Fresh Air - Actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor On The Complexity & Heartbreak Of Female Friendships

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

In The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat, Ellis-Taylor plays the outspoken ringleader among three women whose friendship spans several decades. Her previous films include Origin and King Richard. She talks with Tonya Mosley about growing up in rural Mississippi, buying two billboards, and getting into acting to stave off adulthood. Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews A Wilder Shore, by Camille Peri.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And my guest today, Oscar-nominated actor Anjanue Ellis-Taylor, is known for her emotionally resonant and nuanced performances. She chooses characters that personally connect with her, that allow her to communicate elements of herself and where she comes from. In 2023, for example, she starred as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

Isabel Wilkerson in Ava DuVernay's film Origin. She was so passionate about this role that when the movie came out, she stood outside of a movie theater in L.A. in front of a big poster with her face on it, passing out flyers to get people to see the film. Origin is based on Wilkerson's book Cast, where she explores the concept of caste systems, drawing parallels to India, Nazi Germany, and the United States. based on Wilkerson's book, Cast, where she explores the concept of caste systems, drawing parallels to India, Nazi Germany, and the United States. Anjanue Ellis-Taylor says she chose her latest role in the new movie,

The Supremes, at Earl's All You Can Eat, because it felt like a rebellion against the lack of curiosity Hollywood has had for stories about the lives of Black women. In the film, Ellis-T Ellis Taylor plays Odette, the fearless and outspoken ringleader among three women whose friendship spans several decades. Ellis Taylor's co-stars include veteran actors Sanaa Lathan and Uzo Aduba. The film is based on a novel written by Edward Kelsey Moore and is now streaming on Hulu. Ellis Taylor has won several awards for her performances and has been nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal in King Richard as Orsine Price, the mother of tennis

legends Venus and Serena Williams, alongside Will Smith, who played Richard Williams, their father. Ingenue Ellis Taylor, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you, Tanya. Thank you for having me. So, Anjanue, one of the things that's so fascinating to read about you is about how you choose roles to play because for a long time, you were an actor because you wanted to make money to support yourself and family members who were depending on you, which actually kind of feels like the opposite of why so many people get

into show business. Because typically, it's the passion that if folks are lucky leads to the paycheck. How did the inverse happen for you? I wasn't someone who, that they wanted to be an actor when they were young. I mean, it's interesting to hear other actors talk about their origin stories. And a lot of those stories start when they can barely walk. They see something and they know instinctively that that is what they want to do. And that's not what happened for me. I am from the rural South. I am from a town in Southwest Mississippi. And I think a couple of things were at play. I think I knew that I was a creative person. I knew that there was something weird about me. Let me just put it like that. I just knew there was something weird and

strange about me. Why? What was weird and strange? Well, you know, my grandmother, our family home, I still, you know, have today. My grandmother had a— Magnolia, Mississippi. Yeah, between Magnolia and Macomb. You know, it's one of those places that your listeners who live in the woods and on farms, you have a zip code that says you're in a town, but you're not really in that town. You just take the zip code that says you're in a town, but you're not really in that town. You just take the zip code assigned to you. So I'm actually in Macomb, Mississippi, but it's Magnolia, Macomb.

We had this room in our house, and we had two rooms. One was a room that was a study for my grandfather, who was a minister. And in that room, he had these books. And they were, some of them were, one of them was a dictionary that was, I'm sure when I was younger, probably half the size of my body. It was so big. He had geography books. He had science books. He had biographies. It was this world that I stepped into when I went into that study he had passed before I lived in the house. So all of these

books that he had were in this room. It was an escape room. And then we had another house, another room. And in that room is where I would take those books and I would sit in my grandmother's rocking chair and I would read those books. It was world building that I did when I was a kid. And was alone in that project. I don't think my, you know, I don't think my, you know, the folks that I went to school with for the most part, you know, was engaging in that kind of life as a child. So that's when I knew something was weird and strange about me,

that I had my eyes, I had my mind pointed in a direction that I couldn't, I didn't understand, but it was fascinating to me. You went on to Brown University and you studied African American studies. And if I remember correctly, there was someone there, a professor or someone who saw that you had this ability to act and pushed you in that direction. Yeah, I went to Tougaloo College in HBCU in central Mississippi. And this man, Jim Barnhill, he used to come to Tougaloo and he would direct these plays. He's actually from Mississippi as well, but he was a professor at Brown. So he would kind of come to Mississippi and direct these plays at Tougaloo.

