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Alice Bolin

Interview by Lily McLemore

In her debut collection of essays, Dead Girls, Alice Bolin explores America’s undeniable fascination with murdered, maligned and silenced women. Here, we ask her about serial killers, Britney Spears and LA freeways. 

What do you think is the driving force behind America’s obsession with dead girls?
There are probably too many forces to get into. The noir Dead Girls are like contemporary America’s version of Catholic virgin martyrs, whose bodies were also the site of both veneration and violence, and whose deaths often sprang from male hunger and rage. These are ambiguous icons. Dead Girls are the most potent evidence we have of our culture’s misogyny—but their prevalence also seems like a way to police women’s behavior, a warning that theirs could be our fate. The popular obsession with dead women is symptomatic of America’s deeper feelings and biases toward women. What do you think some of these deeper feelings are? I think it probably says more about our feelings about men—the way their primacy in our society bulldozes everyone else’s desire, success and freedom. Violence against women is startlingly common. Women are so often collateral damage in men’s refusal to deal with failure or frustration. Many noir stories take this everyday misogyny and make it about—who else?—men. Fascinatingly twisted and broken murderers take helpless victims while stoic detectives face the evil of humanity by avenging the Dead Girl. Women’s daily desires and fears are often completely absent in these stories.

The Dead Girl is everywhere, from “Twin Peaks” to popular fiction and “Dateline.” Can you give a general character sketch of the titular Dead Girl?
I would say in general a Dead Girl is a pretty, white teenager who is either mysteriously missing or horribly murdered, though those demographic markers vary. Most importantly, the Dead Girl captures the popular imagination—the Dead Girl obsession is absolutely related to what Gwen Ifill famously called “missing white woman syndrome” when discussing the ways that media coverage of white female victims took precedence over every other victim of violent crime. These dead women have more in common with glamorous poster girls than “characters”—we don’t know the Black Dahlia or Natalee Holloway or a victim on “Law and Order: SVU” in anything other than smiling snapshots or gruesome crime scene images.

Why do you think there is a tendency to mythologize serial killers, to make them seems almost supernatural and hyper-intelligent, when in reality, they are, as Jess Walter writes, “the kind of broken, weak-minded loser who preys on women on the fringe of society”?
The myth that serial killers are superhumanly charming, manipulative, intelligent and cruel keeps us from finding more systemic reasons for why many men have gotten away with brutalizing and killing women over and over again for years—law enforcement’s attitudes towards both marginalized women and middle class white men, for instance. It also makes one feel less guilty about our very basic fascination with hideous violence.

Can you explain the evolution of your understanding of the Britney Spears song “. . . Baby One More Time”?
“. . . Baby One More Time” came out when I was in fifth grade, and I swear I had this weird, immediate sense that it had changed the paradigm of pop music. The song’s lyrics are opaque, but its sonics are unforgettable; the images in the music video are so vivid, and yet they do very little to illuminate the song’s meaning. I was 25 when this repeating lyric in the song struck me: “My loneliness is killing me.” What a strange and yet appropriate thing for a teeny-bopper to sing! Loneliness is one of my abiding interests in this life, since we all go through it, but we go through it alone. It made me think deeper about Britney and her genius.

What about your relationship with the writing of Joan Didion?
Didion is one of my heroes, as she has been for a generation of women writers. I essentially moved to Los Angeles because of her. I wanted to absorb some of the brainy, sun-soaked alienation she traded in. I have evolved from simple hero worship with Didion, though, especially in writing this book, where I have had to confront some of the problems I see in her approach. I always loved her as a writer of place, but her California mythmaking is attractive because it calcifies a complex, changing place to an idea. Her stubborn romanticism about California is interesting because in general she is so skeptical, which is probably her strength as a writer; in her analyses, she takes very little for granted. But when you are skeptical of everything, it is difficult to make moral judgments. The concerns of the rich and poor, the powerful and powerless are all equally hollow and ridiculous.

