Prepare to be schooled

Sarah Vowell tells us why it rocks to be a lady historian

By Erica Phillips
Published: November 10th, 2008 | 7:50pm

As a non-fiction writer, Sarah Vowell includes a lot more personality and witticism in her books and essays than one would find in typical historical research, and this is what many say makes her work readable and enjoyable. Vowell started her career in radio, and honed her unique voice as an essayist on NPR’s This American Life. She is widely known for her writing in McSweeney’s, her music reviews in Salon, and her earlier books, Take the Cannoli and Assassination Vacation.

In The Wordy Shipmates, Vowell’s fifth book and most recent release, our mistress of history digs up nearly every word written by and among the earliest English communities of the American Northeast — their quarrels and meeting minutes, journals and letters — then serves up the dry and muddy text with a fabulous frosting of humorist on top. Venus Zine caught up with Vowell between dates on her book tour this fall, and chatted about being a woman in her field. Though it’s not on her mind all too much — she’s got more serious stuff to think about! — she admitted she was relieved to talk about something other than New England Puritans for a change.

So who is your favorite female historical figure?
That I’ve written about? I hardly ever write about women because I tend to write about people in public life; before the 20th century that was almost all men. In this book, I write about Anne Hutchinson [who led her own alternative Bible study group, causing a scandal among Boston’s male religious leadership]. I have mixed feelings about her. I really admire how outspoken she was and how fearless — she definitely out-witted her accusers at her trial — but I find her to be also a harbinger of Evangelical Protestantism and, you know, also a crazy person who thought she heard the voice of God. I guess I tend to think anyone who says they hear the voice of God is a little mentally imbalanced.

Does it ever cross your mind that most of the people you’re studying are men? Is that at all an issue to you or is it just sort of a fact?
I mean, it kind of goes with the territory. Mainly the things I’ve written about are pre-20th Century public figures, especially governmental ones or writers or explorers. All of that is pretty male-dominated and I can’t go back in time and do anything about that. My next book is probably going to be about the history of Hawaii so I’ll definitely be writing about Queen Lili’uokalani, not because she’s a woman but because she’s the last monarch of Hawaii. So I don’t really care about that. It’s not my job to go back in time and be the PR person for my gender.

I have to say that almost always when I’m signing books, the people who get their book signed and say “I really hate history but I liked your book,” those people are almost always women. On the one hand, it’s great when someone tells me that I’ve got them interested in history, but I don’t know why it’s almost always women. I don’t know why women aren’t interested more in history, government, politics.

Your work often discusses history in the context of present-day politics, so I was wondering how you go about getting your information about the present, your news?
Basically, I have the news consumption habits of a 75-year-old man. I read the New York Times, I listen to the BBC from NPR. I’ve basically turned away from the 24-hour cable news programs, because it seems like it’s about ten minutes a day of things worth listening to and the rest is just yakking. I’m really on a kind of anti-yakking campaign. I’ve actually started — again, like an elderly person — going back to watching like the NBC Nightly News, the half-hour news broadcast.

Do you think history is enough a part of the news that we see and read?
Well, probably not. I don’t think there is enough of it, but it’s definitely how I see things. Like, I’m talking to you from St. Louis and I’ve never been here before. Just flying into Missouri I had all these things kicking around in my head: Louis and Clark and The Gateway to The West and “Isn’t Chuck Barry from here?” And, you know, Mark Twain, and the paintings of, oh-what’s-his-name, Thomas Hart Benton, and then of course the troubles between Kansas and Missouri leading up to the Civil War. So I really kind of see the world — especially this country — everything seems haunted. There’s plenty of that there if you look for it, but I don’t think it’s being offered to people on a doily every day.

The Wordy lady’s recommended reads:
1. Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer. Highly recommended, this is “a book about not being able to write a book about D.H. Lawrence.”
2. Early Bird: A Memoir of Premature Retirement, by then 27-year-old Rodney Rothman. “He moved to a retirement community in Florida,” Sarah explains, “and there are a lot of funny, you know, situations that he gets himself into.”
3. Have Mercy on Us All: A Novel (Chief Inspector Adamsberg Mysteries) by Fred Vargas. A detective novel thriller set in one of Sarah’s favorite crime-novel settings: Paris.
4. Murder in the Marais (Aimee Leduc Investigation) by Cara Black. Another Paris thriller. “In order to solve [the murder], the detective has to crack a case from the Nazi occupation of Paris in the 40s.”

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For more on Sarah Vowell, check out her website.
Click here to order The Wordy Shipmates