Me and my friends auditioned for one of these plays. And from that experience, he said to me, you should consider doing this thing. And I just thought it was absurd because I did not have, I didn't have that example. You know, I didn't have that example at all. There was nobody from Macomb, Mississippi, from Mississippi that I knew that was doing that. I mean, the reality is there weren't a lot of black women doing that in general. It just felt like very alien to me. So he suggested that.

And I will be honest with you. He said you should leave Mississippi and go to Brown. So I applied to Brown. Somehow I got in. I'm sure with his, you know, putting a big word for me to get admitted into Brown and that happened. And then he said, you know, you should go to graduate school and study acting. And I said, okay, cool. Anything that will keep me from trying to have to find a job after college, I will do that.

That will stave off adulthood, I will do that. So I applied to a bunch of schools. I got into NYU, finished that. And I was able to find employment before I finished NYU. Was it in theater, your job out of college? Yeah, I had an acting job. And I think that if I did not have that job before I graduated from NYU, I don't think I would have continued to try to find acting work. I probably would have done

something else. I just didn't believe that it was a reality for me. Did you enjoy theater? You know, I, can I be honest? I'm gonna be honest with you. I love theater. I absolutely love theater. I just don't think that I'm a theater actor. And I think that's fair to say. I'm older now. So I can say, you know, I'm not, that's, I don't do that well. You know, it's not for me. I didn't have the best experience being a theater actor. And the reviewers in New York agreed with me. Oh, no. So just to clarify, when you got out of college, you were acting in the theater. And you were making money, though. It was enough for you to continue to get roles,

but you didn't enjoy it. Yeah, I was making, it was actually before I graduated from graduate school, I got an acting job in a play. So yeah, having that job saved me from actually going out and doing auditions and doing that. I just don't think that I would have continued down this road if I didn't have that job before I finished school. And, you know, the reality is, like I said, not only am I from the rural South, but, you know, I was a kid who was raised by my grandmother's fixed income. And, you know, I was, you know, an AFDC kid. I was raised on welfare.

My grandmother used to stand in line to get cheese and further, I would hate to say that I grew up in poverty because there was nothing impoverished about my life. Absolutely nothing. I grew up in wealth. We just didn't have money. For me to make that decision would have been irresponsible for me. I had to break that cycle. And so choosing a profession that had any measure of uncertainty was irresponsible in my eyes. So I didn't give myself permission to do that. It wasn't until you started getting offered roles that

reflected who you were that you started to have a passion for it, acting. When did it become a purpose? Was it a particular role? I think what happened was that a family member of mine, my mother, got ill, and she couldn't live at home by herself anymore. And I was in New York, really kind of flailing around. And my sister got married and I wanted my sister, my sister had been staying with my mother for a long time. And I wanted my sister to have a life. I wanted her to live with her husband and my nephew and have a life of her own. So I moved back home to Mississippi to be with my mother.

And something switched in me. Something turned in me. I was back at home. I was with my mother. I was back in the house that I was raised in. I mean, I was always there. I was there a lot. But I was living there now, right? My mail came there. And it was an urgency that took over. And my income was being used to take care of my mother. comfortable, to be as healthy as she possibly could living with a disease that she would eventually die of, which is Parkinson's disease. And so to do that, I had to switch how I thought about this thing called acting, because even though, you know, it may not have been my first love, I didn't think I was particularly good at it, but somehow I kept getting hired for these jobs. So I said, okay, if these people are going to keep hiring me, guess what? I'm going to go uterus to the wall with it

and do the thing because I have to take care of my mother. And the other part of it is, is I was back in Mississippi. And so I was back in a place where to go to the grocery store, go to the drug store, to go get gas, I would have to drive by Confederate flags all day, every day. Now, if somebody put a Confederate flag in the middle of Brooklyn or the middle of Los Angeles, it would be a riot. But I live in a place where Confederate flags and the flags of the KKK are everywhere, everywhere. And so the other part of it is, is I knew that I could not, this was unacceptable to me. It had always been unacceptable to me, but it was a sleeping bear, right? And so I had to wake that bear up.