Do you see parallels between media’s coverage of attractive murdered women and the coverage of female celebrity icons?
Yes! That is one reason why I chose to think about those living icons—Britney Spears, Joan Didion, Patty Hearst—in the same book as the dead ones. To me this is about that damaging, amoral concept of glamour, where women are valued for being sexy, stylish and mysterious, and a woman can be equally glamorous walking a red carpet or, as Patty Hearst did, spraying Crenshaw Boulevard with bullets. There is a very cruel glamour to being a Dead Girl, which is why the #deadgirl hashtag on Instagram is filled with selfies from living, if spooky, women. Being valued for your loveliness and silence, for the mystery you represent, is not limited to Dead Girls, and is a tendency I think living women should be wary of playing to.

The only thing I think about when I think about Los Angeles (a place I’ve never been) is freeways. Didion writes that the experience of driving in LA is a “kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway.” What’s your relationship to LA’s famed roadways?
I grew up in Idaho, where, as my dad so often said, “There are no roads.” It is one of two states without a north-south interstate highway, and much of the state is wilderness. I had never experienced driving on freeways like the ones in Los Angeles before I moved there—like, ever—and had to learn the rules of driving on them by Googling it. But because I grew up in such an isolated place, driving for hours and hours to get somewhere feels very natural to me. Driving across LA on a congested freeway felt like an extension of, say, driving the lonely stretches of I-90 in eastern Montana. Nevertheless I walked and rode the bus far more than anyone else I knew in LA, for financial reasons and because if I moved my car there was always a chance I wouldn’t be able to find another parking place. Those alternative modes of transportation were just another dimension to the impossibility of getting anywhere in LA and more public opportunities to listen to music on my iPod and cry.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Dead Girls.

Photo credit Justin Davis

In her debut collection of essays, Dead Girls, Alice Bolin explores America’s undeniable fascination with murdered, maligned and silenced women. Here, we ask her about serial killers, Britney Spears and LA freeways.
NonfictionArts & CultureArt

Mary Beard

Interview by Alice Cary

Mary Beard has an extraordinary knack for making art history palatable. She has been called “Britain’s most beloved intellectual,” and this summer Queen Elizabeth II honored her many achievements by naming her a dame.

She is a classics professor at the University of Cambridge, but her scholarly journey seems to have started with a piece of cake. As a 5-year-old in 1960, she visited the British Museum, where she desperately wanted a better look at a 3,000-year-old carbonized piece of cake from ancient Egypt. That’s when a curator did something she’ll never forget: He reached for his keys, opened up the case and put that piece of cake right in front of the wide-eyed little girl.

Speaking by phone from her home in Cambridge, England, Beard acknowledges, “The idea that some old guy, or so he seemed to me, sees a kid trying to look, and what he does is open the door for you­—that’s a moving moment.”

Opening up doors to history is exactly what Beard has been doing in her long career as a professor, television host and author, including in her bestselling revisionist history of ancient Rome, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. This spring, she was featured in a new BBC series, “Civilizations,” which is now available on PBS.

In highly readable prose accompanied by a wealth of pictures, her companion book to the series, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization explores both the depiction and reception of ancient art. She examines images of the human body, and also of God or gods. In doing so, she travels the globe and gallops through history, witnessing a sunrise in Cambodia at Angkor Wat, visiting art-filled caves in India, traipsing through the Mexican jungle to see Olmec heads, wandering through the ranks of China’s terra-cotta warriors and admiring a modern Turkish mosque in Istanbul.

“You start to see how these things are incorporated into our own lives and the lives of people of the past.”

She’s a plain-spoken, down-to-earth guide, from the top of her long, flowing gray hair down to her fashionable sneakers, which allow her to get up close and personal with a cavalcade of art masterpieces. Her enthusiasm is contagious as she clambers alongside a 65-foot-high Roman statue, the Colossi of Memnon, saying, “I’ve waited half my life to be here!”

