21. Marjorie Hillis — Live Alone and Like It with Joanna Scutts

AMY HELMES (CO-HOST): Hi, everybody! So, as you know, we are recording this podcast in our homes during a pandemic, and in this episode, it just happens to be three moms with kids of various ages in the house while we are trying to record the podcast.

KIM ASKEW (CO-HOST): You may hear small outbursts from a child in the background.

AMY: That’s motherhood.

KIM: Yep.

AMY: With that said … Valentine’s Day. Never has a single holiday had so many wide-ranging emotions associated with it. 

KIM: Yes. Glee, dread, weird pressure and anxiety — all of those things come to mind for me, you’re right. 

AMY: There’s something a little bit off about a holiday that so obviously makes people who aren’t in a relationship feel bad. I’ve had a lot of lonely Valentine’s Days in my past, Kim. I remember one year when I opted not to wallow and instead got crafty and made all of my single friends beautiful and elaborate Valentine’s cards. And I think you got one that year.

KIM: I still have it, in fact, and it’s one of my favorite Valentines, for sure! So welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off some of history’s long-forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes… and okay, listeners, as you might have guessed, we’re not selecting some long-lost romantic novel in honor of Valentine’s Day this week.

KIM: No, we wouldn’t do that to you. Instead, we’re going in the completely opposite direction. We’re going to focus on Marjorie Hillis, a writer whose book, Live Alone and Like It (a self-help guide celebrating the single life) was among the top-10 bestselling nonfiction books of 1936. 

AMY: She gave non-married women of all ages (Live-Aloners, she called them) the green light to view themselves not as spinsters but rather, as chic and sensational singletons who could waltz through life with a freedom to do exactly as they pleased — and to really savor it. Her pithy tome (along with its subsequent sequels) is charming, witty and chock-full of advice that, honestly, still seems really solid even today, no matter what your relationship status is.

KIM: It’s a delightful read, and we’re thrilled to be discussing it today, especially since we have the ultimate authority on Marjorie Hillis with us today to chat. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

AMY: So we are so very lucky to have literary critic and cultural historian Joanna Scutts here with us today. She graduated from King’s College, Cambridge, and went on to earn her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia. She helped curate exhibits and events for the New York Historical Society's Center for Women’s History, and she’s written for The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time and The Washington Post, to name just a few. Her 2017 book The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It was published to rave reviews and named one of 2018’s feminist must-reads by the UK’s Red magazine, and it’s her book that introduced me to Marjorie Hillis. Joanna, thanks so much for joining us!

JOANNA SCUTTS (GUEST): Thank you for having me! I’m so excited to talk about this.

KIM: So, Joanna in your book, you talk about how you first discovered Hillis, and it’s a really special anecdote and we were hoping you would share the story with our listeners.

JOANNA: Sure! I often say that it was a gift that came into my life. It was at a time in my life when I was kind of flailing. My father had died recently; I was single; I was almost thirty and finishing up a pHd program and had no idea what was coming next. One of my oldest friends when I was home in London gave me a copy of this book, which I read and devoured having kind of gotten over the title, because the title is kind of a bit of a punch in the gut in some ways: Live Alone and Like It? It’s like, “Oh, this is my future.” But it was so funny, and my friend sort of insisted, she was like, “Read on and listen!” So she’s reading me passages from it, and we started reading them to each other, and then I devoured the whole book and really was just fascinated by this voice. Really captivated by her sense of humor and I was just like, “Marjorie Hillis…” I had no idea who this person was, and I Googled and there was no Wikipedia page — there was not a hint of who this person was. Eventually I found somebody’s blog that had talked about it, and there’s kind of a little bit of a cult of Marjorie Hillis out there, so I tapped into that, but I sort of knew there was a story here, and I wanted to figure out what it was. 

AMY: I love the fact that not only did you write a biography of Hillis but you actually kind of used her as a sort of fulcrum to tell a larger story, about the history of women in the 20th century. What do you think makes her the perfect figure with which to tell that larger story?

