam War, along with his best friend Rye Walsh . Finley is killed in action, but Frankie decides to enlists as a nurse. She attends Basic training and ships out in March 1967. She befriend two fellow nurses, Barb and Ethel . Frankie eventually becomes a surgical nurse, working with surgeon Dr. Jamie Callahan . They become close, but just before his tour of duty is complete, Jamie's helicopter is shot down and he is killed.

Soon, Frankie is reassigned to more dangerous location and is becoming an increasingly capable nurse. While Frankie's tour of duty is due to be complete in March 1968, she sees that her skills are needed there and decides to re-enlist. At a party, she is reunited with Rye Walsh, who is now a respected navy officer. Rye is initially engaged but breaks it off to be Frankie, and Rye decides to re-enlist so they can be together in Vietnam.

In March 1969, Frankie finally heads back to California after her second tour of duty comes to a close. Rye is due home in 27 days as well. Frankie struggles to reassimilate back home, plagued with nightmares from the war and the realities of hostile war protestors. She alienates friends and her parents are embarrassed of her war record. She is devastated to learn that Rye has been killed in action. After she gets fired from her hospital nursing job, she has a mental breakdown and leaves home after fighting with her parents. Frankie goes to the VA for help with her mental health, but is turned away since she wasn't in combat. Finally, Frankie calls Barb and Ethel in desperation. Ethel decides to move Frankie into the bunkhouse at her father's farmhouse so Frankie can have some time to figure out the next phase of her life.

Part Two opens in Virginia in April 1971. Frankie, now 25, is doing well and working as a surgical nurse. She's been staying with Barb and Ethel in the bunkhouse they remodeled into a two-bedroom cottage. Frankie is in D.C. with Barb attending anti-war protests when she learns that her mother has had a stroke. Frankie finally goes home and reconciles with her parents.

Frankie gets involved with an organization dedicated to bringing home prisoners of war, and begins seeing Henry Acevedo, a psychiatrist and anti-war protestor. When she becomes pregnant, they agree to get married. However, when the war ends and the POWs arrive home, she realizes Rye is alive. When she miscarries, she ends her engagement with Henry. Frankie begins to take a lot of pills, her work life begins to suffer and she gets suspended from work. Meanwhile, she begins secretly seeing Rye, who assures her he plans to leave his wife.

Frankie doesn't realize Rye has been lying until she learns his wife has just given birth to their second child. Distraught, Frankie accidentally overdoses on pills. In response, Frankie's parents check her into a treatment facility run by Henry, who tells her she has probably been struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder from her time in Vietnam.

Frankie spends the next few months in treatment. She then decides to leave and start over, purchasing a dilapidated farmhouse in Missoula. She takes in Donna, another nurse struggling with PTSD from Vietnam. Together they rebuild the property a ranch called the Last Best Place that serves as a refuge for women who'd served in Vietnam. The book ends with Frankie attending the unveiling of the Vietnam War Memorial and seeing Jamie there who apparently survived and is divorced now.

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

If this summary was useful to you, please consider supporting this site by leaving a tip ( $2 , $3 , or $5 ) or joining the Patreon !

Book Review

In The Women , Kristin Hannah continues her strong record of telling compelling and intimate historical dramas about women, this time focusing on a nurse serving in Vietnam.

Frankie’s character has clearly been crafted to serve the story and provides a vehicle to represent the experiences of the female veterans of Vietnam. Through Frankie, Hannah explores the lives of nurses serving in Vietnam as well as the difficulty of reassimilating afterwards.

Despite the war-ravaged setting and the tumultuous times stateside, The Women is a story gently and compassionately told. Hannah’s writing is as capable and confident as ever. I think in the hands of a less experienced storyteller this story could perhaps drag on or become too dark, too wearisome or just repetitive.

Instead, Hannah manages to tackle this topic and introduce a lot of very real tragedies and difficulties during that time while keeping things interesting and occasionally even lighthearted or hopeful. There are many moments of darkness, but also moments of relief that offer some respite.

To be honest, I’m not someone with any particular interest in war stories and the Vietnam War period has never been high on my list. But Hannah managed to draw me into these characters and their struggles. I found The Women quite engrossing, which was an unexpected surprise.

Some Criticism

I think the worst thing you could probably say about The Women would be that there is some genericism to the characters. Frankie is the typical smart, likeable young woman with an independent streak that is commonly found in historical fiction novels.

In general, the characters and plot feel very much like they were selected in order to help tell a story that would reflect a certain range of experiences during this time period. That said, I still found them effective and believable, so this aspect of the story didn’t really bother me.

Read it or Skip it?

The Women isn’t a story that breaks new ground or offers any sort of life-changing type insights, and I think that’s okay. I don’t think every story worth being told needs to be.

Instead, it’s a confident and welcome addition to a growing body of beautifully told stories about women, offering depth and infusing life into these figures that for a long time have been largely relegated to the sidelines in books, movies and other media.

The Women is an unchallenging and “safe” type of book, but it’s one I enjoyed. Hannah’s newest offering is a quick read that’s worth the time, and I’ll be looking forward to what she comes up with next.

See The Women on Amazon.

P.S. If you liked this, you might also like Hannah’s previous novel, The Four Winds .

P.P.S. This reminded me a lot of The Giver of Stars , too.

The Women Audiobook

Narrator : Julia Whelan & Kristin Hannah Length : 15 hours

Hear a sample of the The Women audiobook on Libro.fm.

