The First Ladies

Steve Thomas: Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, welcome back to Circulating Ideas.

Victoria Christopher Murray: We’re glad to be back.

Marie Benedict: We’re excited to be here. Thank you for having us.

Steve Thomas: So, we usually talk library stuff on the podcast, and since you already on before, I already asked you about your personal experiences with libraries in the past, but how do you think of it from a professional author mindset, like when fans come up and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I took the book out from the library instead of buying it!” How does that make you feel or do you go to libraries a lot to do signings or in conferences? How does it work into your professional life?

Marie Benedict: I mean, I for one am delighted to have readers read our books, however they get them. I’m thrilled. Victoria and I are both huge library people. I mean, I’m a library nerd myself, so I’m thrilled when people find us and find our books through the library. And just as an aside, I have to say we are indebted to libraries for this particular book. We discovered the letters between Mary and Eleanor through library archives. And then it was only through the use of my local library’s very dusty microfiche machine, which hasn’t been used for decades, and that I became very familiar with over the multiple weeks I used it. That was how we found and got deep into the communications between the women. So we are fully indebted to libraries for this book.

Victoria Christopher Murray: Yes, and I’m just going to add to that the research can’t even be done without the libraries. So the books can’t even exist. So we are indebted and we love them.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, because to get into their heads, like you’re trying to do for these kind of books, especially writing in first person, you’re really in their heads. You’ve got to read stuff like those correspondences, because you can’t just read a news story about people because you’re not getting in their heads, but that really gets their thoughts out there. When you were on the podcast last time, you talked about The Personal Librarian, the last book that you guys wrote together and the first book you guys wrote together. And we talked about how you came together on that book and became friends through that process. Do you think that your friendship influenced your decision to take on this story for the next book, which is also about a prominent white woman and a prominent black woman becoming friends? Obviously a hundred years later, so the world’s a little different, but was the friendship part of it part of how this story appealed to you?

Victoria Christopher Murray: Yes, it really was. You know, when we wrote The Personal Librarian and we started touring around the country, we found that people were very interested in Bella da Costa Green, just enamored with her, loved her, but they were just as interested in our friendship, which was surprising. I don’t think I expected it. I don’t know if Marie did, but it was very surprising, city after city, people wanted to know as much about us as they wanted to know about Belle, and part of the reason was because they wanted to have the kinds of conversations that we told people we were having together.

So with this book, we were very intentional, and this was a relationship that Marie knew a little bit about. Not much has been written about these two women together as friends. And so we thought it would be a perfect way to not only write another great story and uncover information that people did not know, but it could be a reflection on our friendship and almost a guide as to how people can become friends themselves, even under the toughest discussions and situations.

Steve Thomas: That’s great. I mean, I remember that part of our conversation when we talked last time of how y’all kind of helped each other through the pandemic and the fallout of things that after the George Floyd murder and all those discussions and it was just you could have these frank conversations and those kind of things come up in this story with Eleanor and Mary.

Marie Benedict: Yeah, as we were crafting their story and of course we rely very heavily on research, but there are always gray areas where we don’t know a particular conversation or we don’t know exactly how things transpired and that was an opportunity for us.

to share the conversations that we were having and kind of attribute them in some manner, changed for the circumstances in the time of course, to Eleanor and Mary and allow people to kind of participate in the sort of process that we have gone through ourselves and that they seem to be so fascinated with as we were out on the road talking about The Personal Librarian.

Steve Thomas: Well, and then when you wrote The Personal Librarian, that was again during the height of the pandemic, which meant I believe you didn’t meet in person at all during the writing of the book. Am I remembering that right? Or did you actually get to meet in person during the writing?

Victoria Christopher Murray: We met in person before the pandemic. So we met a couple of times. We went to the Morgan Library together in person, but yeah, we didn’t, we only got to get together again the day the book came out, like, right before, so that was very exciting.

Marie Benedict: It was very exciting. We definitely had met several times before as we were writing the book and before we submitted our first draft of it to our editor. It was really during the editorial process that we had to rely exclusively on Zoom, and really because that whole year up until the book came out, the world was very much COVID-ridden and going places was extremely limited, and then even when The Personal Librarian came out in hardcover, really the only event we did in person was Good Morning, America.

And that’s, that was when the book came out and that’s when we got to kind of be reunited. So that was magical and exciting and everything you could wish for.

Steve Thomas: Did you get to work more together on this book in person?

Marie Benedict: We’ve spent weeks and weeks and weeks together.

Victoria Christopher Murray: And you know, that’s not a necessary part. We just always look for ways to get together because we’re really good friends, and I just love getting together with Marie because when I make her laugh, she never stops.