JOANNA: That’s such a great question, and there’s sort of a “meta” answer and a more substantive answer. The meta answer is what I was saying about how completely she had disappeared. As I started to research, I realized how hugely famous she had been for this very brief moment and how enormously successful this book was. And that kind of interplay of fame and disappearance is something that is very common with women writers, historically, who can be famous and successful but don’t have the sort of establishment...don’t get into the “academy,” don’t get canonized in the way that men do more easily. And I was interested in that moment of fame and disappearance as a story of women’s literature even as relatively recently as the 1930s. But then she also kind of has a trajectory, a life story that we’ll talk about. The journey that she took is a very typical one in some ways. Her family was from the Midwest and sort of moved to New York at the turn of the 20th century when the city became this sort of huge metropolis. And she was a minister’s daughter and she went to work for a magazine and became this journalist/editor, really embraced her working life, her professional life, her professional identity… came of age as women were given the vote and so kind of became successful and independent in a way that hadn’t been possible for previous generations. She basically became famous by writing a self-help book about how to be more like her. (Takes a certain level of confidence and success!) Obviously, hers was a very privileged story. She was not fabulously wealthy by the standards of the time, but certainly wealthy and secure, and she had opportunities that weren’t available to poorer women; certainly weren’t available to black women, women of color at the time. So her life story is a particularly privileged white feminist story, but I think the way that she reached this much wider audience makes for a really interesting bigger story. 

KIM: Can you tell us a little bit about the origin of the title of your book, “The Extra Woman” and where that springs from? 

JOANNA: Well, it’s her subtitle. So the book, Live Alone and Like It is a “Guide for the Extra Woman.” And in a way, that extraordinarily blunt phrasing (kind of a two-punch title) but it was quite a common phrase. In the book she talks about it sort of as a “social extra”  — being sort of undesirable at dinner parties because you mess up the numbers. But also there’s a really important sense of how you sort of were legally “extra” at the time, and for many, many years, historically, the status of women in the American legal system was that you were “covered,” (the legal term is coverture — you were covered by your husband or your father) and women who were unmarried were sort of outside that system in a way that the system didn’t really have a place for. Being “extra,” being outside of the expected kind of “two by two” formation of culture and identity. She was really speaking, as she often does, of this much larger legal problem but approaching it in a very light way.   

AMY: It’s funny, too, because now, that term “extra” is almost a good thing: “She’s so extra!!” But yes, the original version of it? A little insulting.

KIM: Yeah, it’s worse than being a third wheel.

JOANNA: But it’s true, I think you’re always both. You were surplus to requirements but you also had the possibility to be bigger than life, and I think there was always some potential in there.

AMY: I think we need to give listeners a taste right off the bat of what Hillis’s book — Live Alone and Like It  — is like. 

KIM: Right. So in a nutshell, it’s an advice book, and it’s organized into 12 chapters that address key topics centered around living your best solo life, be it advice on how to set up the swankiest apartment, how to be a single party hostess and witty conversationalist, how to dress chicly, and even tips on cooking for one. It’s all about cultivating a cultured, pampered existence for yourself. 

AMY: And yeah, she even delves into the “pleasures of the single bed” (Oooh!) and takes a no-judgment attitude about sex and having affairs, which was pretty daring for her era. But I think the best way to illustrate the book is to just go ahead and share some of her fabulous advice, so to that end, Joanna, Kim and I are going to share some of our favorite nuggets of wisdom from the book. Joanna, would you care to start us off?

JOANNA: Okay! Well, one of my favorite sections is the chapter which is composed as a kind of Q&A about etiquette. There’s all kinds of arcane rules about where you’re supposed to sit at a dinner party if you have single women there. They were really apparently a big problem for dinner parties! But one of the questions was “Is it permissible for a youngish un-chaperoned woman living alone to wear pajamas when a gentleman calls?” It really depends, Marjorie says, assuming she knows one pajama from another, it’s entirely permissible. And then she goes on to give you the different kinds of pajamas. Sleeping pajamas — those are not acceptable to receive anyone; beach pajamas (which I’m still not quite sure what those are); lounging pajamas; and then hosting pajamas. I fell in love with this idea of “hostess pajamas” — I think there’s a great untapped market there.

KIM: I mean, we need this for Zoom, if someone hasn’t already written it, but which pajamas you can wear for Zoom depending on who you’re talking to on Zoom. I think that would apply. And I think we do need different types of pajamas!