Discussion Questions

Did The Women change your perceptions about nurses in Vietnam or the war in Vietnam?
Why do you think Hannah chose to tell this story?
Why do you think Frankie made the decision to enlist? Do you think you would make the same decision under those circumstances?
What did you think about Frankie’s argument with her father that he glorifies men going off to war, but not women? Why do you think he feels this way? Do you think people still feel this way?
What did you think about Frankie’s relationships with Jamie and Rye? Do you think there was real love there? What do you think this story would sound like from their perspective?
What do you think happens with Jamie after the end of the book?
Who was your favorite character in the book (other than Frankie)? Why and what about them did you find compelling?
What parts of Frankie’s experiences in Vietnam did you find most upsetting? What about as a returning veteran attempting to re-assimilate?
Do you think Frankie is a “hero” and what makes someone a “hero”?
How do you think Frankie’s story would differ if her socioeconomic circumstances were different? If she were poor, if she were a minority or if she didn’t have the support system that she did?

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of The Women

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Grab the tissues: Kristin Hannah has a new novel

As with hannah’s other novels, ‘the women’ puts its protagonist — and readers — through a lot.

Why am I doing this to myself? The thought occurred to me as I reached the bottom of Page 20 in Kristin Hannah’s new novel, “ The Women .” Barely three chapters in, and already protagonist Frankie McGrath was learning that her charming, mischievous older brother had been killed in action in Vietnam. “ Shot down … in a helicopter … No remains … all hands lost. ” If you’ve read Hannah’s historical novels, you know that this development will be but one snowflake in a blizzard of tear-jerking tragedy that will inundate you over the next 450 pages.

Reading Hannah’s books may be a masochistic pastime, but it’s also a hugely popular one. “The Nightingale,” “ The Four Winds ,” “ The Great Alone ,” “Firefly Lane”: Her books are such reliable bestsellers that her publisher is betting big on “The Women” with an initial printing of 1 million copies. If Kleenex doesn’t come up with a tie-in campaign, it’s leaving money on the table.

The tragedy that befalls Frankie is multilayered, though all of it can be traced back to the moment she impulsively volunteers to be an Army nurse in Vietnam. Before she knows what’s happened, she’s 2nd Lt. Frances McGrath, arriving at a 400-bed hospital 60 miles from Saigon. Battling stomach distress and sporting a positively medieval “regulation panty girdle,” Frankie has no understanding of what horrors await her. Her first full day in-country, after helicopters swoop in carrying dozens of gravely injured men, a medic hands her a boot and, when Frankie realizes a foot is still inside, she vomits and then tells anyone who will listen that she’s made a huge mistake. “I shouldn’t be here,” she gasps.

A Hannah fan knows this part is nothing to worry about. This is the part in “The Great Alone” when Leni first moves off the grid to Alaska and comprehends the true meaning of the term “harsh winter”; it’s the part in “The Four Winds” when Elsa heads west with her son to escape the Dust Bowl and realizes that California is not, in fact, a welcoming oasis. It’s the in-over-her-head phase that comes right before the theme song from “The Greatest American Hero” starts playing.

Eventually, Frankie will be the kind of nurse who can work during a blackout with bombs dropping around her and a flashlight clamped between her teeth. Still, the thrill of newly acquired expertise can’t forestall the queasy certainty that, at any moment, the other shoe will drop. I read “The Women” while hugging an emotional-support pillow and trying to divine which characters would be sacrificed. Hannah’s protective instincts toward her protagonists are on par with George R.R. Martin’s. But even if Frankie made it out alive, I knew there would be many more who wouldn’t.

An interview with Vietnam War nurse Edie Meeks

Would Frankie’s closest friends, fellow nurses Barb and Ethel, survive their tours of duty? How about Jamie, the dreamy doctor with the “kind, sad blue eyes”? Or her brother’s best friend, Rye, a pilot with more than a passing resemblance to Paul Newman? Maybe there’s some kind of formula: If character X has Y amount of charm, he is 10 times more likely to die. When the goofy kid from Kentucky is wheeled in, cracking jokes about the shrapnel lodged in his backside, a warning flashed in my brain: Don’t get attached to this one.

Which returns me to my original question. What is it about Hannah’s tragic tales that keeps me coming back? It’s a doubly interesting query, I think, given reading trends since the start of the covid pandemic. In 2020, interest in romance novels skyrocketed. Suddenly, readers, reeling from the uncertainty of simple existence, flocked to the guarantee of a happy ending.

An interview with Vietnam War nurse Diane Carlson Evans

Some of that popularity arose from BookTok — the bibliophile’s corner of TikTok — a platform that helped novels by Ali Hazelwood , Sarah J. Maas and Elissa Sussman become bestsellers.

But BookTok is also a place where young women go to feel big, messy emotions — to read heartbreaking works by such authors as Colleen Hoover while filming themselves weeping. It seemed like a strange practice to me until I started to interrogate my own inclinations. I wasn’t prepared to show the world my tear-streaked face, but was there something to the idea of being part of a group that wanted to really feel something? Hannah certainly makes that happen. (True story: I once teared up just describing the scene in “The Great Alone” when Leni’s mother kills a man to save her daughter’s life. In my defense, and to paraphrase contrite men everywhere, I am the mother of a daughter and the daughter of a mother.)

On TikTok, crying is encouraged. Colleen Hoover’s books get the job done.

Hannah got her start writing romance novels — “A Handful of Heaven” (1991) has one of those shirtless-man-embracing-a-windswept-heroine covers — but even as the pandemic made readers hungry for happily-ever-afters, she kept serving up stress and sadness. “The Four Winds” came out in early 2021 and was an immediate bestseller.

More book reviews and recommendations

I remember reading the book during that bleak, isolated time. And while it destroyed me, it also awoke something that was — and continues to be — in short supply: empathy. It gave me a new appreciation for what everyday people from the past endured; it also gave me perspective for how my own micro-tragedies fit into the larger framework of history. Hannah tells the stories of real but unsung heroes, and when you consider that, the price of a few sobs seems relatively small.

So where does “The Women” land on the Kristin Hannah Cry-O-Meter? Is Frankie’s fate as tragic as French resistance fighter Isabelle Rossignol’s? Is there a single line — “Not my Leni” — that will get the waterworks going years after reading it? I would love to tell you, but my screen is getting inexplicably blurry.