“Blimey!” Beard recalls. “That’s when you realize it’s vast. I’m sitting on his foot, and that’s big, and there’s a whole statue there.” Later in our conversation she circles back to how affected she was by these encounters: “If I look impressed and a bit moved, it’s because I was. It’s kind of exciting and slightly terrifying in a way, to be so up close to those things. I’ll never forget it.”

Unlike many art historians, Beard doesn’t simply focus on the lives and methods of artists, whom she describes as “one damn genius after the next.” Those stories interest her, but she points out that there’s much more to contemplate.

“I think that just as—or more—interesting is what people made of [the art], how they saw it and what they did with it,” she says. “Simply to concentrate on that one moment in which this work of art was created—usually by a male creative genius—is not to see enormous amounts about the history of the object: [not only] what it was for at the time—how people understood it then, how radical it was then—but also what happened to it over 2,000 years and how people have used it differently and thought about it.”

She notes, “We’re in the picture, too. That all has to be part of the discussion. It’s widening the sense of what the history of art is. As I say, ‘putting us back in the picture.’”

Take nudes, for instance. Today’s art viewers take them for granted, or as Beard phrases it, “not just one damn genius after another, but one damn Venus after another.” But the idea of displaying the naked female body was once really “in your face,” as first evidenced by the Aphrodite of Knidos, carved by Greek sculptor Praxiteles around 330 BCE. Nudes have now become “part of the stereotype of the greatest hits of world art,” Beard says, then offers a counter perspective: “It’s quite important to think about why something that we now think of as very much part of the standard tradition was, once upon a time, so difficult, awkward and upsetting, actually.”

While affirming that she’s a great admirer of museums, Beard cautions that they “encourage you to look at objects in kind of standardized ways.” In contrast, she loved seeing artworks that were “either somehow in their original setting in churches or were kind of out there, just in the world.” One high point was a visit to an unfinished sculpture still in its quarry in Naxos, Greece, which offered a very comfortable place to sit.

“This sculpture has been in the world of this village for two and a half thousand years now,” she notes. “You start to see how these things are incorporated into our own lives and the lives of people of the past.”

Beard hopes that both the book and television series will give museum-goers more ownership of what they see. “I hope they’ll feel closer to [the art] and have a sense of a right to speak about it.”

She also offers this important advice for museum visits: “Don’t spend too long. Spend an hour there, look at three things, and then go away. Actually go and really get to know something. There’s nothing worse than watching people being somehow herded through museums.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m getting old,” Beard says, “but I find I get terrible museum legs after about an hour and a half.”

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Robin Cormack.

Mary Beard has an extraordinary knack for making art history palatable. She has been called “Britain’s most beloved intellectual,” and this summer Queen Elizabeth II honored her many achievements by naming her a dame.

NonfictionLiteratureArts & Culture

Anne Boyd Rioux

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

In the loving and extensively researched Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux explores the history and enduring power of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In a Q&A with Rioux, we asked her about her own relationship with Alcott’s novel, the March sisters and other female authors of the era. 

You first read Little Women in your 20s. What led you to the book at this time? How did it affect you upon first reading?
I first read Little Women in graduate school. It was assigned in a course on American literary realism as a kind of companion piece to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It meant a lot to me then to read about Jo’s literary ambitions and her conviction, as she says at the end of the book, that she believes she will write better books one day for her experiences as a wife and mother. When my daughter was born about 10 years later, I gave her the middle name Josephine, so obviously it really stayed with me.

When and why did Little Women become a subject of scholarship?
It was largely ignored by academics, who were mostly male, until feminist critics began to establish themselves in the 1970s. The first truly scholarly examination was in 1975 in Patricia Meyer Spacks’ The Female Imagination. Then Judith Fetterley’s essay “Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War,” published in the journal Feminist Studies in 1979, really showed what could be done in an extended analysis that applied the new tools of feminist criticism to Alcott’s novel. Ever since, the novel has proven to be a rich text for scholars using a wide variety of approaches, including Marxist criticism, cultural studies and queer theory.

Which March sister do you find the most relatable? 
Jo always meant the most to me. Her ambitions made her the kind of foremother I needed—someone who had grappled in the mid-19th century with the same things I was still grappling with in the late-20th century.