JOANNA: Absolutely.

AMY: Kind of piggy-backing off that question was one of my favorite tips: Once you have a gentleman caller at your house and it’s time for him to go, how do you tactfully get him to vamoose, as they say? I will just read the little snippet that she says: If you want him to come again soon, a little tact is usually wiser. You might begin with “Let me get you a glass of water.” (Nothing stronger). “It’s hours since you had that highball.” This will get you both up and give you the advantage. You can keep on standing, which will eventually wear down any man if you don’t drop first. There is little danger that you will have to call the elevator man or open the window and scream. It may happen, but don’t get your hopes up. You have to be pretty fascinating.

KIM: This is like the opposite of “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” How do I get him out?! That’s hilarious.

AMY: Kim would you care to share one?

KIM: Yes, I have so many, but I’m going to go to the beginning of the book, Chapter One: Solitary Refinement, and it’s mentioned a little in the preface, too, but I’ll skip straight to this: You have got to decide what kind of life you want and then make it for yourself. And it sounds really simple. It could be the premise of, I guess, many self-help books, but honestly, I think if you stop to think about it, it’s about being active rather than reactive, and if you can take that little first step, then you’re sort of on your way to figuring it out. Says someone who lived alone, off and on, for two decades and finally figured it out. I wish I had had her as a guru.

JOANNA: I’m so glad you quoted that line, Kim. It’s one of my favorite lines in the book and I just love that it’s true. It’s the simplicity that kind of stops you in your tracks. She goes on to say that having traditional marriage and kids is often a way of kind of avoiding that question and the reason why it’s that much more urgent for people who live alone is that, you know, you’ve got nothing standing in the way of you and that decision. So it’s a really proactive stance that runs through the book.

AMY: Okay, Joanna, any other fascinating tidbit that you can share?

JOANNA: Well, I think we were going to talk about New York a little bit later, so I don’t want to go too much into it, but I love the pages when she’s talking about exploring your city, essentially. It’s kind of this whole litany of “Have you been here?” “Have you been to this?” “Have you hunted up the little French restaurants that are the cheap, out of the way ones?” “Have you been to the Yiddish theater?” It’s both a kind of wonderful snapshot of New York in the Thirties, but also, what’s interesting about that section is this is the part that really confused me, because the first version of the book that I read was the translation of this American book into a British context. So in the British version of the book, instead of going to Broadway, it’s the West End, instead of Central Park, it’s Regent’s Park. And so everything about it is tailored to London. I love that there’s this kind of vision of a really active, engaged life in the city, but it kind of almost doesn’t matter which city because the same thing is there wherever you are.

AMY: Which brings me to my next bit of advice that I loved, about travel. She says: A reasonable amount of travel ought of course to be listed among the necessities. And an unreasonable amount if you can manage it. (And this is my favorite part:) If you don’t agree with this, there is something wrong with you and you should see a doctor or a minister or at least read a few travel books and folders. I mean, hilarious!

KIM: I have one that, I would be surprised if Amy didn’t pick this one, too, because I could hear her saying this: Anyone who pities herself for more than a month on end is a weak sister and likely to become a public nuisance besides. Basically, like, yeah, you can feel sorry for yourself for a little bit, and I think she even goes into the details of having a good cry in your bed and everything, but wallowing in the pity is not going to get you any closer to living the life that you want. So kind of, “Chin up, now. It’s time to sort of get with it and start living.”

AMY: Also, she strongly urges you to maintain a sense of fabulousness. One of my favorite recommendations is to make sure you put a mirror at the foot of your bed so that when you wake up in the morning, you can be sure to look at yourself and make sure that you’re not falling apart.

KIM: I won’t be taking that advice!

AMY: You know, it’s a reminder to not let yourself go if you have to look at yourself in the mirror every morning.

KIM: Good advice, but no thanks.

JOANNA: So the mirror at the foot of the bed is also, I always thought, a bit of the minister’s daughter coming through. That kind of sense of like keeping yourself honest and that sense that you’re always accountable to you god or to your mirror. It’s frivolous, but this is one of those moments where I feel like the frivolity slips and there is a serious, quite tough-mind, Protestant advice here about “You’ve got to keep your standards up even if no one’s watching.”