Stephanie Merry is the deputy editor of Book World.

By Kristin Hannah

St. Martin’s. 471 pp. $30

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The Women’s Pages by Debra Adelaide review – bend it like Brontë and Buttrose

A multi-layered story of missing, absent and dead mothers could have failed miserably but this Wuthering Heights inspired tale is tender and wise

A cademic and author Debra Adelaide has a long been fascinated with the creative acts of writing and reading – how certain stories, in her case Wuthering Heights, stay with you for life. The Women’s Pages, based on the opening short story in her collection Letter to George Clooney , pays homage to this idea as Adelaide spins an intriguing tale with missing, absent and dead mothers at its core.

It is 2014 and 38-year-old Dove has recently lost her adoptive mother. Grief makes her inert. Unable to muster the energy to continue working, she quits and decides to write a novel. She’s never written one before and is uncertain how to proceed.

All she knows is that it will be set in 1960s suburbia, a time when girls’ ambitions stretched little further than securing a husband and raising a family. Her main character is Ellis who, at 16, has never known her mother nor been able to gain a glimmer of information about her from her father Edgar. Alone in the house where her father was born, she realises that assumptions about her future are modest, but she has greater ambitions.

We know the story. As readers, we settle into the expectation that Ellis will somehow buck the system. Except that now Dove intervenes in the narrative.

She gives Ellis a son Charlie and later decides against it. With a keystroke, Charlie is no more. Dove forges ahead and Ellis, unaware that feminism is even a word, strides out into the world. She works her way up to being editor of the women’s magazine Pages, in the mould of Ita Buttrose, complete with the recalcitrant Packer-esque boss. Dove dithers with her story. She catches the bus to Ashfield where Ellis lived, searching the streets for the right house, the School of Arts where Ellis once attended ballet lessons. As if Ellis were a real person.

Dove’s urge to write initially seems to be about purging her grief. But again Adelaide foils this idea. The truth is that discovering Ellis’s story allows Dove to confront long buried feelings about her birth mother. Ellis has a child Charlie, later erased, and then Dove gifts her another child, which Ellis gives up. Is it a cold-hearted decision by a woman determined to invest her energies in her career or is Ellis incapable of being a mother because she never had one? Both character and writer grapple with an emerging sense of loss for the mothers they never knew.

It’s worth noting Adelaide also grew up in suburbia, where her own mother expected her to finish school at 16 and become a hairdresser. It is also interesting that Ellis is determined to make her mark on the world in a way her narrator Dove does not. In the 1960s, choosing a career over being a housewife is an act of defiance. Dove, a 38-year-old woman in 2014, is making the opposite choice – to opt out of both.

This is what makes The Women’s Pages such an intriguing novel. In the hands of a less gifted author, it could have failed miserably. But Adelaide creates a cohesive narrative around her themes: creativity, the struggle of women to define who they want to be and the impact of missing mothers on those left behind.

She did it before, of course, in her internationally acclaimed novel The Household Guide to Dying . In that book, her character Delia Bennet is preparing her children for her forthcoming demise (another dead mother) and quotes Dylan Thomas and George Eliot. In The Women’s Pages, Adelaide takes that idea one step further by inserting Emily Brontë into the actual story.

Wuthering Heights is Dove’s adoptive mother’s favourite novel. Dove read it to her as she lay dying and now Emily Brontë, high on the moors, haunts her dreams. It is never made clear whether Dove consciously or subconsciously names Ellis after Emily Brontë’s pseudonym Ellis Bell. Or, for that matter, draws on the characters from Wuthering Heights, naming Ellis’ father Edgar, the housekeeper Nell and her missing mother Catherine.

Wuthering Heights is a novel with barely any mothers: “They were all dead or dying, or simply blank spaces, unnamed and unacknowledged.” And for her part, Dove cannot decide if Emily Brontë’s novel is a story about a miserable childhood or failed parenting. She never seems to fully grasp that the story haunts her because she too is motherless.

Where does Adelaide leave us then? Giving nothing away, the ending is shocking. Adelaide has deceived the reader, reminding us that she, unlike Dove, is in control of the story. Missing, absent or dead mothers and women choosing between career and family – this is hardly new territory but in Adelaide’s hands, the result is tender, wise and extraordinary reading.

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What To Leave Out

Second Half First by Drusilla Modjeska Knopf 400pp $39.99 AU Published October, 2015 ISBN 9780857989796
The Women’s Pages by Debra Adelaide Pan Macmillan 304pp $29.99 AU Published October, 2015 ISBN 9781743535981
Eat First, Talk Later by Beth Yahp Vintage 368pp $34.99 AU Published September, 2015 ISBN 9780857986863

These three new titles – two memoirs and a novel – each written by a well-established local author of fiction, are concerned with what it might mean to map the contours of a life on the page. Where to begin and where to end; what to include or to leave out. What particular significance might self-transcription have for women writers as they seek to trace continuities and discontinuities in female experience from their own lives to their mothers’ or grandmothers’ generations?

For Drusilla Modjeska, the sweep of Second Half First is not that of an autobiography or perhaps even a memoir but ‘simply a reflection on the arc of life’. Neither is Beth Yahp’s stylistically heterogeneous and thoroughly researched Eat First, Talk Later typical of the memoir form, charting the author’s circuitous quest to recover her parents’ personal histories by taking them back to Malaysia for a road trip down memory lane. Debra Adelaide’s intriguing and emotionally rich narrative puzzle in The Women’s Pages offers us a fiction within a fiction, interweaving the lives of two women – one of whom, it seems, is the creation of the other.

