About the Author

Ursula Parrott (1899-1957) was born Katherine Ursula Towle in Dorchester, Massachusetts. After graduating from Radcliffe College, she became a newspaper reporter in New York and married her fellow journalist Lindesay Marc Parrott. The experience of their divorce helped inspire her first novel, Ex-Wife, which was published anonymously in 1929 and sold 100,000 copies in its first year. Parrott became one of the most successful female writers of the 1930s, adapting several of her bestsellers for the screen, including Strangers May Kiss and Next Time We Live. Her tumultuous private life included three more marriages, rumored liaisons with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and the jazz guitarist Michael Neely Bryan. She died of cancer on a charity ward in New York, having spent the small fortune she earned with her pen. Alissa Bennett is an essayist whose work addresses fandom, celebrity, and popular culture.

Marc Parrott (1923-1988) was the only son of Lindesay Marc Parrott and Ursula Parrott.

Reviews

"As it went on I found myself more and more moved by the writer's ability to render on the page the complexity of lost love coupled with the loss of first youth, and then second youth. Quite remarkable."--Vivian Gornick "Take one shot of Dorothy Parker and two shots of Dawn Powell, stir briskly, add a sour cherry, and you have the intoxicating Ex-Wife."-- "Air Mail" "The 'young single woman in the city' genre feels almost as old as cities . . . But modern New York is where the genre has reached its apotheosis, from Edith Wharton to Beyonce and beyond. In this mostly upward and exuberant history, the writer Ursula Parrott has been largely (and sadly) omitted . . . [Let us] revel in the surprising freshness of its prose . . . Ex-Wife depicted remarkable erotic freedom . . . The other thing that glows in Ex-Wife, and the biography of its author, is New York City: the lights, the fights, the freedoms, constraints and terrible costs."--Alexandra Jacobs "New York Times" "Deftly crafted, wryly observed, and thoroughly unsettling . . . Caught between Victorian sexual mores and the libertinism of interwar Greenwich Village, Patricia brings a gimlet eye to the pervasive misogyny and sexual hypocrisies of her generation."--Jessica Fletcher "The Baffler
" "Like Fitzgerald but from a woman's perspective . . . Ex-Wife is a sharply observed, intimate account of a failed marriage, several failed love affairs, an abortion, numerous alcoholic interludes and one-night stands . .. as if Dorothy Parker, Noel Coward, and Oscar Wilde had collaborated to examine the war between the sexes in the post-Victorian era."--Joyce Carol Oates "New York Review of Books" "Ex-Wife is every bit as engaging and thought-provoking as it was in 1929. The novel can be read as a period piece about the 1920s, the emergence of flappers and independent career women, but it is also an anatomy of a marriage and a divorce that takes a searing look at a conflicted woman . . . The novel's passages on female friendship are as profound as Patricia's efforts to become her own woman in the company of the men she desires."--Carl Rollyson "New York Sun" "Ex-Wife presented readers and critics with a new woman, one who was pursuing new vocational, economic, and romantic freedoms. She spent her days chasing a career, while her nights were a boozy smear of restaurants, speakeasies, and amorous encounters. She was exciting and discomfiting and morally questionable . . . But Ex-Wife, which is now being reissued (by McNally Editions) for the first time in more than thirty years, wasn't the racy, frothy endorsement of cosmopolitan white women's liberation that readers were primed to expect."--Jessica Winter "New Yorker" "Told with a polished Jazz Age dandyism, Ex-Wife resonates at a subtle but unmissable emotional frequency, which is what makes it feel so contemporary. While reading, I found myself taking screenshots to send to friends of almost every page."--Zsofia Paulikovics "AnOther Magazine" "Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife . . . gives us an idea of what it would be like to walk into [a] museum and or gallery and see a portrait of how we might have looked [then]: all of us dressed in stylish flapper clothes, swilling bootleg gin, chattering and flirting."--Francine Prose "The first thing I wondered [reading Ex-Wife] is where it had been all my life . . . A shockingly anticipatory account of what it means to want and what it means to be left; we live in a world where most of us know the feeling of both."--Alissa Bennett "from her Foreword"