KIM: I love that insight into it. That actually makes a lot of sense. 

JOANNA: So one thing that I’ve always liked is about the importance of friends, because one of the things that she emphasizes over and over again is that being a successful Live-Aloner is not about being a hermit. And actually, the social life that you build is vital to your happiness. She says most people’s minds are like ponds and need a constantly fresh stream of ideas in order not to get stagnant. So she has this idea that you should always be feeding your mind and you should be keeping up on books and theater and culture and also seeing your friends. Your friends are a really key part of keeping that active. She has another line about being something, doing something in the world. One that gets quoted a lot, but it’s: Be a communist, be a stamp-collector or a ladies’ aid worker if you must, but for heaven’s sake, be something. It reads very differently in 1936 than it would have in 1946, but the idea that you just go out and be a part of your community, part of your world, socially, politically. Just because you’re alone it doesn’t mean that you have to stay inside.

KIM: In some ways it feels like, “Yeah, of course,” but I feel like so many people, especially when you’re first starting out on your own, really don’t get that. I know that I didn’t, and it did take me a while to figure that out for myself. To really stop waiting for an event or a person to sort of direct my life and to take it upon myself to do all those things. So I think if women read something like this as they were starting out, especially particular types of women (maybe like me), they might have had an easier time of it from the beginning and enjoyed themselves a little bit more.  

AMY: She also talks about, you don’t want to venture into “old lady” territory. Or, you know, you don’t want to be the person at the dinner party who is a bore, because you’re not going to get invited back, and that’s a lot of the reason why she kept emphasizing to make sure you’re up on current events; make sure you have a selection of recent books that you can talk about, movies that you’ve been to, plays that you’ve been to.

KIM: The woman who treats herself like an aristocrat seems aristocratic to other people, and the woman who is sloppy at home inevitably slips sometimes in public. It sort of reminded me of that idea of dressing for the job you want to have, and I think a lot of her advice is sort of geared toward presenting yourself, but in doing so, you begin to turn inward and look at what you really want, and I love that aspect of what she’s saying.

AMY: And she’s so funny, too! Every bit of this advice, I don’t think we’re doing justice to the fact that she’s hilarious. But at the same time, she kind of gets really “tough-love” with you, too. I was reminded of the “Snap Out of It!” moment in “Moonstruck,” for anyone actually old enough to get that reference. She cautions readers against feeling sorry for themselves, writing: “...you can figure out for yourself just what you’ll become with a mental picture of ‘Poor little me, all alone in a big bad world.’ Not only will you soon actually be all alone; you will also be an outstanding example of the super-bore.”

KIM: I love that. So Joanna, when this book was published in 1936, there was really an appetite for this sort of thing. Can you tell us a little more about that?

JOANNA: Sure. Our picture of the Depression obviously is that nobody really had anything, and yet there is a lot of up and down obviously in those years. In 1936, the Depression has been dragging on for most of the decade. There was a real sense that people were on their own to kind of make their way. There’s a huge boom in self-help books in the middle of the 1930s. How to Win Friends and Influence People is also 1936. People were very eager for stories about how you could succeed and how, if you just change your mindset, you can overcome circumstance. So this is also the time when Norman Vincent Peale, who goes on to become kind of the guru of positive thinking, he’s getting his start around this time. And there’s a lot of other people. Napoleon Hill, who had a big bestseller called Think and Grow Rich. There’s just kind of this real sense of like, you can mentally overcome your circumstances and succeed. Marjorie Hillis is one of the few people who was specifically writing to women and writing in a way that isn’t about how to find a husband or how to be a thrifty housewife or how to push your family’s budget, but she’s there saying, “figure out what you want, go after it. Move, leave your family. Sell your old house and take a chic apartment in the city.” All of these things that are just very much about making your own way. She kind of capitalizes on that hunger for self-help, but sort of does it with this interesting feminist twist.

AMY: So Hillis was in her 40s when this book came out, and it might be surprising, especially for that era, to think of a woman her age writing a book about how to epitomize fabulousness, basically. But she also had a seemingly glamorous job, I think, that no doubt gave her really a specific insight for this task. 