Why isn’t Little Women included on more teachers’ syllabi?
To put it quite simply, because it’s viewed as a book for girls. There is no room in today’s classrooms, (as far as I can tell from national surveys, what teachers across the county have told me, and my own knowledge about schools in my area) for books about girls—unless they focus on other issues such as civil rights or the Holocaust, as is the case with To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank. Teachers feel as if they have to teach books about boys because they believe boys won’t read about girls, but girls don’t mind reading about boys. As one school librarian told me, there is a lot of concern with making sure that students read books from the perspective of other cultures, races, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc., but no one appears to be concerned that boys aren’t reading books about the other half of the population. As I talk about in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, there is plenty of evidence that boys can and will read Little Women and other books about girls if we help them overcome the stigma attached to all things female and feminine. And that is a larger project that will benefit boys and girls.

How have you seen your own students impacted as they study the novel at a collegiate level?
I’ve seen a range of responses. Initially, they are dismayed at its length (nearly 500 pages), and some wonder why we were reading a children’s book (until I remind them that Huck Finn is a children’s book, and it’s often taught in college literature courses). But once we start reading Little Women, they grow attached to the March sisters and Laurie and find themselves quite invested in the choices they are making as they mature. They realize that the book is dealing with some of the same life choices they are also facing, so it isn’t the children’s book they were expecting. Although I did have one male student who obviously refused to even buy the book, I’ve also found that many of the men are as affected by it as the female students. One man came into class very upset the day we read the part where Jo turns down Laurie. Another wrote in his final response that even though he was a 30-year-old man, he was so glad to have read the book and was sorry it was over.

In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, you write about literary heroines who have followed in Jo March’s path. Is there one character in this tradition whom you find the most appealing?
Rory Gilmore, from the television series Gilmore Girls, is particularly interesting because we see her grow and develop over the course of about seven years. The summer my daughter spent binge-watching the series on Netflix, I realized that Rory was to her what Jo March has been for generations—she was a touchstone, a girl whose personality, experiences and life choices my daughter could identify with, measure herself against and learn from. And Rory’s choices aren’t always what we’d want them to be, just as Jo’s weren’t. But it’s the way that girls and young women see themselves reflected in these characters and how they judge and compare themselves to them that really interests me.

You’ve written extensively about Alcott’s contemporaries, including Constance Fenimore Woolson. Who are other female writers of the era you believe merit more recognition?
There are many, but I will mention particularly Fanny Fern, Elizabeth Stoddard, Sui Sin Far and Zitkala-Sa. And when we examine the writings of women from these earlier eras, we need to be able to evaluate them on their own terms as well as ours. Looking back and expecting women writers to conform to our contemporary ideas of what makes great writing is not going to help us understand the paths that earlier women writers have forged. Each of these writers is available in print with introductions or essays that can help put them into the context in which they lived and wrote. I highly recommend them!

Why do you believe it’s valuable to tell the stories of these 19th-century female writers?
In addition to the fact that if we forget the past we are in danger of repeating it, I’m also concerned that so many women writers today seem to feel, as Virginia Woolf did in the 1920s, that there isn’t much of a tradition behind them. Or they might not want to think of themselves as belonging to a separate tradition of female writers. But it’s important to recognize that they aren’t the first women writers to feel that way and to struggle to belong to an American literary tradition. There have been many who’ve been there before and whose legacies have been forgotten, ignored or suppressed. I see women writers today struggling with many of the same issues that early women writers did: wondering if they can combine their lives as writers with motherhood, trying to assert their value as writers and not only as women writers, pushing against male critics’ expectations, and resenting the bias they feel directed toward them as women writers. How can we move beyond these issues if we don’t recognize how long-standing they are and continually repress them as each new generation of women writers is largely forgotten?