And the way to wake that bear up was to use that money that I was getting from these jobs and do this sort of work that I was doing to wake that bear up. One of the things that I did was, and this is when I first got back home, One of the things that I did was, and this is when I first got back home, one of the things that I did was I purchased a billboard on Highway 55 in Jackson, Mississippi, which is the capital of Mississippi. I purchased a billboard and I had written on the billboard,

We Shall Overcome, the iconic song from the civil rights movement. I had it written, those words, I had them written in Confederate flags. What was the message that you were trying to give? I mean, people, black people and white people were kind of upset by it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This this man who had a store in the mall and his son was making making T-shirts and these are black. This is a black man and a black, you know, had a black son, obviously. And this he was doing making making T-shirts and printing some of these T-shirts and sweatshirts with the Confederate flag on them. So I went to that store and I confronted them about doing it because I was astounded that that they would do. They're participating in something that celebrates black genocide. And so I confronted them about it. And then he said to me,

he realized through the conversation that he was having with me, he said, you're that woman who put that billboard on 55 on Highway 55. I said, yes, I am. And he just went in on me. He was so angry with me because he felt that I defiled something that was sacred because I put Confederate flags with written, I wrote, we shall overcome and I did it with Confederate flags. And he felt I was desecrating we shall overcome by writing that anthemic phrase in Confederate flags. He thought I was desecrating that. That's the exact reaction I wanted him to have because I wanted black people to be angry and I wanted white people to be angry. And I got both reactions. That was your first sort of billboard campaign.

Was it just one billboard? For that, yes. And then what's funny, because I wanted to do more of them, but they got hip to me. So they stopped. They stopped it. When you say they, the companies. I would call all the companies because the companies, yeah, they were refusing me. Companies like Lamar, I would call them. I would try to get somebody else to call so it wouldn't be me because they didn't necessarily know it was, you know, they don't know me from Adam, but they know that they knew about that billboard. And they tried to stop me in every way that they could.

But a few years later, then you had another billboard in Florida. Can you tell us about that one? Last summer, this was after Roe was overturned, I did a panel or something. And in the panel, you know, I said that I've had an abortion. And I was sitting next to someone. And as they were talking, I could tell that they were uncomfortable saying that they had had one as well. And so within their conversation, they revealed that they had had one and there were family members in the room. And they said, nobody knows that I did this. I'm actually telling my family members as I'm saying this that I had an abortion. And I realized, OK, there's so much shame around this. more women would say, would talk about their reproductive histories, no matter what,

whether they had the child or not had the child or whatever they chose to do, that it would shift the conversation around it. And so, because I liked the billboards, I did another billboard. And I wanted it to be in Florida. And I wanted it to be in the backyard, in the front yard of Ron DeSantis. What did it say? My name is Anjanue Ellis, and I had an abortion. What was the reaction? I didn't get a whole lot of reaction. And also the other thing that prompted that is that my family and I went on a family trip to Disney World last summer. And if you drive down any highway

in Florida, every other billboard is, I believe it's intimidation. It is a billboard saying, you know, what would Jesus want you to do with the baby? You know, every other billboard is like that. And ultimately, I didn't get a lot of reaction. I'm going to continue to do these things. But I just got to make sure that people know that I'm doing that. But for me, it wasn't so much about the reaction that I got. It was I was reclaiming space. I was claiming space. So if I had that billboard saying my name is Anjanue Ellis and I had an abortion, that was one less billboard that they could use to intimidate women. Our guest today is Oscar-nominated actor Anjanue Ellis Taylor. We're talking about the new movie she stars in called The Supremes at Earl's All You Can Eat.

More of our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Hey, it's Aisha Roscoe from NPR's Up First podcast. I'm one of thousands of NPR network voices coming to you from over 200 local newsrooms across the country. We bring all Americans closer together through free and independent journalism, music, politics, culture, and so much more.

The NPR Network. What you hear changes everything. Learn more at npr.org slash network. Truth, independence, fairness, transparency, respect, excellence. This is NPR. Hey there, this is Felix Contreras, one of the co-hosts of Alt Latino, the podcast from NPR Music where we discuss Latinx culture, music, and heritage with the artists that create it. Listen now to the Alt Latino podcast from NPR. I want to talk a little bit about your latest movie, The Supremes at Earl's All You Can Eat, because it reminds me, it sort of reminds me of classics like Fry Green Tomatoes and Waiting to Exhale because it's tender and it's complex. It shows as best it can, you know, kind of like a 360 degree look at a woman and women characters interacting with each other. And you play the role of Odette, who's best friends with two other women who together, the three of you call yourselves the Supremes.