JOANNA: Yes! Absolutely! She had been at Vogue magazine at this point for more than 20 years. She worked her way up. She was an editor. When she got started, she worked with Dorothy Parker briefly when she was at Vogue writing underwear captions. Brevity is the soul of lingerie, famously. Dorothy Parker, years later, talked about Vogue at that time and said actually back then it wasn’t a very glamorous place; it was kind of dowdy, that these women were very nice and very genteel, kind of white-glove ladies. It was over across the hall at Vanity Fair where they were much more dashing and glamorous. But over the years, Vogue did get more racy and more glamorous, and Marjorie became good friends with the editor in chief, Edna Woolman Chase, who was there for almost 40 years. And her autobiography is an interesting ride as well, but she loved her work and even when she was wealthy and when she had a family, she didn’t give it up. Marjorie was very much the same. She loved her work, and so they were sort of like-minded women. Marjorie described herself as very plain. That she was dowdy and she never had boyfriends, she never had much interest from men when she was young, but she knew how to dress, because Vogue taught you that. It taught you how to make the best of what you have and how to be confident, and she really thought of fashion as what we were saying earlier, it was really a tool for women to present themselves to the world. She has a great line about It takes a genius to make an impression in rundown heels and an unbecoming hat. She thought women should study it as a manual. As kind of, “Okay, I have to learn what goes with what,” and if you learn that, you can dress better and then you can essentially put your best foot forward. But she really didn’t think it was just something for beautiful women or young women or rich women. It was something that everyone sort of had a right and a duty to embrace.

AMY: Although Live Alone and Like It was written for women everywhere, a lot of the advice seems particularly suited to city girls, and it feels like this book is a real love letter to New York. Now, Joanna, as someone who now calls New York home, I can imagine that’s something you appreciate.

JOANNA: Absolutely. So I’m from London originally and I’ve lived in New York now for 20 years soon, so it really does speak to me as a city girl and I think that’s right, Marjorie does essentially say that part of the challenge of being single is escaping the judgment and the well-meaning help and advice of family and friends and so a large part of it is about getting to somewhere you can reinvent yourself, and of course historically, traditionally, that’s been cities. Marjorie loved New York. She wrote a book about New York, a guide book to the city, in 1939, and we actually had a friend read a passage from that at my wedding, which was in a park on the edge of the East River. She talks about the beauty of the rivers kind of wrapping around Manhattan. It’s just a wonderful, simple evocation of what it means to be at home in New York. She had talked about being in a New York apartment and she says, you can’t be lonely if you’re surrounded by all these other lives. There’s “Nowhere else, except for perhaps on a mountaintop can one feel so securely snug and remote, so sure of being able to live one’s life as one wants to, as in a New York apartment, where you never see your neighbor and choose your friends because you like them and not because they live around the corner. That always kind of struck me as a fantasy, but it’s a very powerful, enduring one, for sure. 

KIM: And even that apartment building that she moved to, there’s something just so “of the moment,” and modern. It felt like she was at the beginning of some exciting time and right in the middle of it. There’s one whole chapter in the book devoted to budgeting and finances, and Hillis cleverly titles it “You’d Better Skip This One.” (Which of course makes you want to read it.) So much of the book is about finding life’s little luxuries, but this book was written during the Great Depression as we talked about. So how did Hillis manage to square that?

JOANNA: Well, the simplest answer is that she was rich, but the serious answer is that she, I think, recognized that self-help has a lot to do with inspiration and also aspiration, so she was really aware that part of what people were looking for was something to kind of inspire them to greatness and to more than they had. Her second book, which was all about budgeting, is called Orchids on Your Budget. She’d initially called it An Orchid on Your Budget. (An orchid. A single orchid). And then she ran it by her colleagues at Vogue and they thought that that was stingy. So it became Orchids, which I love. And she does say in that book, she says explicitly that this isn’t advice for people who are struggling to survive, fairly obviously. She says it’s about people who are able to make the choice between butter on their bread; it’s not for people who are struggling to get the bread. She makes that distinction fairly self-consciously, but of course, it’s still a very privileged kind of book. But that didn’t seem to get in the way of its popularity.

KIM: And while you might think a lot of her advice would be maybe a little dated almost 100 years later, it really isn’t! You know, there are a few things …. She mentions having servants to wait on you … something most of us today DON’T have… those sections can get a bit cringey at times.

