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University of California Press

Becoming the Ex-Wife

The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott
by Marsha Gordon (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: Apr 2023
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780520391550
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 43 b/w illustrations
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About the Book

"Makes an excellent case for Parrott as an unjustly forgotten historical figure."—The New Yorker
"Remind[s] us of the brazenly talented women sidelined by convention."—New York Times
The riveting biography of Ursula Parrott—best-selling author, Hollywood screenwriter, and voice for the modern woman.  

Credited with popularizing the label "ex-wife" in 1929, Ursula Parrott wrote provocatively about divorcées, career women, single mothers, work-life balance, and a host of new challenges facing modern women. Her best sellers, Hollywood film deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law made her a household name. Part biography, part cultural history, Becoming the Ex-Wife establishes Parrott's rightful place in twentieth-century American culture, uncovering her neglected work and keen insights into American women's lives during a period of immense social change.
 
Although she was frequently dismissed as a "woman's writer," reading Parrott's writing today makes it clear that she was a trenchant philosopher of modernity—her work was prescient, anticipating issues not widely raised until decades after her decline into obscurity. With elegant wit and a deft command of the archive, Marsha Gordon tells a timely story about the life of a woman on the front lines of a culture war that is still raging today.

About the Author

Marsha Gordon is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, a former Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award. She is the author of numerous books and articles and codirector of several short documentaries.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 
A Note on Name Usage

Introduction: "Maxims in the Copybook of Modernism"
1 • The Limited Life of a Dorchester Girl 
2 • At Radcliffe: "A Pushy Lace-Curtain Irish Girl from Dorchester"
3 • First Husband, Lindesay Parrott: "Strange Moments of Tenderness and Pretty Constant Dislike"
4 • Modern Parenting
5 • Greenwich Village: The Path to Becoming a "Self-Sufficient, Independent, Successful Manager of Her Own Life"
6 • Hugh O’Connor: High Felicity on the "Road of No Rules"
7 • New Freedoms in the "Era of the One-Night Stand": The Ex-Wife Is Born
8 • Ursula Goes to Hollywood
9 • Second Husband, Charles Greenwood: "The Stupidest Thing I Ever Did in My Life"
10 • "Extravagant Hell"
11 • The Business of Being a Writer
12 • Third Husband, John Wildberg: The Faint Resemblance of Stability
13 • "The Monotony and Weariness of Living"
14 • Fourth Husband, Alfred Coster Schermerhorn: "Two Catastrophes Should Be Enough"
15 • Saving Private Bryan: The United States vs. Ursula Parrott
16 • Her "Breaks Went Bad"
17 • "Black Coffee, Scotch, and Excitement"
Afterword: Remembering a "Leftover Lady"

Acknowledgments 
Chronology
Notes
Published Writings of Ursula Parrott
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"As Marsha Gordon argues in her engaging new biography, Becoming the Ex-Wife, the novel 'offers a strong case for the protections of marriage and the dangers of being an unattached woman.' . . . In her biography, Gordon makes an excellent case for Parrott as an unjustly forgotten historical figure: a sociological flash point, a beneficiary of feminism and victim of patriarchy who got her enemies mixed up."
— The New Yorker
“Why did a once-transfixed reading public turn away, and why is Parrott so often now eliminated from a pantheon of popular urban “working girl” writers that includes Helen Gurley Brown, Candace Bushnell, Nora Ephron, Dorothy Parker and, perhaps most comparably, Jacqueline Susann? . . . A reissue of Ursula Parrott’s racy novel “Ex-Wife,” and a new biography of its author, remind us of the brazenly talented women sidelined by convention. . . . [Gordon] surfaces plenty of colorful period detail: passport photos of everyone looking mussed and truculent in that Jazz Age way; correspondence from exasperated agents, editors and lovers; even an adorable 'mapback' version marked with key locations in 'Ex-Wife.'”
— The New York Times
“[V]igorous, entertaining, and well-researched . . . [Gordon’s] biography salvages and reconstructs Parrott’s many remains, rescuing an important American voice and cultural figure from near oblivion. . . . The result is a clear, full, yet unlabored portrait of Parrott, written in agile, accessible prose. Gordon’s tone is warm but unsentimental (as was Parrott herself), occasionally displaying a subtle and welcome bit of cheek or zing befitting her subject."
— Los Angeles Review of Books
“[R]igorous . . . an enlightening companion to the novel"
— The Baffler
"Marsha Gordon’s Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott is a thoroughly researched, sympathetic, but not uncritical portrait of a woman who achieved exceptional commercial success as a writer and who was, for a while, 'the most famous divorcée in the United States.'"
— The New York Review of Books
"Gordon’s biography . . . is good on Parrott’s significance for an understanding of American life – and women’s lives, in particular – in the interwar period, with its glancing insights into alcoholism and abortion. Keenly supported by examples from the writings, Gordon also shows how her subject’s life was often too strange for any kind of fiction."
 