What’s next for you?
I’ve actually become very interested in a forgotten woman writer from the 20th century: Kay Boyle. I have the same feeling when I read her stories as I did about Constance Fenimore Woolson’s—namely, why don’t I know her, why is she not read today, and what can I do about it? For now, I’d like to help get more of her incredible stories into print. She wrote about the rise of fascism in Europe, the German occupation of France and the aftermath of World War II in Germany. Her stories make you feel as if you are right there living the experience with her. I’ve never read anything like them.

Author photo by Jennifer Zdon.

In the loving and extensively researched Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux explores the history and enduring power of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In a Q&A with Rioux, we asked her about her own relationship with Alcott’s novel, the March sisters and other female authors of the era. 
AudioWomen's HistoryBiographyArts & Culture

Saskia Maarleveld

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

After more than 300 recorded audiobooks, acclaimed narrator and voice-over actor Saskia Maarleveld knows that every audiobook requires something special. But what’s the difference between narrating a historical book versus a biography of a beloved icon? Comparing two of Maarleveld’s performances, The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History and Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge, offers a look into an audio narrator’s preparation, devotion and ability to roll with the punches.

Here she discusses a day behind the audiobook curtain, what it’s like to deliver Carrie Fisher’s jokes and why narrating nonfiction is so much harder than fiction.

Tell me a bit about transforming books into audiobooks. How do you prepare, and what do you enjoy about the preparation? From one project to the next, how much do you change your approach to each audiobook?
Once I have a script, I will first and foremost read it through. That’s the most important prep you can do: knowing the book, its characters and flow. Depending on the genre, there will then be a certain amount of research to do. Looking up correct pronunciations is one of the most important. I also like to know about the author and more about the subject matter, especially if it is a genre like historical fiction or nonfiction. I tend to not “overprep” a book, as for me the most fun part is having the story feel fresh in the booth. You want to know it but not have belabored it such that the words and characters don’t feel alive. Being open to what might come out in the booth is part of the fun!

What’s a day in the studio like for you?
I live in New York City and am lucky to be surrounded by the best audiobook studios and producers, so I go into a bunch of different studios to record. I always have an engineer and sometimes a director. A usual day for us is 10 a.m. to 4 or 5 p.m. We take bathroom and water breaks when we need them and have a lunch hour, but otherwise I’m in the booth recording the entire time! I like these longer days, as you can really get on a roll with whatever you are working on, recording usually about three finished hours or more in a session. Surprisingly, it’s usually my brain that starts to fray at the end of the day before my voice!

“It puts a lot of pressure on the narrator when you are trying to portray an icon like Carrie Fisher—you need to get it right!”

I’d love to discuss two audiobooks you recently narrated: Carrie Fisher and The Queens of Animation. What was most important to you as a narrator as you approached each audiobook? Did one pose more challenges than the other?
Both of these were nonfiction, which was a thrill as I mainly record fiction. Being nonfiction, it was important to me that I respect the stories of these people, doing thorough research before getting in the booth. For Carrie Fisher, I watched a ton of interviews with her to get a feel for her voice, personality and sense of humor. I watched a lot of clips from Disney movies to revisit the scenes I was describing in The Queens of Animation. This prep helps the words not fall flat when they are being read; there is life and movement behind what I am describing to the listener. This comes through most when I have a clear picture on my head.

Carrie FisherIt was a special treat to hear your ability to deliver Carrie Fisher’s jokes. What is it like to tap into an icon like Carrie Fisher? How is it different from tapping into a fictional character?
I loved having the opportunity to learn more about Carrie Fisher, a person I knew from on screen but now had to embody in a much more personal way. Having read the book ahead of time obviously gave me so much of what I needed, but also the interviews and clips I watched helped me with delivering the Carrie lines in ways that embodied her. It puts a lot of pressure on the narrator when you are trying to portray an icon like Carrie Fisher—you need to get it right! Whereas with fictional characters, you have much more room for interpretation and imagination.

The Queens of AnimationWith The Queens of Animation, our audio columnist especially loved the way you draw readers in, “like [you’re] confiding a dark secret.” Is this something you set out to do intentionally for this book?
Nonfiction can feel a little impersonal if the narrator just reads the words on the page and remains removed from them. It’s hard because you aren’t narrating as a character, so the more you can make the listener feel like you are talking directly to them, telling them the story, the more personal it becomes. I’m glad that came across in this project!