AMY: And yeah, tastes have literally changed a bit in terms of, let’s say, the chapter on cooking. I probably won’t be serving my guests noodles mixed with chicken livers and tomato sauce which was one of her recommendations. But I really loved her advice about making a habit of planning your social life out a week in advance, so that way when the weekend rolls around, you already have a ton of engagements lined up -- you’re not sitting at home twiddling your thumbs. That’s solid advice, I think!

KIM: Yeah, definitely, and I loved the chapter on serving cocktails and what to stock your liquor cabinet with — you’d still today be considered extremely cool if you followed her guidance on that today. 

JOANNA: Yeah, I mean certainly the cocktail thing is sort of: learn the classics and don’t try to improve on them. She’s very strict about that. Yeah, and I think she has a great many relevant things to say about not only pajamas but other forms of bedwear. She really… there’s a whole wardrobe out there: bed jackets she’s very keen on, so you can have breakfast in bed.

AMY: And she also says dress for bed as if you’re not going to bed alone, which I love.

JOANNA: Yes, she has a great deal of fun with the sort of prurient assumptions around single women and even though from her own life, from what I was able to glean, she clearly wasn’t especially scandalous in her own life, but she definitely understood that single women (especially financially independent women) were a scandal in some sense, and so she sort of leans into that very much with all the advice on glamorous negligees. It was clearly a kind of titillating glimpse behind the curtain of what the single lady in her apartment is doing.

AMY: And I think she said I can’t tell you whether or not to have an affair, but if you are going to have one, wait until you’re 30. That was her advice also.

JOANNA: Yes, I like that advice. She just says, “There’s just too much drama before that, but by the time you’re 30, you know what you want. You’re not going to put up with nonsense. Your family’s kind of given up on you anyway, so you’re fine.” There’s something to that! I do also think that her advice about material objects is really… i really have sort of taken that to heart since reading all of this. She genuinely believed that beautiful surroundings, beautiful clothes do have a real effect on your life and how you feel. That line about if you don’t look your best how hard it is to come across well. And also it’s very hard to be happy in an apartment surrounded by all sorts of crap that you hate. It’s about spending time and attention and daring to sort of choose the things you love.

AMY: Definitely the precursor to Marie Kondo: Find what sparks joy. So at the end of every chapter, Hillis includes these “case studies” of various women who serve as examples of either what to do or what not to do… Honestly, they were my favorite parts of the book, because she’s so dramatic and funny in telling their stories — often cautionary tales and sometimes horror stories. Now I presumed they were fictitious, but it seems from reading your book, that she really did base some of these on people she knew.

JOANNA: Yes. So they’re often sort of too well-disguised at this distance to really figure that out, but certainly there are moments where she got a little sloppy and she didn’t really disguise them enough and people recognized themselves. I think especially in the second book about budgeting. People were like, “Umm… is that me?” In Live Alone she has one which is very recognizable which is a “Miss. W.” who stands on her head at parties. Which was a reference, clearly, to this very famous interior designer Elsie de Wolfe, who was a kind of scandalous figure in various ways. She was an out lesbian; she was a big enthusiast of yoga when it was brand new, and this was her party trick, was to stand on her head. So that’s one where clearly everybody knew who she was talking about. But for the most part, I think her mix of known people and maybe there are amalgamations, but they are, I think, yeah, you’re right — very lively and really do make the case that there’s this army of women out there who are desperate for this kind of advice and stumble upon it in some way, but there’s an untapped market that she’s identified.

KIM: So, can you tell us about how this book was received when it came out? I know it was marketed in a rather unusual way?