It's a nickname given by Earl, the owner of the diner where you all would hang out. What did you love most about this story and your character in particular? On a practical level, I just looked forward to working with women, having scenes with women. A lot of the work that I had done prior to that, I hadn't done any work with women. I hadn't been in any scenes with women. So I was just excited about the prospect of that. I was excited about working with Tina Mabry, another Mississippian, who directed a film called Mississippi Damned. And it was just so good. And Tina has said this, and I echo it, and it actually echoes a conversation I had with a friend of mine earlier this summer. And we were talking about how we don't necessarily relate to traditional movies that are about romance,

because they come from, you know, very hetero approach, a very hetero angle, you know, it's all about a woman and a man. And, you know, it has those tropes. And, you know, I'm a queer woman. So that adds to, you know, my just being sort of like, when are they going to tell stories about, you know, women, you know, being in love? So there's that. to that is that we were talking, my friend and I were talking about how we feel that friendships between women are as complex and as, you know, tormenting and heartbreaking as any love story. Yes, they are love stories.

They are love stories. They're great romances. And as someone who has had, you know, friends that have come and they've gone, you know, friends that have passed away, it is a heartbreak. It is more heartbreaking, actually, sometimes is when, you know, some girl or guy, you know, decided to kick me to the curb, you know? It is as significant, and we don't give it that kind of space in media, and that's why I appreciated the story so much. I was thinking about how you said this movie is a rebellion against the lack of curiosity about the interior lives of women, and Black women in particular in Hollywood, and it's forces like that

that actually create the beauty of friendship and excellence that we see on the screen it's a very interesting dynamic I mean do you see it that way yeah I do I I think that we we together in the margins, you know? What do you mean by that? When you are living in a world that refuses to value you, refuses to see you, you look for the eyes that do. And, you know, we all have those people in our lives, those black women in our lives, if you're a black woman, you know, you have that community of women that can be built around, we see each other, we see each other, we value each other, we find each other glorious,

we celebrate each other, we cheer each other. We defend each other against a world that refuses to acknowledge sometimes our lives. Yeah, and there's tremendous power in that. There's tremendous power in that. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest today is award-winning actor Anjanue Ellis-Taylor. She stars in the new film The Supremes at Earl's All You Can Eat, which is now streaming on Hulu. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. Today we're talking to Oscar and Emmy-nominated actor Angenue Ellis-Taylor. She stars as Odette in the new movie The Supremes at Earl's All You Can Eat. It's a coming-of-age film about the lives of three women whose friendship spans over decades. Ingenue Ellis-Taylor also starred in Ava DuVernay's 2023 film Origin.

In that film, she plays Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson. Origin is based on Wilkerson's book Cast, where she explores the concept of caste systems, drawing parallels to India, Nazi Germany, and the United States. Here's a clip from Origin, and in this scene, Isabel Wilkerson is at a small dinner party in Germany. They are talking about the differences and parallels between the U.S. and Germany. The German host speaks first. You have 900 shootings a week, it seems, in America, and you keep giving people guns. I don't understand it. Oh, dear, we don't even understand it ourselves.

We don't understand. You know, I heard here that displaying the swastika is a crime. Three years in prison? Yes, that's true. I mean, it's not tolerated. Well, in America, the Confederate flag, which is like your swastika, the flag of murderers and traitors, it is a part of the official flag of one of our states, Mississippi. Men who wanted to wage war for the right to own other human beings, statues of them sprinkled all over the country right now. That's Anjanue Ellis-Taylor and Ava DuVernay's 2023 film, Origin. And Anjanou, the host then goes on

to kind of refute this comparison between Nazi Germany and American racism. And is it true that in that moment, you all actually rearranged that scene? Yeah, we did. But ultimately, we did it as written. And, you know, Ava and I kind of had a, you know, bit of a disagreement.

I wanted Isabel to have the last word in that scene. I wanted that real bad. But Ava didn't want that. Yeah. And I think it's important to know that this is actually more of these words belong to Ava than they do Ms. Wilkerson, that this whole idea of what happened here is, across the Middle Passage, is tantamount to genocide. It is genocide.

And it's a genocide that continues because, you know, Sonia Massey died two weeks ago. So that was Ava's voice there. And I just I think it was a significant, significant moment. Yeah. And, you know, it was cool for me to be able to be from Mississippi and to say those words about Mississippi. And she let me, you know, she let me, you know, put in a couple lines there. Isabel, in the film, she loses both her husband and her mother within a short window of time. And it was through this character that you allowed us a window inside of her personal grief.