How blurred is the line between fiction and memoir, given the pliability of memory, its lacunae and its distorted focus? If we decide to illuminate particular moments in our past, do we thereby create a fiction of their prominence? Such moments can be revised, revisited, remade – scenes in Eat First, Talk Later are reshaped as they are seen from new angles; reflections in Second Half First twisted to catch a new light. And for writers of fiction, what does it mean to feel the emotions of one’s characters as if they were one’s own, as Dove, the protagonist-cum-author of The Women’s Pages , does? What does it mean to decide the fates of these characters, who have become like companions?

Second Half First , as its name suggests, does not begin at the beginning. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it begins at one of many beginnings, which is also and most obviously an ending. On the night before the author’s fortieth birthday a romantic relationship reaches its dissolution, having begun in the aftermath of another ending – the premature death of Modjeska’s mother, Poppy, 17,000 kilometres away in London. The breakdown of this relationship opens the memoir and unspools its early threads, marking – along with Poppy’s death – a kind of tide mark in Modjeska’s life, to which she will return in writing thirty years later. It is a catalyst for, rather than a focal point of, what turns out to be a wide-ranging, digressive, loosely structured, thoughtful and thought-provoking memoir (of sorts). Modjeska traverses a breadth of personal territory, sketching patterns of alignment and fragmentation, alighting here and there on moments of connection, separation, grief or revelation.

Some 25 years after the publication of her fictionalised and eponymous biography of Poppy, Modjeska again contemplates the myriad and often intangible ways in which we are formed by our parents’ histories, and considers how very long it can take us to understand the extent of their influence; how long, sometimes, before we even seek our parents’ stories out. She returns in memory to her mother and her father, having done so physically in the days and weeks preceding each of their deaths. It is a process which continues for many years after they are both gone. Perhaps not surprisingly, given Modjeska’s longstanding interest in personal histories, it is the spectre of memory which concerns her; not simply that store of sensations, experiences or impressions built up over the course of a life, but also the idea of memory, its function, form and fabric.

Modjeska’s is a discursive and engaging voice, her contemplation of this ‘second half’ of a life unapologetically candid. The prose is exploratory and flexuous; she revises and revisits words, phrases or images, occasionally switching tense within the span of a page or even a paragraph. As she observes of her craft,

words bend and weave, sentences and paragraphs gathering in stories, digressing and doubling back, making a pattern that may not be able to be apprehended as an embodied work to walk around, but can reveal its shape in the mind of a reader, a compatriot, a stranger.

Much of Second Half First dwells on the relationship of writers – novelists, biographers, memoirists – to one another, and their imaginative lives as readers. This history of Modjeska’s life is at least partly the history of her reading, and some of the most engaging sections of the book are those in which she traces the currents of her reading practice through periods of intellectual exploration or emotional succour. An early mentor, the critic and poet Dorothy Auchterlonie Green, propels this mining of literature for life.

Go back, she said. Go back to the mothers, to the world yours was born into and that you came from.

In returning to her literary mothers, Modjeska uncovers lives shaped by the tug of war between ‘love and independence of mind’: Simone de Beauvoir, Christina Stead, Rebecca West, Doris Lessing and Anna Wulf, the latter’s protagonist in The Golden Notebook . Can we, as Modjeska implores West’s biographer Victoria Glendinning (whose pointed exposure of the contradictions in West’s attitude to marriage she loathes), not honour rather than deplore the inconsistencies in women’s lives, the ructions caused by the tension between independence and love?

Rather than catching a woman out, couldn’t there be a way of writing her life that honoured – rather than excused – the inconsistencies, the confusions, that – as I knew from my own wavering, criss-crossing desires – were still integral to the struggle to live with both love and independence of mind in a world that did not easily accord this combination to a woman?

Second Half First is a meditation on these inconsistencies and on the struggle to accommodate both independence and love in Modjeska’s life and in the lives of other women writers and artists. She asks us to embrace contradiction, and to allow ourselves and others ‘wavering, criss-crossing desires’.

Ambivalence, uncertainty; the experience of life between the lines of the tide: that was the story, not the certainty of bricks.

The form of Second Half First is in its own way a celebration of ambiguity, contradiction and inconsistency. Modjeska moves back and forth across decades and continents – from her much loved ‘house on the corner’ in Enmore to the mountainous villages of the Ömie tribe in Papua New Guinea, and back to the New South Wales South Coast – blending stream-of-consciousness with passionate argument and astute self-reflection, as it slips throughout between a kind of extended essay and memoir.

Despite its status as a novel – and its structural incorporation of a fiction within another fiction – Debra Adelaide’s The Women’s Pages asks many of the same questions as Modjeska’s loose-limbed ‘reflection on the arc of a life’ in Second Half First ; and indeed, shares others with Beth Yahp’s frustrated pursuit of her family history in Eat First, Talk Later . The façade of a conventional, close third-persona narrative – a young woman named Ellis, not long married and a new mother, attends a backyard barbeque in honour of the wedding anniversary of her husband’s friends – lasts only as long as the novel’s opening chapter. Soon enough, and before we are comfortably acquainted with our protagonist, her status as the fictional creation of another woman becomes apparent.

Ellis is revealed to be a character conjured by Dove, a creatively unsatisfied graphic designer who finds herself drawn back into the world of Wuthering Heights as she reads it to her adoptive mother, who is dying in hospital. Her creation is, of course, named for Emily Brontë, who wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell (and fans of Brontë will no doubt derive a certain gratification from this protagonist’s aptly named parents, Catherine and Edgar). The creative impulse as experienced by Dove is precisely that – an impulse, an urge, an itch. She finds herself accosted by an almost uncanny compulsion to write the story of Ellis, a young woman who feels unsuited to a life of matrimony and motherhood. Dove has never experienced either herself, and seems unlikely, if not uninclined, to do so in the future. That she ‘invented’ a child for Ellis because she – Dove – ‘needed him’ reveals how close the ties are between author and character; how strong the potential for a kind of emotional projection. Ellis appears to Dove full-fleshed, plaguing her author’s dreams and demanding realisation in prose. The novel has a doubled structure, as sections of Ellis’s story are intercut with that of her author – and indeed with the story of her own creation. In this sense it is an unashamedly literary novel, explicitly concerned with the writing process, and the entanglement of a novelist’s life with that of her protagonist. Here again we see the echoes of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook in the spectre of a protagonist who also an author, and a narrative frame which turns finally in upon itself.

