For me, sharing a need, i dont know very many louisas. So it was probably a little bit better. My name had to do with who i became as a person, my name is louisa. Do you think her name affected her personality . It was a lot more common than it is now. In berlin everybody was named louisa. The queen was louisa, royalty, everybody was louisa. It was not quite as uncommon. I feel more comfortable answering a question that louisas name, a little background, people think i was her, before i met her, shifting i say to people my name is louisa, they complement me. So yes. Yes. This particular louisa has a maker on identity, more enthrall of our own. The other thing that fascinated me more than any other biography it read like a novel. I was in a world that was somehow fictional, i was trying to look at what caused that feeling. When you were telling them, moved through such distinctly novelistic settings, and jockeying for a husband, in snowy st. Petersburg, she comes back to america in the early days of the republic, i wondered what kind of strategy you used in order to make this biography feel strangely like a novel and whether that was a conscious decision. I try to balance the storytelling with being true to getting across a lot of the ideas in their historical context. I kept in mind not to circulate beyond what she told me. She is really unusual in that she talks so much about her feelings and thoughts. A lot of the people we read biography about were writing for posterity. So they were not talking about they were not talking about feelings in the same way. We all have feelings but in those days they did not admit it. I think she was not the best interpreter of her own feelings but they were there on the page. She gave me so much material to work with but at the same time, her life was a great story and i wanted it to unfold as it happened, so much, i wanted the ideas didnt want it to be written from 2016 and have these block undigested we are going to talk about the second great awakening, or how women were regarded in salons or whatever. I wanted it to all be this soil, rooted really strongly but what we get is the flowering of that. I also did read some novels, i had some novels when i was writing i actually thought of it in three parts, she was born in an office and she was born in london, raised as many, a girl like jane austen was raised, in london. No matter. And i went back and reread all of this. I learned something really important and what i learned learned to Pay Attention to the financial language in the novel the way they talk about marriages as contracts and alliances and that really helped me. Her father goes bankrupt after she is devastated by it and she is devastated to the degree that seems crazy now and her father doesnt care. She actually confesses year after year, not even like a trauma, constantly reoffends. And to me that is the way we described it and you go back and read these novels and everybody has a price tag and there are grounds for getting out of a marriage. You go back and read that with that in mind he refers to it, he says i am doing my duty and you realize the thought process, you have to decide to save a marriage and this was deeply upsetting and destabilizing. I dont think i would have appreciated that in quite the same way had i not been able to put that fertilizer into the soil. In st. Petersburg after years of working. There is a language again, not written at the same time, cant get too much from her but if you can get a feeling, talk about a place, a book that was really important, a travel journal, i dont know how to say it, which was written at the same time by this beautiful writer, wish i could remember his name because i want everybody to read it. It also helps divide the place and middle march also not risen at the same time. These were not researched. To get the feel for how it is, tell a story because what i was after, john quincy was interested in facts and dates and what happened when someone does something when you get them together and what she was interested in was this emotional landscape. I have two contemporaneous stories, the actual journey of her life, narrative of her life, and i sort of thought of it as her life but the other one, she goes through and grows so much and that was one of the most exciting things, how much she changed was i did not want to write a biography about this, how they became what they are. She was this kind of dynamic changing growing figure, not a stable element in that way and i wanted to snap that growth. That is something that comes through clearly in the book, how mysterious a character she is and how changeable she is and also how invested she is in learning her own voice. She broke three different memoirs, she wrote troves of letters and each of her memoirs is written in a different voice, each letter is written in a different voice, sometimes she is complaining is a hypochondriac and other times she is sensitive and intellectual and other times a satirist. It does feel like there is a record of her voice but also a record of her many voices. I do wonder reading it whether that was a complicated thing as a writer to track this person who seems to have so many different voices and you got to know her by the end of the processor what she is alluding to buy the end. I felt i got to know her really great. Which is to say complicated human beings. And where they were and how. It was not something i normally think of. And the development of the voice is very funny. And the first letter, it is one incredibly long run on how she hits writing. I will therefore quit the subject. 