Unable to get hired by sexist editors, Parrott would become so famous with her fiction, magazine writing and movie deals - and for just being that relative novelty, an ex-wife - that they were compelled to cover her.įor better and a long slow slide into worse: three more husbands painful affairs (one with a pot-smoking Air Force private 17 years her junior ) multiple abortions the squander of her considerable earnings a federal indictment for helping the private desert a grand larceny charge and homelessness. Their divorce would inspire “Ex-Wife,” the most successful of her 20 books. Marsha Gordon, who has written a new biography, BECOMING THE EX-WIFE: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (University of California Press, 304 pp., $29.95), could not unearth a single obituary from 1957 when her subject died destitute, at 58, of what her son called “a mercifully fast cancer.” This neglect was particularly striking because Parrott had been adjacent to newspapermen for much of her unlong, action-packed life.īorn Katherine Ursula Towle, “lace-curtain Irish” in Dorchester, Mass., and educated at Radcliffe, she longed to be a reporter, and married one, Lindesay Parrott, who later worked for The New York Times.

In this mostly upward and exuberant history, the writer Ursula Parrott has been largely (and sadly) omitted. Probably someone was wandering around ancient Athens in a fetching tunic with a papyrus scroll detailing how Hermes got handsy.īut modern New York is where the genre has reached its apotheosis, from Edith Wharton to Beyoncé and beyond. The “young single woman in the city” genre feels almost as old as cities.

The paris wife novel