Emerging over several interspersed chapters, Ellis takes on a life of her own – enigmatic and multilayered, selfish yet entirely sympathetic. Dove returns to details of the scenes she has conjured, building up the pieces of a day, an hour or a moment; sometimes even realising with a shock that she has got the scene ‘wrong’ – that in fact, Ellis would not have done this, gone there, said that. Dove is allowed her inconsistencies and contradictions – just as Modjeska would have the many women authors she admires forgiven theirs. Moving now back to adolescence, now forward to divorce and self-sufficiency, Ellis’s life accumulates its layers like a painting, until the creation has near eclipsed her creator.

As readers we come to know Ellis both independent of her author and through the process of her composition – an interplay which Adelaide handles with consummate skill. And in this most explicitly fictional of fictions arise some of those same questions begged by the memoirist. There are so many ways to write a life, where does one even start? What warrants our attention – where do we train our eye, our camera, our pen? Moreover, from what angle do we see? And what happens when we take a second glance, when we revise our first impression, or look from a different angle? Moments in Ellis’s life are first seen, then recast, sometimes even overturned, as Dove shifts her angle, a scene pressing itself anew upon her, unbidden and shaken up. Visiting the suburban Sydney street where she has imagined her characters into being,

Dove placed her hand on the picket gate then removed it. Something was wrong. She could see the scene that had replayed in her mind a thousand times, the scene so vivd where her story had first begun. It was as if it had happened just this morning, but there was a piece missing.

Just as Dove revisits the scenes she herself has written, trying to understand her own creation, Ellis will seek the stories of those who have shaped her, reappraise the scenes of her childhood, probe the absences by which it was defined. Like Modjeska – and Yahp – Ellis and Dove both seek their mothers, writing themselves into being through the process.

She had not meant to write the story of women but that was how it had appeared, that was the only story in her head. The more she delved into the lives of her characters the more it was about missing or silent women and the more it seemed it was her job to find them and open their mouths and pull their words out and lay them across the pages.

For the story of women is of course also the story of historical circumstance, the confluence of political, economic and social change. Ellis’s life, the lives of Dorothy Auchterlonie Green’s ‘mothers’ or those literary forebears whose struggle for ‘love and independence of mind’ so concerns Modjeska, are shaped by the availability of contraception and abortion, by access to education, by the opportunity to enter the workplace and thrive there unhindered by gendered discrimination, with equal remuneration to their male colleagues (we live in hope).

The Women’s Pages is a technically accomplished novel, weaving together its separate threads to a conclusion in which the division between them begins to break down. It is also a sheer pleasure to read – its prose elegant and polished, rich with telling detail, and moving without being sentimental. At its heart it is a fiction of fiction-making, celebrating the entanglement of authors with their characters, and conjuring the uncanny sense that these characters exist even beyond the imaginations of their creators.

At first glance Beth Yahp’s richly layered memoir of her own and her parents’ lives in Malaysia – between which and Sydney she continues to travel – may not seem to have a great deal in common with Adelaide’s meta-fictional novel or Modjeska’s meditative and meandering reflections; though the latter shares with Yahp her experiences as an expatriate, moving between two cultures and two different ideas of home. Yet here too arise those same questions: whose story am I writing – my own or that of my parents? From which angle? And why? To which Yahp answers,

It’s no defence, but this is my side. This side of the story is mine.

Eat First, Talk Later is a story steeped in Malaysian culture, politics, language and cuisine. Yahp conjures up the flavours and smells of delicious dishes of every colour and consistency, the paradisiacal image of beach-lapped islands, the clamour and sound of Kuala Lumpur and the consonant-filled rhythms of Malay. The writing is dense, lyrical, even occasionally opaque, moving back and forth between scenes from five, ten, fifty or seventy years ago sometimes within the space of a page – and between history, memory and self-reflection. Yahp’s warm and incisive humour inflects her prose as she fills the pages with the rhythms of several tongues.

Eat First, Talk Later is a memoir of travel and self-imposed exile of movement across continents and within relationships, between cultures and ideas of home, asking what it might mean to settle in Sydney, in Kuala Lumpur, or in Paris. Need we choose the place we call home? What might a peripatetic life in which home is not a city, a house or an apartment, look like? Yahp is formed by each of the places in which she has made at least a temporary home, as she is formed by her parents’ stories, and by the myriad cultures, languages, cuisines, traditions and identities of the country into which she was born. It is a country whose complicated history might be told – as it is, playfully, throughout by Yahp – via its rich culinary offerings: a history of foods.

The layering of political and historical detail throughout will be fascinating and informative for those readers (like me) who know relatively little of twentieth-century Malaysian history. Yahp’s involvement in political activism and her proximity to key opposition figures gives her a unique vantage point from which to explore her country’s recent history and the undercurrents of its political upheavals. She explores the intersection of this history with the lives of Malaysian citizens of all backgrounds, and with the stories of her own parents – their families, their first encounter, their courtship and their establishment of a life together.

There are many reasons why Yahp is interested in revisiting or uncovering the sites and scenes of Peter and Mara’s shared history. She is writing to bring their stories into the world as they reach old age; writing to make their stories hers as well; writing to understand. And as she does so she is interrogating what it might mean to seek such stories. Is the act of retelling them also an act of obscuring, an act of fictionalising?

