Ask an Author with Gill Paul
Sometimes you meet people who have the unique ability to bring others together. Historical novelist Gill Paul is one of those people.
For those who don’t know, Gill is the million-copy-selling author of books exploring the lives of real women who have been misunderstood by history. She is also the mastermind behind an occasional author lunch in London, which is a real delight and lifeline when you spend most of your time sitting alone at your desk writing books.
I was thrilled then when, at one of those lunches, when Gill told me that her next book would be about real-life titans of publishing Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins. That book is called Scandalous Women, and it is out now in the US and Canada! (Readers from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, the book comes out for you on August 29th.)
1966, NYC: Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls hits the bookstores and she is desperate for a bestseller. It’s steamy, it’s a page-turner, but will it make the big money she needs? In London, Jackie Collins’s racy The World Is Full of Married Men launches her career. But neither author is prepared for the price they will pay for being women who dare to write about sex.
Jacqueline and Jackie are lambasted by the literary establishment, deluged with hate mail, and even condemned by feminists. In public, both women shoulder the outcry with dignity; in private, they are crumbling—particularly since they have secrets they don’t want splashed across the front pages.
1965, NYC: College graduate Nancy White is excited to take up her dream job at a Manhattan publishing house, but she could never be prepared for the rampant sexism she will encounter. While working on Valley of the Dolls, she becomes friends with Jacqueline Susann, and, after reaching out to Jackie Collins about a US deal, she is responsible for the two authors meeting.
Will the two Jackies clash as they race to top the charts? Will Nancy achieve her ambition of becoming an editor, despite all the men determined to hold her back? Three women struggle to succeed in a man’s world, while desperately trying to protect those they love the most.
To celebrate the release of Scandalous Women, Gill has kindly agreed to an Ask An Author interview.
Without further ado, here’s Gill!
What initially drew you to the stories of Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins?
A reader messaged me on Instagram to say that my novel Manhattan Girls reminded her of her favorite novel of all time, Valley of the Dolls. I hadn't read Dolls so I bought a copy and as I turned the pages my creative brain started ticking over. Jacqueline Susann is not as well remembered today as Jackie Collins, but if I could include both of them in a novel, I reckoned I could cover some interesting ground. I knew they both had tragedies in their backgrounds, and I knew they'd both been pilloried for being women who wrote about sex. I didn't realize at first quite how much they changed the publishing world for the better.There’s also the story of Nancy, a young woman who arrives in New York City looking for a job in publishing. She experiences a lot as she works to establish her career, including everything from being passed over for promotion because of being a woman to outright sexual harassment at work. At the same time, Jacqueline and Jackie have their own struggles because of misogyny. Why was it important for you to highlight those challenges for each of these characters?
I was Nancy. Straight after college I started work in publishing and encountered misogynist bosses and authors with wandering hands who suggested it was part of my job to sleep with them. We can chuckle at shows like Mad Men, but it's important to remember how far we have come in combatting sexism so that we never slide backwards again.With any novel that draws on the lives of real people, there must be some big decisions that you as a writer need to grapple with when it comes to when to stick to established facts and when you need to take a little artistic liberty for the sake of the story. Can you talk a bit about how you handled this with Scandalous Women?
Both of the Jackies are dead but some of the people peripheral to the story are still alive, and my publisher's lawyer was adamant that I shouldn't dramatize scenes with real living people in them. And although he is described in biographies, it felt morally wrong to me to dramatize scenes with Jacqueline Susann's disabled son. Otherwise, I tried to stick largely to the facts and timelines of the two Jackies as far as I know them, but used novelistic license to fill in the gaps. Did they know each other? They easily could have, but their relationship in this novel is my invention.At times in this book, there is a sense of rivalry or at least friendly competition between Jacqueline and Jackie. You’ve written about relationships between women in the same industry before. (I’m thinking specifically about A Beautiful Rival, which highlights the legendary rivalry between titans of the cosmetics world Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein.) What do you think it is about professional rivalry that continues to fascinate readers?
Rivalry gives a novel instant dramatic tension: how far will they go to sabotage each other? Scandalous Women tells a very different story from that of Elizabeth and Helena, who really did hate each other. But I'm sure that Jacqueline Susann was peeved when a new, younger version of herself arrived on the scene: a glamorous ex-actress, who was also writing racy novels about sexually liberated women, but who was nineteen years her junior. From Jackie's side, I'm sure she was trying to emulate Jacqueline's overnight success in the US but it took longer for her. She didn't hit the New York Times bestseller list until Hollywood Wives came out in 1983.If someone is reading this and has never taken a chance on a Jacqueline Susann or Jackie Collins novel, where would you recommend they start?
Valley of the Dolls is a chunky page-turner, at 417 pages long. There are bits that could have done with more editing and bits that are dated, but it's a classic of its era. I also like The World is Full of Married Men because the cheating husband David gets such a satisfying come-uppance. Jackie's organized crime novels starring Lucky Santangelo are hugely popular, and Hollywood Wives is a fabulous paean to 80s consumerism.I always like to end these Ask an Author interviews with a question about what books you’ve recently been reading and loving. Do you have any recommendations?
I recently read Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and loved his colorful turns of phrase and the quirky character he created in Holly Golightly: "It's useful being top banana in the shock department," she trills. Ann Patchett's Tom Lake didn't disappoint, with its insightful story about the nuances of family life. And I'm currently reading Kerri Maher's All You Have to Do is Call, which reminds me of the 70s classic The Women's Room by Marilyn French – a group of women friends battling to have satisfying careers and marriages in a patriarchal society.
Gill Paul is the bestselling author of twelve historical novels, many of them about real women from the past whom she thinks have been marginalized or misjudged by historians. Her novels have reached the top of the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Toronto Globe & Mail charts, and have been translated into twenty-two languages.
You can find out more about Gill’s books and where you can purchase them at https://gillpaul.com/.