Katie Rothstein
Interview with Mary Gabriel
With each of her biographies, Mary Gabriel pulls off a balancing act. On the one hand, there is the research: rigorous and often leading to hundreds of pages of endnotes. On the other, there is her storytelling: fast-paced and scintillating. Gabriel’s works give the reader not only a picture of her characters, but a complete immersion in the social, political, and cultural histories of the eras in which they lived––all while remaining a joy to read.
Gabriel is the author of five books, including Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (2018), winner of the 2022 NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize for narrative nonfiction; and most recently, Madonna: A Rebel Life (2023), a near one thousand–page volume that meticulously charts the singer’s career as both a celebrity and an artist.
On a video call from her home in Ireland, we asked Gabriel to reflect on how she consistently makes biographies into page-turners that read more like thrillers.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: In the introduction to Ninth Street Women you wrote, “I’m interested less in a vertical history than a horizontal one. In other words, those experiences in people that influenced the artists rather than their chronological development.” Tell us about your process. How do you make history come alive?
MARY GABRIEL: What I was talking about is the idea that a lot of biographies are almost like an armature: it’s just the spine of a story. It’s the facts embellished enough that it becomes a book. I often feel like I’m reading a calendar of events: the person did this, the person did that. Those are valuable because you need that tree of life to start with, but I come away having more questions than answers.
I think a person isn’t those vertical events that create that armature. A person is the result of all the things that have happened to them, all the things that have impacted them, plus the times in which they live. It’s the idea that we’re really the sum of what we have experienced. So, with all of my books, the reason they become so long is that I need to tell all that backdrop.
The people who influence you change the whole course of your life. You might be going in one direction, and as soon as you interact with a certain person, you change directions entirely. A biographer’s duty is to describe that: why a character went from this route to that route. That’s what I was talking about, this horizontal thing. You, as the reader, are being carried along this life’s journey with the person in the same way they were. You’re experiencing not the vertical, but the horizontal. You’re being swept away in the wave of their life.
WSR: How do you start a project?
MG: By finding a subject. It has to be someone who’s going to hold my attention for many years. Once you commit to a book, and you’re in it, you’ve got to like the person or you’re going to lose your mind. Or, if you don’t like the person, you should at least be intrigued by them.
You have to also ask yourself when you’re looking for a subject, has this person been written about to death? You can take somebody who’s completely obscure and be pretty safe in that regard, but then you have to ask yourself, why is that person obscure? Is it just because history has been written by white men and this person has been neglected because they’re a Black woman or a Native American woman? Or is it because this person, as much as I’m interested in them, isn’t really all that interesting? So, you have to have an honest moment with yourself and ask, is this my obsession, or is this really somebody who the world needs to know about? And if you say yes, the world needs to know about them, then that’s good.
WSR: Regarding inspiration and being able to sustain interest in someone over the course of a long period, have you ever hit a wall with projects? Have you ever said to yourself, ‘I have to walk away from this?’
MG: Once you’re committed, you’re committed. If you’ve got a contract, that’s it. You do that real soul searching before you start writing. That’s when you ask, can I really do this? Is this really someone that I’m going to want to live with? Because you don’t just live with them for a few hours a day, you live with them twenty-four hours a day, for however many years. I can remember [with the Marx book] writhing all night long, dreaming about Karl Marx, not even anything in particular, just his name, Karl Marx, Karl Marx. You’ve really got to want to do that, because otherwise you will go nuts.
Madonna was the most difficult book I’ve written because she’s the only person I’ve ever written about who’s alive. That was a whole other set of considerations. Also, the fact that at a certain point in the project, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to talk to her because she wasn’t interested in talking to me represented a big obstacle. That was a moment when I had to say, can I do this book? Is this a valuable book? I was already several years into it. That was something I hadn’t experienced before. Instead, I tried to approach her as I did all my other subjects. She is so far outside of our world, our normal, pedestrian world, that she is almost a historical figure at this point. So, I could do my usual intense archival research. In fact, with her, there was as much material as Karl Marx. There was so much material that I was drowning in it. That was probably the closest I ever came to that moment of saying, should I do this? Can I do this? And the answer was yes, and I was pleased enough with the results.
As far as losing interest, I think the more time you spend with people, the opposite happens. You become more interested, and I think that helps your writing because if you’re excited by the subject, if you’re thrilled by the subject, then the reader is going to be also. Your excitement’s going to infect them.
WSR: You have such an affection for the people you write about without losing your ability to be critical and to actually put them in context. How do you feel like your process of discovery and coming to understand your subject informs the final work?
MG: I have been criticized for liking the people [I write about], being too friendly with them. But I can’t say I’m going to spend five years with this person if I don’t like them. How masochistic would that be? If I’m choosing a subject and a person, I want the reader to discover them the way I have, and learn why I like them. But I’m not saying lose your perspective. If you don’t like them, that’s fine with me too, but just give them a chance.
Every biography is a portrait of the writer and a portrait of the person they’re writing about. In that meshing of those two individuals––or in the case of Ninth Street Women, me and about seventy-five other people––it becomes a little bit of a friendship, if not a love affair. That’s bound to come out on the page, and there’s nothing wrong about that. Just like with a person you love or a person you’re friendly with, there are things that are going to annoy you, but you still like them. That’s how I am with my characters. I think you can keep that distance if you just realize that, although you might think of these people as friends and you might really love them, you also recognize they have flaws, as we all do.
Going back to Marx, there was a poet who he was friendly with in Paris in the 1840s. The guy was an absolute scoundrel. One of Marx’s daughters said to him, ‘How can you stand him?’ Marx said something like, poets are different kinds of people, artists are different kinds of people, and basically, you just have to cut them some slack. So, if you’re writing about these people, you have to realize they’re going to disappoint you, or they’re going to do things you don’t approve of, or they’re going to fall down in your estimation over the course of a book. But I think that’s great because how boring would it be to write about someone who was perfect, or someone who never disappointed you? I mean, that person wouldn’t be real.