Becoming Madam Secretary
Becoming Madam Secretary
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Stephanie Dray on Becoming Madam Secretary
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The hero her family forgot to nameDray grew up in a family for whom FDR was practically a household saint. Her grandparents survived the Depression by hunting frogs and picking wild mushrooms. Both grandfathers enlisted after Pearl Harbor. Her father got polio. In all of that mythology, one name was conspicuously absent, and the absence only became visible when Dray started researching the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and stumbled onto the woman who had actually built the New Deal’s safety net.
FDR was always a household hero for us. But Frances Perkins? She was never mentioned. So learning about her was like uncovering a hidden chapter of history, and when I realized how she was right there in the trenches, fighting the good fight, before Roosevelt ever thought to, I knew her story was the one I needed to tell.
The stakes turned concrete when Dray connected Perkins’ specific legislation to specific deaths in her own family. A great-uncle, then a teenager, had died trying to steal coal to keep the family from freezing. The programs that eventually turned things around were not FDR’s invention alone.
I don’t think my family would have survived the Great Depression without Frances, so I feel I owe her a personal debt of gratitude. And I consider it an honor that I get to tell her story — even if she was so private that she wouldn’t have wanted me to.
She began drafting the novel before it had a publisher, and she was already prepared to defend her subject against anyone who questioned the ranking. The conviction she expressed here was not a publicist’s talking point — she made this remark while the book was still in progress.
I am working on a novel right now about the fabulous Frances Perkins, the most important woman in American history hands down. I will fight anyone on this. She was Roosevelt’s right-hand woman during the Great Depression, she was the architect of the New Deal, and there is not a single American life today that is untouched by her work.
Beneath the biographical impulse sits a political one. Dray’s family history gave her a first-hand understanding of what a social safety net actually prevents, and she wanted the novel to carry a warning about what happens when the people who built that net go unremembered and uncredited.
A lot of people mistakenly believe that progress in a society is linear. My grandparents’ generation defeated Fascism, built a social safety net, and set up the country for the longest period of relative peace and prosperity we have ever known. But that can’t be taken for granted.
How she wrote it
Two thousand pages of oral history and one surprising poemDray started writing in March 2020, when the pandemic had shut down physical archives. Columbia University’s digitized oral history of Perkins, roughly 2,000 pages recorded in the 1950s, became her primary raw material. The audio gave her something a transcript alone could not: a way to calibrate the character’s speech patterns and social code.
I was surprised to hear that Boarding School Lockjaw come out in her accent because she didn’t go to boarding school, but she did work with many people who did, and I guess she knew how to fit in when she wanted to.
That auditory detail fed directly into how Dray rendered Perkins’ voice on the page. Whenever the drafting stalled, she went back to the recordings. “Whenever I was filling in the blanks, I’d listen to her recordings and let Frances talk to me so that she would hopefully speak through me,” she told the Historical Novel Society.
More than a year into the project, when the archives reopened, Dray was able to read Perkins’ personal papers at Columbia in person. The standard scholarly account of the marriage between Perkins and her husband Paul Wilson had treated it as largely pragmatic. What Dray found rewrote that assumption entirely.
I discovered very touching love letters between Frances and her husband. Those surprised me because that relationship is often presented as more of a marriage of convenience without passion. I was glad to learn otherwise!
The love letters were not the only document that forced a reappraisal. Dray also turned up a poem Perkins had written about Paul shortly before his commitment to a psychiatric institution. Perkins’ own public remarks about the marriage had been characteristically flippant, and Dray had taken them at face value until the poem contradicted them. The discovery made Dray reconsider how much of Perkins’ public self-presentation was protective performance rather than genuine feeling.
She also knew what she was doing in evoking a spirit of revolution with that hat — in reminding people that she wasn’t some wild-eyed newcomer to the American scene, but that her ideas were deeply rooted in the nation’s history.
The book’s structure went through at least one significant overhaul. Dray had originally drafted sections from the point of view of Charlie Wyzanski, a young lawyer Perkins mentored, so readers could see the Secretary from the outside. Her critique group stopped her.
My critique partners had an intervention and reminded me that it was poor form to have a book about the most important woman in American history narrated by a man.
Wyzanski became a supporting character, and Perkins held the entire narrative perspective herself. Dray also tried multiple opening sequences, including one set in Philadelphia where Perkins was working undercover, before settling on New York.
Perkins’ deliberate self-concealment, the uniform of tricorn hat, pearl necklace, and black dress that she wore every day, was both the central obstacle in writing the book and one of its most productive puzzles. The hat had a calculated dimension that went beyond avoiding fashion commentary.
She didn’t want anybody talking about her clothes. She didn’t want anybody talking about her personal life. She wanted everybody to talk about her work. And so she was very deliberately private. And in some ways, that makes her a really interesting character for historical fiction, because you have to try to figure out what was really going on behind that public persona that she cultivated so carefully. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Becoming, not bornDray studied government at Smith College and practiced law before turning to fiction full time. That trajectory, from law to storytelling, gave her a particular interest in how women navigate institutions built without them in mind. The title of the novel names that process directly, and in a video interview she articulated what it points to.
She wasn’t born ‘Madam Secretary’. She became ‘Madam Secretary’. And it was a long and arduous process. [paraphrased from audio]
Dray’s distinction between what a biographer must do and what a novelist is permitted to do captures something she has thought about across her career writing historical fiction. Perkins was intensely private, leaving deliberate gaps in the record. For Dray, those gaps were not a problem to apologize for — they were the novelist’s invitation.
A biographer should lay out the facts and be careful about speculation. But as a novelist, it’s my job to speculate and fill in the blanks, which is super fun.
What she wants us to sit with
A name, a fight, and eighty years of unfinished workAt the March 2025 Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute event, Dray made her most direct case for why Perkins belongs at the center of the American story. The argument is quantitative as much as moral: she measured Perkins’ legacy in decades, not anecdotes.
There is not a single American life that has not been touched by Frances Perkins. I say she is the most important woman in American history and I mean that. Because even though we have had other women who have served in vital roles... there’s no women that I’m aware of and very few men I’m aware of that have had a legacy that lasted 80 years.
Getting past what Perkins was willing to disclose was not just a craft challenge. It was the entire moral purpose of writing the novel in this form rather than contributing another work of nonfiction. Dray put her goal in terms of what she hoped fiction could produce that biography cannot: not admiration, but feeling.
By speculating about all the things Frances Perkins would have been infuriated to have me speculate about, I hopefully make readers feel something about this extraordinary American heroine other than simply academic or intellectual admiration.
The form Dray works in, biographical historical fiction, is itself an argument she has made repeatedly across her career. Here she states it in its most distilled version: the reason she writes this kind of book is the same reason she wants readers to read it.
I love biographical historical fiction because I feel that it’s an exercise in empathy. To write it, and to read it, you must put yourself in the shoes of another actual person and try to understand her decisions, all while simultaneously letting yourself experience the milieu of another time period. This forces you to flex the emotional muscles necessary for empathy. And empathy is an absolutely essential skill; it can make you a better human being if you let it.
The final message Dray draws from Perkins’ life is not triumphalist. Perkins lost battles, watched hard-won protections erode, and kept working anyway. Dray wants readers to leave the book with that understanding of what political commitment actually looks like across a lifetime.
The best we can do is fight and win most of the battles in a continuous war for a better world. I think Frances Perkins knew better than anyone that we’ve got to fight even if we’re going to lose so that someone, maybe a generation later, can pick up the sword we lost on the battlefield and carry on the fight.