And I think you actually have said it's one of your unfortunate gifts as an actor to accurately portray grief. And you actually enjoy it. Can you describe that satisfaction that you feel in being able to articulate grief so well? Well, I mean, I say that it is something that I bring with me to work because I live with loss. I don't think there's a person alive right now that are going through the last few years that we have gone through as a world, as citizens of the world. We all are suffering loss, even if we don't know anybody who personally died. We know what loss that we've experienced just in a way of life. Just certain things that we took for granted, that we can't take for granted anymore.

And I told a friend of mine recently, I said, a new friend, I said, to know me is to know that I miss my mother. So that is what I am. It is a part of my identity. I am living the rest a part of my identity. I am living the rest of my life without my best friend. That ain't so good. So I bring that to work with me every day. What makes it a gift is that I get to utilize that or appropriate that in the service of portraying the brilliance that is Isabel Wilkerson. That is the gift.

I want everybody in this world to know who Isabel Wilkerson is. Isabel Wilkerson is an academic. She's a journalist. She's a scholar. And her book, Cast, if you are not a reader of nonfiction, you may not know who she is. You may not know of the book cast but in terms of the importance and the significance of the message

of that book every citizen of the world needs to know about that so to be the face of that man come on come on can I ask you about your mother yeah you recently

a few years ago added her last name to your name. You were Anjanue Ellis, and now you're Anjanue Ellis Taylor, in anniversary of her departure. And I just felt what I feel every year, which is just a, you know, something ain't right. Something is wrong, you know. When did she pass? She passed away April 4th, 2019. Yeah. I'm sorry for your loss.

Yeah, no, no, no, no. Hey, listen, we all got it. And, you know, every mother is a mother, but every mother isn't a friend. And my mother was my best friend. So that's why I carry it with me, you know, in the way that I do. But, yeah, you know, my father, I don't don't know him very I don't know him at all and I said you know I'm my name gets called in all these like top flight places you know what I'm saying like when they called my name out at the academy awards they said his name and I was like I don't know that dude. I don't know him.

Why should he get the glory? So I said, I need to carry her name with me. So if something good happens, you know, I want her included. You're close with your mom and also your grandma, too. Your grandma also raised you, too, right? Yeah, they did some co-parenting. I thought it was interesting how you said your grandma showed you her belief in you, not through words, but through actions.

What were some of the ways she did that? So she wasn't someone who was, you know, particularly like, girl, you can do it. That's not what she did. But I'll tell you this little story. I've told it before. They had a program because we're always having programs in the Baptist Church. We had a program and it was on a Sunday night. And I had a poem that I was assigned to read that recite that night because we didn't read anything. You had to recite everything at New Home Baptist Church. So I had a poem that I had memorized, and I was going to say it that night. And it was a torrential rainfall. We lived on a dirt road. And I said, Grandmama, I want to

go to church tonight to say my poem. And she said, Girl, it's raining. We can't. I don't want to do that. I don't want to get caught in the rain. I mean, it was terrible. The weather was horrible. But I was a kid. I don't know about that.

I didn't care. I just wanted to say my poem. We got in the car and as we were leaving out of the house to go to church, the car got stuck in the mud. And my grandmother got out of this car and pushed that car out of the mud and took me to church so I could say my poem. So my grandmother never said to me, girl, you're going to be somebody. But she pushed that car out of that dirt so I could go say my 10 line poem at church on a Sunday night. So I didn't need her to say it. She showed it to me. She showed it. Who named you Anjanue? My mother. Yeah, she had a lot of kooky friends in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. And they came up with it. I'm sure they were high. I'm sure something was being smoked at the time. But yeah.

You still have a strong presence, connection in Mississippi. And my grandparents on both sides come from Mississippi too. And one thing I've always known is that they fled because they were forced to during the Great Migration because of the lack of opportunity and racist terror. But it's not like they wanted to. And if they could have, they would have built a life there. You could live anywhere in the world. You choose to continue to have, to hold space there, to make it your home. That feels like a radical act. Do you see it that way? Why do you still, when you could live anywhere else in the world, choose to make that your home? Yeah, my aunts and uncles, my mother, they all left.

And all of them wanted to have other choices, other economic choices. Their father went through hell. His church was bombed, and he was arrested for bombing his own church. Wow. So they wanted to get away from that. Exodus, what it did is it made space for forces that could, you know, occupy the space and turn it into what it is now, which is a neo-confederacy. And I have to fight against that. And one of the ways to do that is just to be present.

It's just to be present. It's not even being political. You know, I've done political stunts and that kind of thing. But it is just to really be present. It really is. I hear so many stories of my friends

who had, my grandmama's from my uncle. Now they stay. They we got land down there. We got land. And I tell them all the time, you need to go back. Go back. Register to vote. Go back.