Of course, I get it wrong. I’ve got whole chunks of the story wrong – places, people, periods. names, the sequence of events, never mind details of colour, shapes, sounds and smells, where it’s said truth resides; not in the cool, dry facts of things, but in their detail, the inflection in the way a child’s name is said – ‘Payao’ or ‘ Creee -cher’ – a clipped voice sounding out from the doorway of an echoey room. I have my own memory of this. Shall I give it to Mara?

Where do these reminiscences sit between truth and fiction? What is the effect of these acts of misremembering, of revision, on Yahp’s quest to unravel and illuminate her parents’ lives – and what particular significance do such revisions have when they arise in memoir, as opposed to a fiction like Adelaide’s? This is, after all, Yahp’s side of the story.

In blending the stories of her family with the story of Malaysia, Yahp does not shy away from thorny questions of political and national identity, of responsibility for the actions of one’s leaders and for the place of one’s country in the world. The actions of Australia towards refugees and the role of Australians in endorsing or repudiating those actions sit alongside the tumultuous political history of Malaysia, the tensions simmering along ethnic lines and the ongoing repression of dissent. Which parts of a national identity do we choose to endorse, to identify with, and which to discard? Do we get to choose? Yahp finds herself goading her partner in Sydney with the spectre of Australian racism, identifying herself in those moments as outside the scope of collective responsibility for its manifestations. Perhaps, she muses,

I can’t see anything in ways uncoloured by race – whether I’m in Kuala Lumpur, or Paris, or Sydney.

While Yahp, Modjeska and Adelaide share the subject of women’s lives, only Yahp explicitly addresses the ways in which the lens of race shapes not only her experience but also her storytelling.

There is a difference in style between those passages of Eat First, Talk Later which focus on Malaysia’s history and the patterns of its political upheavals over some seventy years, and those sections in which Yahp allows her own personal reflections to unfold. The latter weave together fragments of information, scenes sometimes unanchored in time, a proliferation of images and conversations, rich with unanswered questions. At times this fluidity can obscure the course of events, making their temporal relationship to one another momentarily difficult to follow. I suspect however that this is deliberate, enhancing that sense of frustration and of incompleteness which pervades Yahp’s attempts to reconstruct histories that may never be known, that can never be uncovered to her satisfaction. She can’t make her parents tell their story the way she wants to hear it, because that story is not theirs.

Two memoirs, one fiction? Or one family history, two fictions entwined into a single narrative, and a ‘reflection on the arc of a life’? All three of these books show women writing themselves into being, as they construct narrative from the raw materials of unwieldy lives, whether imagined or real. Each writes and rewrites sensation, tactile detail, exchange or confrontation, revising and rediscovering through the process. The compulsion to self-transcription is persistent, whether it be in the service of self-discovery, exploration or interrogation; whether it comprises reflection, hindsight, or the recovery of stories which might otherwise be lost; whether it functions to challenge or to reinforce, as transformation or as testament – or simply as record.

Sophia Barnes is an editor and writer living in Sydney. She holds a PhD...

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The Women’s Pages

Debra Adelaide

From the author of The Household Guide to Dying "Tender, wise and extraordinary reading." The Guardian Emily Bronte had written this novel especially for her. For her benefit she had sat alone in her narrow bed in the parsonage, her lap desk on her knees, death all around her with that graveyard right next door, the cold wind from the moors behind rattling the windows...But who had Dove written her story for? Dove is writing a novel for herself, for her mother and for their literary heroines. It describes the life of Ellis, an ordinary young woman of the 1960s troubled by secrets and gaps in her past. Having read Wuthering Heights to her dying mother, Dove finds she cannot shake off the influence of that singular novel: it has infected her like a disease. In grief's aftermath, she follows the story Wuthering Heights has inspired to discover more about Ellis, who has emerged from the pages of fiction herself - or has she? - to become a modern successful career woman. The Women's Pages is about the choices and compromises women make, about their griefs and losses, and about the cold aching spaces that are left when they disappear from the story. It explores the mysterious process of creativity, and the way stories are shaped and fiction is formed. Right up to its astonishing conclusion, The Women's Pages asserts the power of the reader's imagination, which can make the deepest desires and strangest dreams come true. PRAISE FOR THE WOMEN'S PAGES "A satisfyingly complex novel, which offers the pleasures of a well-told story, a page-turner" Australian Book Review "It's a meticulously planned story that provides the ultimate breathtaking surprise at the end of the final paragraph." Good Reading "A gripping read. It is also a sophisticated meditation on the creative acts of reading and writing." Sydney Morning Herald "The opening sentences soothed me with their skillful cadences, the unspoken passion beneath making me turn the pages again and again." The Southerly Review

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Barbara Walters Did the Work

In “The Rulebreaker,” Susan Page pays tribute to a pioneering journalist who survived being both a punchline and an icon.

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The image portrays a seated Barbara Walters in 1976, wearing a striped lavender and pink cardigan, with a microphone clipped to the shirt.

By Lisa Schwarzbaum

Lisa Schwarzbaum is a former critic for Entertainment Weekly.

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THE RULEBREAKER: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters, by Susan Page

Much of the material in “The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters” has been told before, with persuasive narrative control, by the late television journalist herself in her dishy 2008 memoir, “Audition.” Don’t let that stop the reader of this thorough, compassionate biography by Susan Page: It’s a valuable document, sobering where “Audition” aimed for sassy.

If anything, the 16 long years between autobiography and biography endow the two books, taken together, with a memento mori gravitas for any student of Walters, or of television journalism, or of the past, present and future of women in the TV workplace — or, for that matter, of Monica Lewinsky. More on her in a moment.

Walters called her autobiography “Audition” to emphasize the need she always felt to prove herself, pushing her way to professional success in a world that never made it easy for her. Nearly 80 then and still in the game, she acknowledged that personal contentment — love, marriage, meaningful family connections — lagged far behind. She wrote of being the daughter of an erratic father, who bounced — sometimes suicidally — between flush times and financial failure as a nightclub owner and impresario.