Does your work impact how you read?
I have always loved reading, so unfortunately these days it is very rare that I have the time to read for pleasure as I am always reading for work! And when I do occasionally have the time, it takes time to turn off the narrator side of my brain thinking, How do I pronounce that word? How does this character avoids sound? I should highlight this! I thought when I stopped working to have my daughter, I would have time to get back into reading for pleasure again, but with a newborn, reading is a whole new challenge!

What do audiobooks offer that a book can’t? And considering how much audiobooks are booming, why do you think we’re being drawn to this medium more and more?
Time is precious, and these days so many of us are constantly multitasking. Sitting down with a book is a luxury, something you have to focus on not only with your mind but also your body. Being able to listen to an audiobook while driving, ironing, cooking, etc., is such a gift, as we don’t have to stop the busy work our bodies are doing while escaping into the world of a story.

What do you believe are your greatest strengths as a reader of books? What is the most rewarding or coolest thing you get to bring to this experience through your reading?
I was trained as an actor, so my skill at creating characters is something I take pride in, and I also specialize in accent and dialect work. Also, as mentioned in an earlier question, I aim to connect the listener to the story in a very personal way. I want them to feel I am speaking directly to them, drawing them into whatever world we are sharing. If I achieve this, I think my job is done!

What’s one thing people might not expect about your role as narrator?
I work on many projects that I get really attached to, and it is surprisingly hard to read that last word and know my time with this tale has ended. It is a very intimate experience to share a story and embody characters, so after hours and days of disappearing into a book, leaving it behind can be very sad!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read about Saskia Maarleveld’s narration of Carrie Fisher and The Queens of Animation.

After more than 300 recorded audiobooks, acclaimed narrator and voice-over actor Saskia Maarleveld knows that every audiobook requires something special in its reading. Here she discusses a day behind the audiobook curtain, what it’s like to deliver Carrie Fisher’s jokes and why narrating nonfiction is so much harder than fiction.
NonfictionArts & Culture

Keel Hunt

Interview by Trisha Ping

We know authors and agents, publishers and printers, libraries and bookstores—but there’s one company responsible for bringing just about every book you’ve ever read into your life, and you may not even know it exists. In The Family Business, author and journalist Keel Hunt charts the history and contributions of Ingram Content Group, a little-known, family-owned business based in Tennessee that has shaped the publishing world for 50 years. We asked Hunt a few questions about Ingram, its role in the industry and its vision for the future.

Ingram's role in the publishing business is relatively invisible to the general reader. What gaps does Ingram fill for publishers, libraries and retailers?
Basically, Ingram helps publishers, bookstores and libraries by providing essential services that enable publishers to do business in all their modern markets. For many years, Ingram performed a classic middleman function as a distributor of print books, but today, executives at Ingram prefer to describe their job in terms of getting content to its destination—that is, from the publishers who curate and own the content of books to entities that provide it to consumers. This frees up publishers to do their most essential work: finding great content.

"Ingram could and usually did take the longer view and give sustained commitment to unusual or unconventional ideas that might have been unworkable in the short term." 

How did Ingram’s origin as a family business shape its growth and affect its success? 
Because it has been a private, family-owned enterprise, Ingram Book Company (later renamed Ingram Content Group) was freed from many of the onerous short-term horizons that typically constrain public companies—such as the expectations (by shareholders and analysts) to show incremental profit each and every quarter. Ingram could and usually did take the longer view and give sustained commitment to unusual or unconventional ideas that might have been unworkable in the short term. 

Sometimes it’s easy for readers to forget the business machine that lies behind the art of literature. What do you think readers should know about Ingram?
That it has always been a family-owned business, and it grew from a handful of employees to one of the largest media businesses in the world. That its innovations have carried not only Ingram but also the publishers, bookstores and libraries it serves into the new digital age. That Ingram has always taken almost a “partner” approach to each of these critical sectors. Over its 50-year history, key landscape-shifting innovations by Ingram have helped publishers and booksellers alike strengthen their own service models and their profitability.

