Julia Cooke is the author of the books “Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am” and “The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba.” Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Smithsonian, Condé Nast Traveler and other outlets. Her latest work of nonfiction is “Starry and Restless.”
Q. Please tell readers about your new book.
“Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World” is a story about the intersecting lives and careers of a trio of staunchly independent writers and travelers who shaped the way Americans came to receive and understand news from the bigger globe in the 1930s-1950s. It is about their pathbreaking careers and idiosyncratic lives: even as they produced incredible reporting, they were friends, wives, and mothers, and, guided by their deep curiosity and ambition, they changed the game for literary journalism.
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Q. What was something that surprised you while doing your research?
I was floored to learn just how famous the three women at its center were in their day. Emily “Mickey” Hahn’s 1940s memoir of China sold more than half a million copies and made her a regular guest on Danny Kaye’s variety show; Rebecca West was on the cover of Time and President Truman called her “the world’s best reporter”; the buzz around one of the novels Martha Gellhorn published between assignments as a war reporter was that it was better than the one her exceedingly famous husband had just published, which had him grumbling in letters (to her mother, no less) about critics and their biases.
Unlike a lot of women’s history, which reclaims important stories of people who flew under the radar or hid in plain sight—like my last book about jet-age stewardesses—these women were absolutely, definitively visible.
Q. How did you handle the challenge of writing about three larger-than-life characters?
Honestly, by reading so much of their writing! Each of these women was wildly prolific. They wrote tons of books, tons of journalism, tons of letters, and for decades. Getting to know the selves they presented to the public—which shifted over the years—and also their private friendships, the way they wrote to their agents and husbands and mothers, it helped me understand their vulnerability and fallibility, as well as their more private strengths and self-conceptions.
Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?
Mavis Gallant’s “A Fairly Good Time” and “Varieties of Exile.” I love her writing about people in Europe in the interwar period. Her characters are always so strange and unexpected and the atmosphere is delectable.
Q. What are you reading now?
Two novels by nonfiction-writing friends, actually — I just finished the forthcoming “Turn Around Don’t Drown” by investigative journalist Nina Burleigh, which is funny and dark and propulsive and thoughtful, and am reading an in-progress thriller by the memoirist Meghan Flaherty.
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Q. Do you listen to audiobooks? If so, are there any titles or narrators you’d recommend?
As narrators go, I am partial to Andi Arndt, who narrated my last two books. She has a wild and wonderful personal connection to “Starry and Restless”: She is close friends with a former theater professor of hers, Tom Arthur, who is, in fact, the nephew of one of its protagonists, Mickey Hahn. I had interviewed Tom for the book, knowing none of this, and the kismet felt too good to be true.
Tom had given Andi one of Mickey’s bracelets years ago, and as she narrated the book, she held that bracelet in her hands. I love thinking about that. Otherwise, I really like audiobooks narrated by the author. I’ve been listening to Jamie Hood’s “Trauma Plot” lately and am so enjoying her voice and cadence, the added layer of intimacy and understanding.
Q. What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?
I’m a sucker for plot, but it works best for me when combined with atmosphere and a certain stylistic looseness. I don’t like books that are too tightly plotted or feel too aimed at a specific destination; I like language, memorable and human characters, unpredictability, and intelligent digression. Rebecca West’s “The Fountain Overflows” is among my all-time favorites, and among more recent books, I’ve loved Álvaro Erigue’s “You Dreamed of Empires,” Joy Williams’ “The Pelican Child,” Lily King’s “Heart the Lover.”
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
There were phases of writing it when I wrote just a single line in a day, but there were relatively few days over the span of three years that I wasn’t somehow working on it. I gave birth to three babies in a little less than two years while I was thinking about this book, working on the proposal and trying to sell it, and I worked on it in earnest while they were very young (the eldest is now approaching seven, and my twins are five).
The escapism of thinking about these women traveling and swashbuckling their way through the mid-20th century, in times with growing political parallels to our own—watching them insist on a having public life alongside the private, continuing to write and publish no matter what, escaping to the varied geographies from which they wrote—it kept me going.
Those single-line days are indelibly memorable to me.