Steve Thomas: Well, we’ve kind of touched on it a little bit here, but can you tell me the story of The First Ladies? We’ve kind of mentioned Eleanor and Mary, but we haven’t gotten into it.

Marie Benedict: So the story of The First Ladies is the story of a world changing friendship. It’s the story between the relationship between someone we think we know, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and someone that we often don’t know, but really should, and that’s Mary McLeod Bethune, who was well known in some circles in her day. She was an educator. She was an advocate for equality. And it’s the story of the way in which these women became really, truly best friends during an era of segregation and Jim Crow laws, and then came together to lay the foundation for the civil rights movement. These two women made so many contributions that we are utterly unaware of. We’re aware of the contributions, but not the hand that they had in them, and we wanted to celebrate both of those things.

Steve Thomas: And after you wrote The Personal Librarian, did you know immediately you wanted to write another book together and so you were kind of looking for things that would match up with what you wanted to do?

Victoria Christopher Murray: Yes. I can’t speak for Marie, but she wasn’t going to get rid of me that easily. Yes. I just, when we were writing the first book, we were just writing about a lady, a person who needed to come out of the shadows, but there’s so much more to it that we had no idea. So it helped that I wanted to write another book with Marie. When I’m writing my solo books, I miss her because it really is good to have somebody to bounce ideas off of and somebody who has the same objective, but we knew that there was more work to do through our fiction to get people really talking.

Steve Thomas: Real life is obviously much messier than fiction is and when you’re writing a story like this about real people and real events, how do you go about thinking of turning that into a narrative that you’re going to be able to wrap up appropriately at the end and feel satisfied? How do you craft that?

Marie Benedict: Well, I think that kind of goes to the question of how do you craft the arc of a story when you write fiction, but it’s inspired by real people. And of course, we don’t write cradle-to-grave biographies, right? In which the arc of the story is literally birth to death. We are looking at a snapshot in time in a person’s life, and we had a very fixed snapshot. It was a long snapshot. That was the arc of their friendship.

The beginning of our story was clear to us. It was the moment of change, the moment their friendship began. And without giving too much away, we knew exactly when that happened. The historical record’s pretty clear on that, and it was a very kind of momentous occasion. And so that that was a clear start. We did have several discussions about where to end it because their friendship actually goes on for years after the point that we chose in the story, but we kind of felt it was an important beat in their friendship that we chose. It was a moment, that’s again, not to give too much away, but it’s when they’re working together towards the founding of the United Nations, FDR has already passed away, and the next stage in their life is kind of fixated on that. And so we felt like they had reached a really stable, important phase in their relationship. Most of the drama had come to a solid close at that point. Would you say that that’s right, Victoria? That’s kind of how we settled on it? We did go back and forth.

Victoria Christopher Murray: Yeah, we had several endings, you know, the way we know, like Marie said, we knew how we started, but as you’re writing, you have a better feel of how we want to end it and I think Marie you just described it perfectly.

Steve Thomas: Last time I think you said, one person would write one chapter and then you kind of go back and forth. Was the collaboration process the same this time where you’d write just back and forth? Because again, it reads like there’s one author writing the book.

Victoria Christopher Murray: I’m so glad you said that, even with two voices, it sounds like it was written by one author. And that, I love that. I adore when people say that because that’s what we want to do. The process was pretty much the same, only this time we kind of knew who was going to write that first draft. Because we want to tell a complete story and both of us care about the final product that gets to market. It’s very easy for me to write with Marie because, I can’t wait for her to say, “Okay, we need to do this or we need to do that.” And I certainly tell her, “Come on, we need a little bit more right here!” I tell her that all the time. So it was the same process and I’m so glad that still, it sounded like one voice.

Marie Benedict: Yeah, that’s crucial for us. You know, the process between The Personal Librarian and this overall was similar, you know, we sat together, mapped out the arc of the story, talked through chapter by chapter, talked through conversations. The only thing that was really different was that it was clear who was going to do which chapters because we had two voices, and we each took one: I took Eleanor and Victoria took Mary. In The Personal Librarian, we had one voice, and so the delineation of who was going to do what chapter was based more on whether the interest level of handling a particular chapter, whether we had a certain skill set that lent itself more to one versus the other, whereas here that was clear, but of course we shared chapters immediately afterwards and edited each other’s chapters, so that entire process was the same.

Steve Thomas: Right. It wasn’t as simple as people would be like, “Oh, well, Marie wrote all of the Eleanor Roosevelt parts. Victoria wrote all of the Mary parts.” It’s not that simple at all.