4 years all she could write about was how she hated to write. At great length. This is partly a story about her becoming a writer, not a published writer although she did publish. And became proud. And she had these different voices which were so important because she is a complicated person. She actually wrote one satire and called herself lady sharply, and she described lady sharply as the audit compound, warmth and cold humor, she is right, she is risen by tensions and paradoxes but they add up. That made it easier to understand where these were coming from and obviously if you want to pencil this out, she is great in a way. I love that about her. I had more questions about her by the end of the novel than i did in the beginning. Sorry. The best of the novel. My last question, then we can open it up to the audience, has to do with complicating factors in her personality which is she really rose to the role of leader in the early republic, in a pretty magnificent way and you could make the argument she was responsible in many ways for the success of her husbands political career. She was incredibly sharp and intelligent. She paired jefferson down in her letters pretty easily but at the same time she is quite retiring and seems to fully accept a womans place for her husband, one of her three memoirs, the adventures of a nobody. She fully embraces her nothingness and smallness, humility. I was interested, now we tend to want female heroines who rise above that and somehow magically manage to be brave and have no doubts despite the fact they are educated in every way to doubt themselves and be humble. I wonder how you felt about humility and extreme courage and whether that is what you used in her as a character. This is one of the ways in which it passes, people want her to be not often, and they want her to be Abigail Adams or courtesy of modern woman. Talk about how strong she was, she made a 2000 mile journey from st. Petersburg to paris with her 7yearold sun, part way through she escaped converging, she pretends she is amazing. She was really resilient and survived a lot. She was sick all the time. As complicated a person, i think her insecurities is liberating. Very serious, born for the nation, didnt play it. And having to feel that way, and didnt have to be this kind of american icon. She lost it herself, that is a kind of way. Interferences who she was and something would be lost. And i am about attitude towards life. The paradox between her and accepting the constrictions of her life, and she wrote an account of that journey, and wants people to read in some ways, they wrote it, she wrote it because she wanted to be remembered and suggested she was worried about being forgotten. And stayed with me. Any questions . Revolutionary america you think that sort of historical blend [inaudible question] one of the great best friends of history i do think she was not part of the underclass in any way. One of the threads in this book is about her own intimacy with slavery to a degree. It is complicated. She lives in washington dc and did not say the right thing. I do think that that is not why i probably approached this book although i am drawn to the person standing next to the person. This to answer your question in a different way, this period, the first real kind of popular rising, the way in which they negotiated that is quite interesting, trying to figure out how the country was changing and what kind of relationship to have, franchise is expanding. We tend to face the early republic as they knew what they were doing, a perfect document had one problem to figure out. Everybody disagreed about everything. They argued all the time. Everyone was making compromises and one of the exciting things about meeting her is you get that because she wasnt trying to reflect the world. She was just exasperated and hopeful. How hard is it to find references like was she writing about her in any way . He was not writing about her. There are people writing about her, Dolly Madison wrote something, being the leading dissipation of the day that started the whole thing and wrote a wonderful tribute to how vivacious and funny she was. People wrote about her in newspapers, wrote about her parties. There is a lot of that, a lot of letters. Abigail wrote about her. People were drawn to her and tended to reflect that. Another lady being in the news, how do you see the role of first lady being different in the early republic versus how we see them today . Quite different. One of the interesting things about louisas life is her time in the white house is a low point in her life. He she didnt have anything to do. There wasnt any precedent for an active role for a first lady. It was chocolate. That is what she did. As a campaigner she prefigured the role a lot of first ladies do now. She was a surrogate figure, making up for some flaws and shortcomings. You cant draw a Straight Line from her, partly because louisa was criticized for being so forward, that role kind of disappeared. She was punished for it in some ways. One of the reasons she withdrew when she got to the white house, she wrote about this, being too visible so i can step back. There was a complicated thing called the eaton affairs in the Jackson Administration which had some consequences in washington. I wont get into that but there that sort of shutdown. And elevated indifferences, kind of called angel of the heart and all these things, that started around the time he was president and the role women play kind of diminished. It is not like she said an example for other first ladies. Louisa grew up because she was trying to make what was known in the white house or in the new world to create . She was influenced by that. She was sensitive, you couldnt be too aristocratic in the united states. The highest tax i pay is i have to pretend i am not a traveled lady. There was a kind of vision of her already and she was had once didnt care and on the other hand she wasnt where i was. One of the interesting things, the 1828 campaign was really vicious. Her background, propriety, and was accused of the sex scandal, and at the same time the adams camp, Andrew Jacksons wife not having divorced her husbands primary, is true. Very vicious, think of it like politics. The jackson murder, he was. Was there a particular period of her life or episode in her life or aspect of her life you were frustrated by the historical record that you thought would be more interesting . A good question. Certainly slavery is one of the things she became interested in. It is frustrating because of legal documents, doesnt write about that stuff. The piecing together i cant talk about attitudes in quite that way although she does talk about slavery later. They pretty much go silent and i felt the lack of her voice in those moments for sure but she did leave, she herself left vibrant records. It is not like a lot of women in those times burn their letters. People didnt burn her letters, she sometimes wrote letters. I feel very lucky to have chosen a subject for this kind of she had a mania for writing. She called it preventing yes. Success, yes. I would like to think about that later. Anyone . We have anything . [applause] thank you. Thank you for coming out. If you have some time to line up that would be great. [applause]