The Book Club for Troublesome Women
The Book Club for Troublesome Women
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Marie Bostwick on The Book Club for Troublesome Women
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
One sentence from her motherThe book began with a conversation Bostwick had not planned for. She was talking books with her then-89-year-old mother when Betty Friedan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique’ came up, and her mother said something she had never said in all the years before: that the book had changed her life. What happened next was immediate.
As soon as she started talking about Friedan’s book and what it had meant to her and her friends, I knew what I needed to write next.
Knowing what to write and committing to it are different things. At the moment her mother spoke, Bostwick was already deep inside another project, months of research behind her. She walked away from it without hesitation.
I was deep into researching something else. I threw that thing over the wall, called my editor and said, ‘This is the book, this is what we’re going to do next.’ [paraphrased from audio]
She had never actually read ‘The Feminine Mystique’ herself. Getting a copy was among the first things she did after that phone call, and she has now read it roughly six times.
The urgency she felt when the idea arrived was something she had experienced before, and she has thought carefully about what it means when a story idea lands with that particular force.
There’s something almost mystical about the moment of inspiration that sets you off to write a book. Your brain lights up in ways it doesn’t at any other time. There’s a feeling of genuine excitement, often accompanied by an actual physical sensation of tingling when a great story idea falls into your lap. When it happens, you’ve got to seize the moment, respect the inspiration and follow through, because great ideas don’t reveal themselves every day of the week.
By the time the manuscript was finished, she was describing it in terms she had never used for any previous book. This was not a casual claim: Bostwick had spent fifteen years writing contemporary fiction before returning to historical fiction with this project.
As I was writing, a voice in my head kept saying, ‘This is it, Marie. This is the book of your life.’ I’m enormously proud of it.
How she wrote it
eBay magazines and five separate outlinesBostwick had childhood memories of the 1960s, but she treated the era as a research subject rather than a store of impressions to draw on freely. She read Friedan multiple times, read Stephanie Coontz’s nonfiction history ‘A Strange Stirring’ on how women received the book, and read every title the club reads within the story. Then she went to eBay. Physical copies of 1960s women’s magazines told her something the secondary sources could not.
I bought as many vintage copies as I could find, so I could experience them the way my characters would have. This isn’t of any real consequence but boy! Were there ever some terrible recipes back then! And the pictures were even worse. I don’t know when food styling became a profession, but it was definitely after the 1960s.
The recipes were incidental. ‘The Feminine Mystique’ devotes considerable attention to how magazines and advertisers persuaded women that their fulfillment could be found in housekeeping, and holding the physical pages made that argument tangible in a way a secondary source could not.
Building four distinct women whose stories could hold together as one required a structural approach Bostwick had developed across years of ensemble writing. She does not begin with the group. She begins with each woman alone, building out far more history than readers will ever encounter.
I actually write an outline with each character as the hero of the story... because we are all the heroes of our own story... I know way more about their background probably than the readers need to know. [paraphrased from audio]
After the four separate outlines are complete, she writes a fifth that weaves all of them into one overarching story. The outlining alone, she has said, takes a long time.
Of the four women at the center of the novel, Charlotte, the sharp-tongued Manhattan transplant, came to her most quickly, and Bostwick can trace her origins to two specific sources: a real friend’s story about spotting a woman in a mink coat at a Montessori school, and a Sondheim lyric that had stayed with her for years.
Charlotte’s entrance in the novel. [paraphrased from audio]
The scenes involving Margaret’s marriage were the most difficult to get right. The risk was turning her husband Walt into a symbol rather than a person, and Bostwick was determined to avoid it, drawing in part on her own four decades of marriage.
I wanted to make it real and impactful, but I didn’t want to make Walt a monster, because he’s not a monster. He’s just a flawed man who is not having a good year in a lot of ways. [paraphrased from audio]
The ending, by contrast, required no revision at all. Bostwick knew how the book would close before she wrote the first page, and the final scene did not change between conception and execution.
In the mornings I’d hurry to my desk, tingling with anticipation, impatient to continue the conversation with my Troublesome Women. As the deadline approached, I found myself dragging my feet, writing more slowly because I didn’t want the experience to end.
The personal thread
A single mother’s confidence, passed forwardBostwick was raised as the fourth daughter of a single mother in modest circumstances, and she continued interviewing her mother throughout the writing of the book, collecting a firsthand account of what the era’s limitations had actually felt like. But the research went both ways: her mother had also shaped how Bostwick thought about her own possibilities long before this project began.
She never said ‘if you go to college.’ It was always ‘when.’ She just instilled me with the confidence that somehow I’d figure out how. [paraphrased from audio]
That sense of debt to an earlier generation runs through the book’s emotional argument. The freedoms Bostwick’s mother helped her see as ordinary were not ordinary at all, and she wanted readers to feel that gap between what was assumed and what had been won.
I hoped readers would understand that the kinds of freedoms and rights and opportunities that they enjoy today really were paid for by those troublesome women of earlier generations. [paraphrased from audio]
On what’s at stake
Sixty years is not a long timeOne of the central arguments the book makes through story, Bostwick makes explicitly when she talks about it: the world her characters inhabit is not the distant past. She lists the legislative milestones to make the point concrete, including the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, which finally allowed women to open bank accounts and apply for credit without a male co-signer, and the Women’s Business Ownership Act of 1988.
The fact that so many of the rights and opportunities modern women take as a given simply didn’t exist just sixty short years ago.
She is also making a case for the particular work that fiction does in carrying this kind of awareness across to readers. Nonfiction can document the history; Bostwick’s argument is that only a story can make someone feel its weight.
I happen to believe that fiction can be even more powerful and life changing than non-fiction. When we find a character we identify with on a deep level, who is making good or bad choices, it gets us thinking about our own choices and the direction our life is taking, versus the direction we’d like it to take. And I really think that fiction often does that better than non-fiction, because fiction (at least good fiction) doesn’t lecture, it simply presents you with the scenario and lets you make up your own mind as to what your response should or can be.
What she wants us to sit with
Shoes that will never fitThe passage Bostwick returns to in nearly every interview is one Margaret writes near the end of the novel. She calls it the heart of the story, and it carries the book’s central argument in two sentences. The first addresses the women who made the trap; the second addresses the women who stayed inside it.
There are countless good and right ways to be a woman and only two wrong. The first is to insist that your way is ‘the’ way, the only way. The second is to buy into that nonsense and to spend your life limping along an aimless path in shoes that will never fit.
The title itself is part of this argument. Bostwick chose the word ‘troublesome’ deliberately, and she wants readers to arrive at the same revaluation of it that her characters do over the course of the book.
To me, being a troublesome woman is a positive character trait. There’s a certain joyous quality there. A troublesome woman is one I would want to spend time with, perhaps even befriend.
Her final ambition for the book is deliberately open-ended. She resists prescribing a single takeaway, and the reason connects to her argument about what fiction can do that a lecture cannot.
As a novelist, I’ve always considered entertaining and engaging readers to be my first and most important job.
What readers take from that engagement, she has said, is ‘whatever it is they most need at this moment of their lives.’ The book about her mother’s generation, she hopes, will arrive at exactly the right moment for each reader who picks it up.