Jill Lepore's New Biography
of Jane Franklin, Plus Memoirs From Daniel Menaker, Ann Patchett, and Others
by Megan O’Grady
VOGUE Culture Books
Photo: (Right) Dari Michele
“One half of the World does
not know how the other half lives,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor
Richard’s Almanack. He might have been writing about his sister Jane. As
children, they were Benny and Jenny, the youngest son and youngest daughter of
a Boston candlemaker. But while Benjamin Franklin grew up to become a founding
father, diplomat, author, and inventor—the very embodiment of American
enlightenment—his little sister, uneducated and married off to a ne’er-do-well
saddle-maker at fifteen, spent most of her life literally in the dark: indoors,
in poverty, doing housework. Her sole pleasure was their lively, 60-year
correspondence, letters that form the backbone of Jill Lepore’s
extraordinary Book of Ages: The Life and
Opinions of Jane Franklin (Knopf).
“He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the
Constitution,” notes Lepore, a Harvard history professor and staff writer at The
New Yorker. “She strained to form the letters of her name.”
It was thanks to Ben’s early tutelage that Jane could write at all—and in fact she did write a book of a kind: a “Book of Ages” made of rags and flax, in which she listed her children’s births and deaths. “A litany of grief,” as Lepore describes it—only one of Jane’s twelve children survived her—the book is all that remains of her fierce, ever-thwarted desire to make her mark. (She didn’t have a room of her own until she was 69.) Rounding out Jane’s story with a crackling social history of colonial America, laced with tartly deployed quotes from Anne Bradstreet and Abigail Adams, Lepore’s astonishing feat of historical resurrection is ultimately a meditation on biographical conventions, and “what it means to write history not from what survives but from what is lost.” “I know the most insignificant creature on Earth may be made some use of in the scale of beings, may touch some spring, or verge to some wheel unpercived [sic] by us,” Jane wrote to her brother in 1786. Thanks to Lepore, her story endures alongside Jean Strouse’s brilliant biography of Alice James as a testament to all of American history’s little sisters—a story largely of absence.
It was thanks to Ben’s early tutelage that Jane could write at all—and in fact she did write a book of a kind: a “Book of Ages” made of rags and flax, in which she listed her children’s births and deaths. “A litany of grief,” as Lepore describes it—only one of Jane’s twelve children survived her—the book is all that remains of her fierce, ever-thwarted desire to make her mark. (She didn’t have a room of her own until she was 69.) Rounding out Jane’s story with a crackling social history of colonial America, laced with tartly deployed quotes from Anne Bradstreet and Abigail Adams, Lepore’s astonishing feat of historical resurrection is ultimately a meditation on biographical conventions, and “what it means to write history not from what survives but from what is lost.” “I know the most insignificant creature on Earth may be made some use of in the scale of beings, may touch some spring, or verge to some wheel unpercived [sic] by us,” Jane wrote to her brother in 1786. Thanks to Lepore, her story endures alongside Jean Strouse’s brilliant biography of Alice James as a testament to all of American history’s little sisters—a story largely of absence.
Fall’s standout memoirs are
all about the untold story. A ruefully funny insider’s tour of the publishing
world, Daniel Menaker’s My Mistake (HMH) conjures the fiction department at William Shawn’s New Yorker
(and, briefly, Tina Brown’s), where Menaker became an editor under the
warm mentorship of William Maxwell—and where he met his wife, Katherine
Bouton, who encouraged emotional honesty in his writing and wore hot pants
to the office. Musical fame isn’t all its cracked up to be: Steely Dan
cofounder Donald Fagen’s Eminent Hipsters (Viking) recalls a jazz-and-sci-fi obsessed adolescence “with a nasty
case of otherness,” and ends with a wonderfully cranky tour bus diary, filled
with riffs on megalomania, art, bad hotels, and aging: “Tonight the crowd
looked so geriatric, I was tempted to start calling out bingo numbers.” With
four generations of broken marriages in one’s family—including one’s own—being
a little gun-shy when it comes to love is natural, but novelist Ann
Patchett’s winningly anti-romantic collected nonfiction, This Is the Story of a Happy
Marriage (Harper), culminates in a
hard-won happy ending, “a fairy tale—the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.”
And the lone Arabic-speaking member of USAID team sent to rebuild Iraq tells
all in To Be a Friend Is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis
Left Behind (Scribner). Kirk W.
Johnson’s rage-inducing account of government indifference is a tale of
lost innocence that, in our American twilight, feels devastatingly allegorical.
“Your country put a man on the moon,” says an Iraqi interpreter, one of
thousands who assisted the U.S. invasion who remain in mortal danger. “Why is
it so difficult for America to give me a visa?”
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