JOANNA: Yes. This was so fascinating to look at. There was a kind of snapshot in my research about the opportunities for book marketing, which turned on the fact that every town of any size had several department stores and several newspapers. All the newspapers had women’s pages and columns to fill, and all these department stores had windows to fill. Again, Depression Era, they’re open to anything that’s going to bring people in the door. So the publisher's archive has all these amazing marketing plans that were incredibly detailed that they had their salesmen go around to these department stores with a list of quotations from the book and a list of products that they could tie in. So you had your hostessing pajamas, your bed jackets, your negligees, your cocktail shakers and all of your kind of small furniture that was appropriate for your city apartment. I love to imagine these traveling salesmen kind of going to the head of these department stores saying, “This is your new client. The housewives who were your existing client base are all pinching their pennies, but apparently there’s these young women out there who have jobs and don’t have families and they want to be glamorous. So this is what you need to put in the window.” There’s a great window display I found from San Francisco with a quote from the book about the importance of pampering yourself and there’s a mannequin in a negligee and [a sign reading] “negligees, fourth floor!” So there was this big campaign that took the book out of the realm of humor or self-help and sort of took it out of bookstores and put it in department stores.

AMY: Such a brilliant way to tie that in and I’m sure it really made her sales go through the roof, doing it that way.

JOANNA: Yeah, and she was game for all of that. So she was going around and did all kinds of public appearances and book signings and things. So it was clearly a big cultural phenomenon as well as just another book.

AMY: And speaking of “cultural phenomenon,” in your book you mention President Franklin Roosevelt at one point was seen reading this book! Was that just an apocryphal anecdote, or did that really happen?

JOANNA: There’s a photograph of him on his yacht reading this book! Probably maybe it was Eleanor’s copy of the book…

AMY: Well, that just speaks to the fact that it’s very very entertaining; it’s very funny. So I could see him getting into even though it’s written for women. I can see him getting a chuckle out of it.

JOANNA: Absolutely.

AMY: I wish, like Kim said, that I had known about this book when I was a “live-aloner” in my 20s. She seems like the ultimate cheerleader and saleswoman for the single life. For example, she notes some of the benefits here of being single:

You don’t have to turn out your light when you read, because somebody else wants to sleep. You don’t have to have the light on when you want to sleep, because somebody else wants to read. You don’t have to get up in the night to fix somebody else’s hot water bottle, or lie awake listening to snores, or be vivacious when you’re tired, or cheerful when you’re blue, or sympathetic when you’re bored. You probably have your bathroom all to yourself, too, which is unquestionably one of Life’s Greatest Blessings. You don’t have to wait till someone finishes shaving, when you are all set for a cold-cream session. You have no one complaining about your pet bottles, no one to drop wet towels on the floor, no one occupying the bathtub when you have just time to take a shower. From dusk until dawn, you can do exactly as you please, which, after all, is a pretty good allotment in this world where a lot of conforming is expected of everyone.

So apologies in advance to my husband, whom I adore, but this sounds pretty incredible after 11 months of being confined to the house with my entire family for a pandemic. I am so jealous after hearing that passage and I could not agree more.

KIM: She makes it sound really enviable. That’s all I’m gonna say.

AMY: And yet, in 1939, just a few years after finding major success with Live Alone & Like It, Hillis drops a major bombshell on her fans. Joanna, would you care to explain that for us?

JOANNA: “Live-Aloner No More!!!” This was an actual headline. She got married! I know! There were headlines all over about how she was betraying her readers. She had to take her phone off the hook. But yes, she announced in the summer of 1939 that she was getting married to a widower named Thomas Roulston who owned a big New York grocery chain. So they married when she was 50. She went from being well-off and comfortable to being rich-rich. So she moves from her independent single woman’s apartment to a huge house in Brooklyn on Prospect Park, and she settles into kind of a life of a rich man’s wife, and she seems to have enjoyed it. They were married for a decade and he was older than she was. He was in his mid-60s, and sadly after 10 years, he had a heart attack and he passed away and she was faced with living alone again! She actually writes a very moving book about what it’s like to pick up and it’s called You Can Start All Over and it kind of really speaks to people who’ve been divorced and widowed. She packed up this big mansion and she moved back to New York. She moved, I think to the Upper East side. She was back in the city.

KIM: When you were talking about her meeting her future husband and then getting all that press, it sounds like a Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy movie… I could absolutely picture that, and you could see the headlines rolling up on the screen. That was great. How many sequels did she end up writing?