Because that is the way that we can turn it around is we have to be present. We have to be present. So for me, that's what it means. It means just we have to be present. We have to be present. So for me, that's what it means. It means just I have to be present there. I just can't let them have the space. I can't let the Confederates have that space. I have to be there in order to fight that. Anjanue, this was such a pleasure to talk with you. I could talk with you forever, but thank you so much for this conversation. Oh, thank you. Thank you for wanting to talk to me. I really, really appreciate it. I'm telling

you, Fresh Air was a dream of mine, and you made it come true, and I thank you. Anjanue Ellis-Taylor stars in the new film The Supremes at Earl's All You Can Eat. It's now streaming on Hulu. Coming up, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews A Wilder Shore by Camille Perry. This is Fresh Air. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says that summer is a great time to lose yourself in a big biography, and she thinks she's found a wonderful one. Here's Maureen's review of A Wilder Shore by Camille Perri. As a portrait of a marriage, it's bizarre. I'm talking about

the dual portrait John Singer Sargent painted in 1885 of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson. Louis, whose first novel, Treasure Island, had been published two years earlier, is captured pacing in a darkened room. Tall and thin, Lewis looks every inch like an insane stork, which is how fellow writer Henry Adams described him. Lewis stares out beyond the confines of the portrait at us, the viewers, as if to share an idea he's just had. Fanny sits barefoot on a chair at the opposite by an admirer of her husband's to diminish her. I am but a cipher under the shadow, she complained to Sargent. Camille Perry's lively and substantive dual biography of the Stephensons called A Wilder Shore, whisks those obscuring

draperies off Fanny and restores her to full personhood. But Perry aims for something even more ambitious in this biography than a feminist recovery of a mostly forgotten wife of a famous writer. In her introduction, Perry describes her book as an intimate window into how the Stephensons lived and loved, a story that is at once a travel adventure, a journey into the literary creative process, and I hope an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life. Inspiration is something of a quaint term these days in lit grit circles, and yet it's always been an abiding draw of biographies. Speaking for myself, after reading A Wilder Shore, I'm inspired to do two things. I want to reread Robert Louis Stevenson's three great works of fiction, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And I want to schedule a seance with Fanny to get some one-on-one instruction on how to live more fearlessly as a woman.

Perry opens A Wilder Shore with a scene that could have been written by Lewis, but instead was lived by Fanny. 1875, she and her three children and their governess rushed aboard a train in San Francisco to cross the country and catch a ship in New York Harbor that would carry them to Belgium. This was no pleasure trip. To reach their destination, the little band rode a wagon through floodwaters. But Fanny was desperate to escape her humiliating marriage to a prospector who lived openly with his mistress. With the little money she'd earned by sewing, Fanny planned to enroll herself and her teenage daughter in art school. Hurtling into the unknown put the 36-year-old, still-married mother of three in the orbit of Robert Louis Stevenson, a sickly Scottish writer who was 10 years her junior. It was love at first sight, at least for Louis. Perry says that Fanny likely saw their affair as something that could not last.

For him, though, sexual intimacy with Fanny was not simply a romp with an older woman. It cemented his emotional commitment to her, a kind of role reversal that is striking for a Victorian man. Of course, the Stephensons' union caused dismay among Lewis's friends, who disparaged Fanny for her age, her Americanness, her short hair and cigarette smoking, and, most virulently, her olive skin. As convincing as she is about the progressive relationship between the Stevenson's, Perry is also clear-eyed about the fact that Fanny still got the somewhat shorter end of the stick. While Lewis respected Fanny as his best critic, he also assumed she would handle the mundane household routine and provide nursing care. Lewis's undiagnosed illness, he chronically coughed up blood, did have the upside of broadening the couple's life through travel in search of a healthier climate. They spent their final years together before Lewis's death in 1894 at the age of 44 in Samoa.

Fanny lived on for 20 more years, writing, traveling, and attracting male protégés. No doubt, her contemporaries derided her for that, too. But thanks to Perry's vivid biography, Fanny has the last fearless laugh. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed A Wilder Shore by Camille Perry. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, author and scholar Frank Garritti joins us to talk about his new book, The Stadium, an American history of politics new book, The Stadium, An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play, where he chronicles how stadiums are our nation's public squares

and the battle over race, class, gender, and sexual identity. Join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producers are Molly C.V. Nesper and Sabrina Siewert. Roberta Shurock directs the show.

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