— Times Literary Supplement
"Parrott led a scandalous, glamorous, sometimes lonely life in the public eye, and Gordon, professor and director of the film studies program at North Carolina State University, has done the world a great service by bringing her back into the spotlight."
— Washington City Paper
"In Becoming the Ex-Wife, Marsha Gordon sheds welcome light on this remarkable and troubled writer, who knew too well how hard it was to be a modern woman who wanted sexual freedom and a career of her own choosing. In this well-researched and fascinating biography, Parrott emerges as a star who should be remembered alongside Jazz Age icons like Dorothy Parker and the Fitzgeralds.”
— Newcity Lit
"[O]ffers an in-depth look at Parrott’s complicated and sometimes scandalous life."
— Walter Magazine
"Parrott is forgotten and Faulkner is famous. This is so much more than a matter of quality, which is why we need biography. . . . Marsha Gordon makes a compelling case for Parrott’s artistry and continuing relevance. . . . Ms. Gordon does something else that is quite shrewd: She has a concluding chapter, after Parrott has died, which concentrates on her subject’s literary legacy. The story of Parrott’s life is over, but her writing lives on, even if we don’t yet know it."
 
— The New York Sun
"Marsha Gordon’s new biography of the best-selling author Ursula Parrott, Becoming the Ex-Wife, rescues this important author’s life from obscurity, . . . Both Gordon’s biography, and the 2023 publication of a McNally Edition of Parrott’s 1929 novel Ex-Wife have garnered a lot of well-deserved attention. . . . In Becoming the Ex-Wife, it is clear Gordon mined all the archives and saved what she could of this fascinating and accomplished woman’s life from obscurity.”
— Biblio
"There are certain books which catch you completely by surprise. Marsha Gordon’s Becoming the Ex-Wife is one of those books. . . . Gordon does an excellent job of telling Parrott’s story because she balances her admiration with the right amount of critical eye. . . . If you can accept that a human can be both good and bad in various measures while finding their life story interesting, then you will enjoy this book immensely.”
— History Nerds United
"Gordon’s biography . . . is good on Parrott’s significance for an understanding of American life – and women’s lives, in particular – in the interwar period, with its glancing insights into alcoholism and abortion. Keenly supported by examples from the writings, Gordon also shows how her subject’s life was often too strange for any kind of fiction."
— Times Literary Supplement

"Ursula Parrott longed to be a hard-boiled city reporter, but when the sexism of the newspaper industry thwarted her ambitions, she found her voice—and made her fortune—by turning to fiction. She scandalized readers with her nuanced, world-weary stories of women who discovered that the sexual revolution of the Jazz Age wasn't always the great gift to women that it was cracked up to be. With her sharp wit, rebellious ambition, and tragic love life, Ursula Parrott deserves to be celebrated alongside greats like Dawn Powell and Dorothy Parker. A pleasure to read."—Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age

"An incisive portrait of a thoroughly modern woman careening through a meteoric literary career and a reckless personal life, from the Jazz Age to the postwar era. Ursula Parrott's massive output of popular fiction, says Marsha Gordon, 'pulled back the curtain on women's debased circumstances in a permissive age'—which is precisely what Gordon does here, to devastating effect, with Parrott herself."—Thomas Schatz, author of The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era

"Ursula Parrott finally gets her due in Gordon's revelatory book. Drawing upon exhaustive archival research, Gordon tells the fascinating story of the best-selling novelist whose tumultuous personal life eventually eclipsed her literary career. But Gordon does more than shine a light on an unjustly forgotten writer—she asks us to consider why she was forgotten. In her work and her life, Parrott explored the paradoxes of modernity for American women—what she saw as the illusory nature of equality for 'leftover ladies,' divorcees or unmarried career women whose lives did not unfold according to the conventional marriage plot. Parrott's trenchant observations arose from her own life but were ahead of her time. Thanks to Gordon's masterful biography, her moment has finally arrived."—Cara Robertson, author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden

"Becoming the Ex-Wife is just the kind of book I love to read—remarkably well researched and entertaining. Gordon deftly shows why Ursula Parrott more than deserves a place on the shelf."—Cari Beauchamp, author of Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood

"In her sparklingly clear and vital new biography, Gordon recovers the story of a singular writer and unhappy woman, who shot to fame with a novel called Ex-Wife and carried that tag around with her for the rest of her life. Although she warns that it is not 'an inspirational feminist story,' Gordon's colorful account is salutary all the same, exposing the ways in which even the most successful women's writing can be dismissed and forgotten, and restoring Ursula Parrott to our attention with sympathy and warmth."—Joanna Scutts, author of Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism

"What a fascinating history Gordon charts! Long before Betty Friedan and Helen Gurley Brown, Ursula Parrott voiced the entanglements of modern femininity for educated white women of her generation. Gordon's account of Parrott's life and work—at once typical and utterly astonishing—is smart, witty, and engaging."—Shelley Stamp, author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood

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