Melanie Benjamin

Melanie Benjamin's new novel is Mistress of the Ritz.

From her Q&A with Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney:

I noticed that a lot of your books are concerned with movies and the 1920s. What is it about this subject and time that has captured your imagination?

If I could be a time traveler, I’d definitely go back to the 1920s. I love that era; I love that women were so liberated and eager to enjoy life, life on their own terms. I love the fashions – the long-waist dresses, the bobbed hair. I love the joyful attitude. Everything was just beginning – Broadway musicals, the film industry, so many great literary magazines like The New Yorker. I would just love to have been there when everything, particularly in the arts, seemed so shiny and new, and when women were first experiencing liberation.

I read that you said information on the real Auzellos was scarce. How did you build their relationship? Did you plan to make it as volatile as it was or did the writing process take you that way?

There really was very little about them but what was there all mentioned how troubled their marriage was. And that’s catnip to an author, of course. Basically I knew that Claude had mistresses in the French way – not believing they had anything to do with his marriage – and Blanche, being an American, did not view them in the same light. And this led to the volatility. Add to that the fact that they were two very different people whose romance had begun in an unbelievably passionate, dramatic way, and I thought—how does a marriage live up to such a grand, epic beginning? So that part of the story of their marriage, I imagined. And then I imagined how a marriage based on epic highs and lows would evolve in wartime, when...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Melanie Benjamin's website.

The Page 69 Test: Alice I Have Been.

The Page 69 Test: The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb.

My Book, The Movie: The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb.

The Page 69 Test: The Aviator's Wife.

The Page 69 Test: The Swans of Fifth Avenue.

The Page 69 Test: The Girls in the Picture.

Writers Read: Melanie Benjamin (January 2018).

--Marshal Zeringue