Victoria Christopher Murray: No, not at all.

Marie Benedict: You’re not going to end up with a seamless book if that happens, I can tell you that much.

Victoria Christopher Murray: Yeah, that’s true. That’s a good point, Marie. You wouldn’t get a seamless book if it were like that.

Steve Thomas: Can you talk about what you feel the strengths of the writing skills of the other of you is? Like, when do you pull in one of the other? When is it like, “Oh well we need more of this, Victoria needs to add that. We need more of that, bring in Marie.” What do you feel like are the strengths of each other?

Victoria Christopher Murray: I cannot tell you how much Marie has helped me not only with these books and just learning historical fiction. She knows history. She knows how to tell these stories. She’s taught me that it’s not gonna be from the cradle to the grave, pick the most important parts. And then we call it her historical brush. I think we told you last time that as a contemporary writer, you know, I wanted to say, “What’s up dude?” so often, and she would just come in with this brush. It’s the same words that I wrote down, but it’s just painted so differently. She’s taught me so much about research, how to speak the language, the history of it. I’ve had a masterclass from her.

Marie Benedict: You know, she’s a little bit biased. I’m just going to say. I can’t even begin to list the things that I’ve learned from Victoria. Now on the writing side, I mean, she pushes me so much in so many wonderful, important ways to get deeper into the emotional life of the character, to go places that are more difficult than are my natural inclinations to go. She pushes me in some of the more intimate scenes as well, which we’ll just leave that alone, but the emotional life in particular, you know, I’m probably more hesitant, more reluctant to go there. She’s helped me have my characters go places that are fraught from a racial perspective, but from a personal perspective, our relationship and her insights and her brilliance have been transformative for me as a person, not just for my characters, not just as a writer, but also in giving me a new lens to see the world and trusting me enough to share that with me, that it’s a gift that is incalculable. It really is.

Steve Thomas: And you’ve each had a book in between. Did you find that your writing has changed because of how you worked together in the previous book? When you were writing your solo book, did you find you were hearing Victoria’s voice in your head and or Marie’s voice in your head?

Victoria Christopher Murray: I wrote a contemporary book in between, but I’m writing my first solo historical fiction right now. And Marie is sitting right next to me, like not only is she sitting right next to me, but like she gave the title to the publisher. She is totally In there and I know that if I have any questions, I can call her up in a moment and just say what about this or how should I handle that? So, in my solo book, she’s still right there.

Marie Benedict: I hear Victoria in my head 24-7, whether I’m writing now and or texting her or on the phone with her. So she’s definitely along for the ride, whether she likes it or not. I will say that certainly, the lessons I’ve learned from her, which are multitude, in The Mitford Affair, which is a book I had come out in between these two books, she definitely pushed me to be bolder, to be braver. I mean, there’s a lot of really uncomfortable stuff that happens in that book. And I could hear her urging me along in my head.

Steve Thomas: We’re trying to dance around the story and not spoil too much of the story of The First Ladies, but what do you feel drew Mary and Eleanor together as such close friends?

I mean, we have the situation that puts them together in the first few chapters there, but why do you think, what did they see in each other that kind of that made them such close friends?

Marie Benedict: That’s a good one. I mean, I would say, I don’t want to speak for Victoria, I would say is, despite how vastly different their origins are, you know, Eleanor came from this wealthy, elite family in America. She’s the niece of the president and Mary was born, you know, the first child in her family, first one born free. So you really couldn’t ask for two different backgrounds and yet women are so similar in so many ways. So similar in terms of their passions, their willingness to roll up their sleeves and do the right thing at a time period when that is not what’s encouraged and certainly not for women. They were in some ways so similar, would you agree, Victoria?

Victoria Christopher Murray: Yes, and the same thing with Marie and I. We are so similar in so many ways, of being the oldest child and having all of the neurotic things that comes with that. We’re so similar in our backgrounds, in our educational ,backgrounds and how we left our careers to come and do this, but there are so many things that are different about us because of our life experiences, and I think that’s what it was with Eleanor and Mary. They had so many things that were similar because of their goals and everything. It was their life experiences that made them different, and they were both curious about the other one enough to come together.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. It seemed like they were both open and honest about it too, like about their curiosity. Mary’s not afraid to say things like, you know, “Well, you don’t know anything about prejudice. You’ve been raised all rich and everything. What would you know about this?” Like, not just thinking it, but saying it directly to her, which kind of shocks Eleanor a little bit at first, but I think then they settle into it and that’s their relationship.