She told of her fearful mother, and of the mentally disabled older sister to whose welfare she felt yoked. She wrote of the three unsatisfying marriages, and of her strained relationship with the daughter she adopted as an infant.

She breezily acknowledged the ease she felt throughout her life with complicated men of elastic ethics like Roy Cohn and Donald Trump. She leaned into her reputation as a “pushy cookie.”

Page, the Washington bureau chief of USA Today, who has also written books about Barbara Bush and Nancy Pelosi, tells many of the same stories. (“Audition” is an outsize presence in the endnotes.) But in placing the emphasis on all the rule-breaking Barbara Jill Walters had to do over her long life — she died in 2022 at 93 — the biographer pays respect to a toughness easy to undervalue today, when the collective memory may see only the well-connected woman with the instantly recognizable (thanks to Gilda Radner’s “SNL” impression) speech impediment.

There was no one like her — not Diane, not Katie, not Judy, not Connie, not Gwen, not Christiane. Not Ellen. Not Oprah. Having created her niche, Walters fought all her life to protect it. Because no one else would. Would that be the case today? Discuss.

“At age 35,” Page writes, “she had finally found her place, a space that bridged journalism and entertainment and promotion. Traditionalists viewed the combination with consternation. She ignored their doubts as she redefined their industry. She saw herself as a journalist, albeit of a new and evolving sort. In some ways, she would make herself a leader in the news business by changing what, exactly, that could include.”

Walters broke rules to save her father from debt and jail. She broke rules to secure on-air status — and pay — equal to that of the often hostile men around her. Walters broke rules to land scoops, gain access and bag interviews.

The account of the driven competition she felt with her fellow TV journalist Diane Sawyer is both fun and silly/sad in its evocation of a catty rumble: Isn’t such competition the everyday reality of the bookers working for the famous men who currently host late-night talk shows? Aren’t those late-night hybrids now the closest thing we have to influential news interviews — except, perhaps, on the women-talking daytime show “The View,” invented in large part by Barbara Walters?

Walters didn’t break rules to get the first on-air interview with Monica Lewinsky — she just worked her tuchis off, from the day the news of an affair broke to the night of March 3, 1999 — watched by 74 million Americans.

Walters was nearly 70 and famous; Lewinsky was a private 25-year-old woman whose affair with her married boss had thrown a country into hypocritical hysterics. The process of establishing trust could not be rushed.

The older woman asked the younger woman a chain of tough questions about sex and intimacy and character and judgment that no human should have to endure on national television. The younger woman answered with a dignity currently out of fashion both in celebrity self-presentation and on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

In the quarter-century since that extraordinary event — the essence of a Barbara Walters Interview — Lewinsky has demonstrated an inspiring power to live on her own terms and not on the assumptions of others. The achievement required rules to be broken, and has come with a price.

Barbara Walters knew what that was like.

THE RULEBREAKER : The Life and Times of Barbara Walters | By Susan Page | Simon & Schuster | 444 pp. | $30.99

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Barbara Walters forged a path for women in journalism, but not without paying a price

Tonya Mosley

The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters, by Susan Page

In 1976, Barbara Walters became the first woman to co-anchor a national news show on prime time television. She was only in that role for two years, but her arrival changed news media.

"She's such a consequential figure for journalists, not just for women journalists," biographer Susan Page says. "The path she cut is one that many of us have followed."

Page is the Washington bureau chief at USA Today and the author of The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. Though they never met, Page says speaking to hundreds of Walters' friends and colleagues and watching hours of her interview tapes gave her a sense of her subject.

Page describes Walters as a fearless journalist who didn't shy away from controversy or tough questions. She battled sexism throughout her career — especially from her first co-anchor, Harry Reasoner, who, Page says, scowled at Walters' presence and tracked how many words she spoke on-air compared to him.

Trailblazing journalist Barbara Walters has died at 93

After leaving the nightly news post, Walters became known for her long-form interviews. Her conversations, which blended news and entertainment, featured a wide range of subjects, including Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin, Richard Nixon, Monica Lewinsky, Michael Jackson and Charles Manson. In 1997, she created The View , a daily talk show with an all-women cast of co-hosts.

"One thing that I thought was interesting about Barbara Walters is that she thought all sorts of people were interesting and worth talking to," Page says. "She really expanded the world of interviews that [national] journalists were doing to include not just presidents, but also notorious murderers."

For Page, Walters' success feels personal: "It never occurred to me when I was looking at a career in journalism that I couldn't do big interviews with important people because Barbara Walters did. ... Even though I've been in print journalism, not TV journalism, I benefited from the battles that Barbara Walters fought."

Interview highlights

On her family life that drove her to work hard

Understanding the source of her drive was hard to understand and I think crucial. And I decided after doing all this reporting about her that, that there was a moment that ignited the drive in Barbara Walters, and that was when her mother called her and told her that her father had attempted suicide. Her mother didn't call an ambulance. ... [Barbara] called the ambulance. [Barbara] rode in the ambulance with her father to the hospital. And she realized almost in an instant that while she was going through her first divorce, she didn't really have a career that as of that moment, she was going to be responsible for supporting her father, who had just tried to commit suicide, her mother, who was perpetually unhappy, and her special needs sister. And that that was going to require her to get serious, to make some money and to sustain that. She always had the sense that it could all disappear in an instant.

On news co-host Harry Reasoner's hostility about working with Walters

He was so openly contemptuous of her on the air that the director stopped doing two shots. That is a shot where you could see Harry Reasoner watching Barbara Walters speak because he was always scowling. It was so bad that they got many letters from mostly women viewers complaining about how she was being treated. ... It was really an untenable situation and one that took a while to unravel, and it was one that unnerved Barbara Walters. It was the one time in her career when she thought perhaps she had made an error so great that she would not recover. She said that she felt not only like she was drowning, but that there were people trying to hold her head under the water.