What are some of those innovations, and how have they shaped the publishing world?
One of the first examples was Ingram’s early application of microfiche technology, which was revolutionary for retail booksellers. Later, Ingram’s development of its Lightning Source model for print-on-demand saved book publishers millions of dollars in inventory costs, adding to recaptured sales and making for faster sales fulfillment and better profitability for publishers and bookstores.

The shift to digital publishing was a real adjustment for everyone involved in the book business. How did Ingram approach this challenge?
In the 1990s, there was much fear and dread in the book industry that the printed book might go away because of digital book technology. But the theorized “death of the printed book” didn’t happen, partly because of Ingram’s innovations in that period and after. These involved business risk and smart thinking. One of my favorite lines in The Family Business is current CEO John Ingram’s early observation that the future was not going to mean “either/or”—as to whether print or digital books would carry the day—but instead it would become an “either/and” world, with both digital and print formats available to serve consumer needs and preferences.

You have written two books about Tennessee politics and have worked as a columnist and reporter. How did that work inform this book? 
Ever since my earliest days as a news reporter, I have loved to write about truly original characters and how they navigated tough situations. That’s certainly been the case with my two previous books about politics and government (Coup and Crossing the Aisle). Some of the best stories in our culture—take Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs or Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail—are about choices that business leaders have made in their own environments. The Family Business has all these ingredients. It shares the untold stories of one of the world’s most private companies and one of the most important media businesses.

Why did you want to record and share the story of the Ingram family and the Ingram Content Group?
I feel it’s important, now more than ever, for as many people as possible to understand how our world works, and particularly what I call the “leadership examples” from innovators throughout history. From Johannes Gutenberg to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, and from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to the Ingrams, innovators have materially helped our world to climb higher and human ingenuity to reach further.

If you could only use three words to describe Ingram, what would they be? 
My three words would be the “family of families.” There are many Ingram associates today whose mothers or fathers (or both) were connected to the business, too. Some have met their spouses there. 

Also, the Ingrams themselves have always honored the role rank-and-file associates play in the company’s overall success. Founder Bronson Ingram insisted on that over his career. He always stressed that the line employees were materially contributing to the company’s success in business. He meant it, and John Ingram believes it, too.

For example: When Ingram Micro was taken public in 1996, at $18 per share, the share price climbed by 15% in just two months. Many Ingram employees—from the telephone sales office to the book warehouse to Ingram Barge towboat crew members—shared in the rewards of that profitable event.

You spoke to dozens of people while researching this book. Does a particular interview or story stand out to you? 
There were several, of course, that stand out over my two years of research. Possibly the most revealing was my first interview outside the Ingram family. I drove to Bradenton, Florida, to talk with Harry Hoffman, who was the first president of Ingram Book Company. After college Harry worked for the FBI (he was sworn in by J. Edgar Hoover himself) and later went on to great success in business. He eventually left Ingram to become CEO of the Waldenbooks chain of mall bookstores. He is still a beloved figure among Ingram old-timers. On the afternoon of my visit, Harry, at 90, was charming and answered my every question.

That interview was also a reminder to “do the interview now” when the idea first occurs to you. Harry died in May 2020, at age 92.

If there’s one thing your book proves, it’s that Ingram has always been a forward-thinking company. What are they doing today that will affect the reader experience in the future?
I suspect only a few people know how Ingram helped our nation—and the world—to navigate day to day through the COVID-19 pandemic. You’ve never heard Ingram people brag about any of this, but you can read about it in the book. Looking further ahead, it will be fun to see what comes next from this innovative business, and how it will serve our culture and the world.

Author photo © Marsha Hunt.

We asked author and journalist Keel Hunt a few questions about Ingram Content Group, a little-known, family-owned business based in Tennessee that has shaped the publishing world for 50 years.

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