The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post: A Novel
The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post: A Novel
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Allison Pataki on The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post: A Novel
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A tip, a museum, and a woman she couldn’t shakeThe book began not with a research plan but with a friend-of-a-friend recommendation that sent Pataki to Hillwood Estate, Post’s final Washington, D.C. home, now a public museum. She arrived without an agenda. What she found stopped her cold.
I just walked in and I said, ‘This woman is amazing. This life was amazing. This is a great story.’ [paraphrased from audio]
The visit left a question that wouldn’t close. Post had been present at some of the defining moments of twentieth-century American life, yet her name had not appeared in any history class Pataki could remember.
How did I not know about this woman? How did I not study her in History?
To explain Post’s strange invisibility to readers who share the same blank spot, Pataki reached for a pop-culture shorthand that also captures Post’s extraordinary range.
I compare her to Forrest Gump … because she was there in the front row shaping every moment in history that we know about, and yet we don’t know the role she played. But she had way better clothing.
The comparison does real work: it names the paradox that made Post irresistible as a subject. A woman that consequential, that invisible in the telling of history, was exactly the kind of story Pataki had built her career to write.
How she wrote it
Six years, a hairbrush, and the pressure of living witnessesPost’s story spans more than nine decades, four marriages, two world wars, and a fortune built from a breakfast-cereal empire. The sheer scope put this project in a category of its own among Pataki’s books.
You have to become obsessed; this has been six years of my life, during which I’ve been living and breathing Marjorie Merriweather Post.
Research took Pataki inside Post’s homes in Washington, Palm Beach, and New York. The most unusual visit came at Camp Topridge, Post’s Adirondacks camp, where private owners invited her to spend the night. She slept in Post’s preserved bedroom: walls entirely pink, grandchildren’s watercolors still hanging, a hairbrush with Post’s silver hairs still caught in it. An unopened safe sat in the room. Pataki did not sleep. She came down the next morning, took her coffee to the lake, and felt as though Post’s soul had never left the place.
It was by far the hardest book I’ve ever written. [paraphrased from audio]
Post died in 1973. Her daughter, the actress Dina Merrill, died while Pataki was still writing, and other family members who had been present in scenes she was fictionalizing were still alive. Hillwood employs PhD historians whose entire professional focus is this specific history. That combination of recency and scholarly scrutiny created a pressure unlike anything she had felt on earlier books.
I felt maybe the most pressure because it’s such recent history. There were people present in the scenes of the book that I’m writing about, you know, I’m writing dialogue who are still alive. [paraphrased from audio]
To manage that pressure, Pataki drew a firm line between what she was doing and what Hillwood’s historians do. She wanted the novel to pass a credibility test, not an approval process. The distinction held: Post’s granddaughter read the book, loved it, and had exactly one objection.
I’m not writing a family-sanctioned biography. You know, Hillwood does that. Hillwood puts out family-sanctioned biographies. I’m writing historical fiction. [paraphrased from audio]
The granddaughter’s sole complaint was that reading about her grandmother’s sex life was ‘really awkward.’ Hillwood now sells the novel in its bookstore.
Writing in first person was a deliberate choice, and one Pataki has made only twice. She described both Post and Margaret Fuller, the subject of a later novel, as arriving with unusual immediacy during research.
These two heroines came to me in such an immediate and accessible way, to the point where I could hear their voices clearly as I was writing.
The novel also draws on Post mythology, not just confirmed fact. A rumor that Post and her second husband, stockbroker E.F. Hutton, partly inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in The Great Gatsby cannot be verified. Pataki cited it precisely because it lives in legend rather than the documented record, which made it fair game for fiction.
With historical fiction, the most outlandish, outrageous, or bizarre moments are always pulled directly from the history, because history gives you the raw material that you just couldn’t make up.
What she wants us to sit with
A self-made identity, and the dignity she insisted onPost married four times and each marriage ended badly. Pataki framed them not as evidence of romantic failure but as the scaffolding around a harder-won story.
For me, seeing these four marriages and the dissolution of them, the true love story that had to run throughout this book was that she had to accept falling in love with her own voice identity.
Post’s conduct during the Great Depression is one of the scenes Pataki returns to when explaining what she wants readers to carry forward. Post opened food kitchens in Hell’s Kitchen, placed fresh-cut flowers on the tables, and hired unemployed men as servers in white tuxedo coats. The detail matters because it goes beyond charity.
I have such admiration for the way Marjorie Post served as a leader in business, in society, in politics, in philanthropy.
The Depression kitchens are a concentrated version of the argument the whole novel makes: that Post understood dignity as something you extend to people, not something you grant from a distance.
Pataki has written about forgotten women before, but she places her feeling for Post in a different register from all previous subjects. She closed one interview by quoting Post’s father, C.W. Post, whose assessment of his daughter doubles as a summary of the novel’s protagonist.
I always got the sense with Marjorie that she was at her happiest and her most fulfilled when she was serving a cause larger than herself. [paraphrased from audio]