Marie Benedict: And Eleanor needed that. She needed someone to be honest and plain and true. She from a young age had this urge, this passion for social justice, but she got waylaid as many people do by society, societal voices, her desire to have a family of her own, her role as FDR’s political wife, and when she goes full circle, she’s open to change, and there’s Mary, and I mean, there is really no greater force for change, tenacity-wise especially, than Mary McLeod Bethune.

Victoria Christopher Murray: But at the same time, one of the things I do want to add to this is something that I often say in the situation with Marie and I. People would assume that Marie is the one that’s learning so much about race and that I don’t have anything to learn. And I have learned a lot and Mary learned from Eleanor, just like Mary challenged Eleanor. I love the scene in the Rose Garden where Eleanor challenges Mary, and I think that’s what a good friendship is all about, and Mary was mad and happy at the same time, probably few people challenged her in that way. That’s one of my favorite scenes in the book because it is the discussion of the white savior. And it’s one of my favorite scenes that I couldn’t wait to have in that book. So I think a good friendship teaches both ways.

Steve Thomas: No, definitely. My view, at least, of Eleanor Roosevelt, I’d heard she was an introvert, but she pushed herself to be out public and do all this stuff, but this really gets into it, that she was really so hard on herself, it sounded like, especially before, I think Mary helped strengthen her, honestly, but just so much, because her mother, and then her mother-in-law, and then of course, FDR doing his things just really devastated her.

Marie Benedict: She’s interesting too, because the snapshot in time that we have chosen, you know, you asked about how to pick and choose, this isn’t the sole goal of the story, of course, but it is a necessary outgrowth of it, is that Eleanor is not the person we think of her as she is now, like the First Lady, the one who will do the bold thing. She was not that person at the beginning of this book, and at this time period, in many ways, it was watching, learning from Mary that helped her in that regard. That relationship between these women did many, many things, but one of the things it did was help Eleanor grow into who she was meant to be and the woman that we think of her as now. She was not that person at the beginning.

Steve Thomas: One of the last things I wanted to ask about, Victoria, you were able to attend the unveiling of a statue of Mary in Washington. Can you talk about how that came about and how it felt to see her getting some deserved recognition.

Victoria Christopher Murray: I know, some long- deserved recognition and to think that it came from the governor of Florida really makes it a little bit extra special, but it came about because… it’s wonderful to know people in high places, and I knew the president of Bethune-Cookman University. He helped us with this book, got me down there. He knew all about this book. So he knew that Marie and I would want to see this, and Marie would have been there as well if she could have been. So that’s how I got the invitation to just actually sit there. Marie was with me the whole time though, because I never let her off the phone, never let her go. But what felt so wonderful, and I say this all the time to anybody who asks me about that, is that she wasn’t being recognized as just a black educator or a black civil rights leader, or she sits in Constitution Hall as an American, and I just am so… it’s overwhelming, you know, to have her be the first one in there that way, that she sits there as an American who deserves to be there among the others.

Steve Thomas: So do you all have any plans or do you think you’ll collaborate again in the future?

Marie Benedict: Oh, geez. Yes. I mean, that contract is long gone. We can’t say what the topic is going to be yet, but you can be assured that it will be some fabulous historical women who we’ll be exploring, much the same issues in a fresh way. We really are on a mission to engage readers, bring readers together from different backgrounds to have these sorts of conversations and these stories are really the perfect way to foster that, we think anyway. Not that I speak for Victoria, but you know, we’ve discussed this ad nauseum.

Victoria Christopher Murray: Yeah, exactly. Marie couldn’t get rid of me if she wanted me to. I would drag her back. But, but I just think we have so much more work to do, because, Steve, you wouldn’t believe what it’s like on the road, even now. I mean, and now people are getting it, so they go into the signings, like, introducing themselves to each other, because they know that’s what Mary and Eleanor and Victoria and Marie would expect. We get texts with this stuff. It’s amazing.

I am so in love with historical fiction now that I’m doing my solo and I just think, especially if they start trying to take it out of schools, it’s going to fall on those of us who’ve been given a gift to keep history alive and with the truth.

Steve Thomas: The book, again, is The First Ladies, and it is fantastic. I read it. It’s great. It is available now for purchase, or, of course, you can get a copy from your local public library, and Marie and Victoria will be perfectly happy with you to do that.

Victoria Christopher Murray: Yes.

Steve Thomas: Don’t forget, your library bought it.

Victoria Christopher Murray: Exactly.

Steve Thomas: Thank you so much for the conversation.

Victoria Christopher Murray: Thank you, Steve, for the great questions!

Marie Benedict: Great questions!

Victoria Christopher Murray: Bye bye.

Steve Thomas: Bye!