JOANNA: Before she was married, she wrote four books. Live Alone and Like It and then there was the budgeting book, a cookbook which she co-wrote with a colleague at Vogue which is terrifying! Oh my goodness, there’s so much potted crab meat and canned everything, it’s really quite a journey! It’s very fun, but it is really something. And then she wrote the New York guidebook to tie in with the World’s Fair which was 1939, and a book of poetry about female friends in New York. And then after she was widowed she wrote this one about picking up and carrying on and then in the mid-Sixties, she wrote a sort of light-hearted kind of reiteration about growing older glamorously and it was sort of a lighthearted capstone book, but still, she was playing the same tune right to the end.

KIM: She just sounds great. She sounds like someone really fun to spend time with. 

AMY: I kept thinking of Auntie Mame when I was thinking of Marjorie Hillis. This idea of just, “I want to live, live, live!” You know? She wants to live life to its fullest and be utterly glamorous and take advantage of everything the world has to offer. That fictional character kept coming to mind for me, so I loved that you introduce that in your book. 

KIM: One of the other tidbits from your book, Joanna, that I loved is the fact that Hillis dabbled briefly in playwriting. She wrote a three-act comedy called Jane’s Business, which is the plot of Jane Eyre set in a modern office setting. As if I didn’t already love her! I want to read that play! It Sounds great!

JOANNA: Oh, I know. I wish I had been able to track it down. That was like a little tiny notice in a newspaper that was talking about this evening of plays and I just was like, “Oh my goodness! Where is that?” So, if it’s out there, I hope it turns up and that we’re able to see it.

KIM: So, Marjorie Hillis died in 1971. She was 82-years-old, and it was just in time to see the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism take off. What legacy would you say that she left behind, Joanna?

JOANNA: Oh, that’s a big question! I think that she’s a great reminder that there’s so much fun still to be had in feminist history. There are so many untold stories and untold lives out there, and sometimes I think that gets presented to us as a duty, like, “Who are all these people we ought to know about and didn’t?” I don’t think you need to read about Marjorie Hillis in school, but there’s just such a pleasure to discovering her voice and her story and sort of understanding that there have been so many interesting women who we are grappling with the status of their lives that we overlike when we want to sort people into easy boxes of like, What did they do? What did they achieve?... What did they SAY? And so it’s really lovely to go back and find these voices, so yeah, dig around in your second-hand bookshop bins and just find these women. They’re out there! In terms of her actual life, you know, I think it’s really important in knowing about 20th century feminism that it did go back and forth, but we get very stuck into the idea that there were these waves — first wave and second wave, and sort of in between the waves there wasn’t very much happening. And of course, there absolutely was, and women in the Thirties were grappling with questions about how to be in the workplace, how to balance home and family and professional and public lives, just as they had been in previous generations and subsequent generations. 

AMY: It’s a completely empowering book, I think, and I would never have discovered Marjorie Hillis without you writing this book. Like you said, just absolute shock that somebody that was so thoroughly entertaining and witty would have been completely forgotten. So if you have not yet discovered Marjorie Hillis, listeners, just go immediately pick up a copy of Live Alone and Like It. It was reissued by Virago, and we totally promise that you will reall\y get a kick out of it, no matter your relationship status. It is smart and snappy and hilarious. And then when you finish reading it, follow up with Joanna’s book, The Extra Woman, which does an amazing job of putting it all into context in a really interesting way. What can we expect from you next… is there anything interesting you’re working on?

JOANNA: Yes! I’m actually working on another really fun feminist history. I’m writing about a group of women this time who are members of a secret club called Heterodoxy who met in Greenwich Village in the 1910s and were all activists and suffragists and feminists of various kinds, and it’s just a really fun, fabulous group, and really a wonderful moment to be digging into another set of rebellious lives, so that will be coming out when I finish it!

KIM: That sounds amazing. We can’t wait to read it and maybe have you back on to talk about that! I know these projects take a lot longer than a podcast. Thanks for joining us, Joanna, this has been really illuminating and a real joy talking to you.

Joanna: Thank you so much. This was so much fun, and I’m so glad to see more and listen to more of what you’re doing and who you’re uncovering. There’s so much out there.

AMY: And now that we’re finishing here, I’m going to go put on my lounge pajamas. Or my hostessing pajamas … one of those.

KIM: Yeah.

JOANNA: Wonderful.

AMY: And that’s all for today’s episode. If you like what you heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast.

KIM: Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and visit LostLadiesofLit.com for further reading materials. 

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes

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