On a turning point in her career, when she interviewed Fidel Castro

So this was in 1977. She was still officially the anchor [of ABC Evening News ], but things were not going well. And she landed this interview with Fidel Castro, who had been interviewed only infrequently by Western journalists. And ... she got in a boat and crossed the Bay of Pigs with him. He drove his jeep across the mountains with her sitting next to him, holding aloft his gun to keep water from splashing on. It was a great interview. A very tough interview. She asked him about freedom of the press, which didn't exist in Cuba. She pressed him on whether he was married. This was a question that he had refused to answer. ... So he finally gave up and answered it and said formally, no. So it was a great interview and it was a comeback interview for her. It both showed what she could do in an interview, and it made her feel more confident again.

On her interview with Richard Nixon when she asked him if he wished he burned the Watergate tapes

That was in a particularly difficult interview, because the only way the Nixon people agreed that she could do it was to do it live. There was no cutting out some extraneous matter to get that last question in, she had to be incredibly alert about controlling the interview so that she would have time to ask that question. And the other thing that we should know about that question is she always wanted to ask the question that everybody wanted to hear, even the toughest question possible, like would you have burned the tapes? She wanted to ask the one that people wanted to hear the answer to. That was one of [her] great gifts. And she figured out that by preparing for hours and hours and writing down proposed questions on small 3x5 cards and shuffling them and revising them, and finally having them typed on 5x7 cards to ask. She would let an interview go where it went. She didn't always follow the cards, but she always had a plan in mind for how she wanted to get the interview started. What she wanted to do in the middle and the thing that she wanted to do at the close to give it a real kick.

On her friendship with Donald Trump

They were transactional friends. She went to his wedding. He went to the celebration of her third marriage. He was often a guest on The View when The View started in 1997. He was then a real estate developer in New York. And if they were short a guest, they could call up Donald Trump and he would come over and be on the show or even do a cameo skit. ... And, in fact, one ABC executive told me, when Donald Trump got involved in politics, that there was a feeling, some discomfort, that she had given him a platform and a legitimacy that maybe he wouldn't have had otherwise.

On her preparation for her infamous Monica Lewinksy interview

Barbara Walters was working on asking the questions, but at the same time, Monica Lewinsky was working with her team on how to answer the questions. The question that gave the Monica Lewinsky team the most trouble was that question, "Do you still love him?" Because at the beginning of their practice sessions, she said yes. And then she said she couldn't say no because she did love him. And she loved him some of the time. And, they warned that that was not an effective answer to have. So you hear her, in this interview giving the answer they had worked out, which was no. But then in her follow up, she does acknowledge that sometimes she does still have warm feelings for him. On the Barbara Walters side, they worked a long time on what the closing question would be, because that's a powerful position in an interview like this, that last question. And they settled on, "What will you tell your children?"

On Gilda Radner's impression of her as "Baba Wawa," mocking the way she spoke

She was wounded when she heard this. For one thing, even though there was this exaggerated lisp that Gilda Radner used, nobody had any doubt who she was parodying. And, Barbara Walters had this speech anomaly. She called it a bastard Boston accent. Other people called it a lisp. Whatever it was she had tried, she'd gone to voice coaches early in her career to try to fix it, and it failed. So her feelings were hurt when the skit was done on Saturday Night Live . Now, it also made her famous. She came to terms with it, but I think she always found it kind of hurtful. ... When Gilda Radner died ... Barbara Walters wrote a sympathy note to her widower, Gene Wilder, expressing sympathy on her death, and signed it, "Baba Wawa."

On her reluctant retirement

She worked into her 80s. ... When she was in her 70s, she was working at a time when most women had been involuntarily retired. So she worked as long as they would keep her on the air. But as she started to sometimes miss a step, there was concern that she would embarrass herself or undermine some of the professional work she had done. ... The people at ABC convinced her it was time to retire. And then CNN came in with a secret offer to put her on the air at CNN, which she was considering when her friends came back and said, no, it's time. ... There was a grand finale on The View , where two dozen women prominent in journalism came and paid tribute to her. And on her last, big show on The View. And when she was backstage afterwards, one of them came up and said ... "What do you want to do in your retirement?" And Barbara said, "I want more time." Meaning I want more time on the air.

On if she was happy

I asked 100 people who knew her that question: Was she happy? And a few people said yes. Joy Behar of The View said "happy-ish," which is not a bad answer, but most people said while she was proud of what she had done and that she loved the money and the prominence that she had won, that she paid this huge price on the personal side — she had three failed marriages. She was estranged for a time from her only daughter. She never lost that feeling that she was always competing and could never stop and be content. So she had the most successful possible professional life, but I think she had kind of a sad, personal one.

Thea Chaloner and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

IMAGES

Review of Women’s Pages Book
Women's Review of Books Volume 26, Issue 6
Women's Review of Books Volume 26, Issue 5
Book Review: The Women’s Pages by Victoria Purman
Women's Review of Books Volume 26, Issue 4
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Book Review: The Women's Pages by Victoria Purman
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Victoria Purman is an Australian top ten and USA Today bestselling fiction author. Her most recent bestseller, The Land Girls, was published in April 2019.The Last of the Bonegilla Girls, a novel based on her mother's post-war migration to Australia, was published in 2018.Her previous novel The Three Miss Allens became a USA Today bestseller in April 2019.
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Victoria Purman is an Australian top ten and USA Today bestselling fiction author. Her most recent bestseller, The Land Girls, was published in April 2019.The Last of the Bonegilla Girls, a novel based on her mother's post-war migration to Australia, was published in 2018.Her previous novel The Three Miss Allens became a USA Today bestseller in April 2019.
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