Becoming the Ex-Wife

Marsha Gordon is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, a former Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award. She is the author of numerous books and articles and codirector of several short documentaries.

• List of Illustrations A Note on Name UsageIntroduction: "Maxims in the Copybook of Modernism"1 • The Limited Life of a Dorchester Girl 2 • At Radcliffe: "A Pushy Lace-Curtain Irish Girl from Dorchester"3 • First Husband, Lindesay Parrott: "Strange Moments of Tenderness and Pretty Constant Dislike"4 • Modern Parenting5 • Greenwich Village: The Path to Becoming a "Self-Sufficient, Independent, Successful Manager of Her Own Life"6 • Hugh O’Connor: High Felicity on the "Road of No Rules"7 • New Freedoms in the "Era of the One-Night Stand": The Ex-Wife Is Born8 • Ursula Goes to Hollywood9 • Second Husband, Charles Greenwood: "The Stupidest Thing I Ever Did in My Life"10 • "Extravagant Hell"11 • The Business of Being a Writer12 • Third Husband, John Wildberg: The Faint Resemblance of Stability13 • "The Monotony and Weariness of Living"14 • Fourth Husband, Alfred Coster Schermerhorn: "Two Catastrophes Should Be Enough"15 • Saving Private Bryan: The United States vs. Ursula Parrott16 • Her "Breaks Went Bad"17 • "Black Coffee, Scotch, and Excitement"Afterword: Remembering a "Leftover Lady"Acknowledgments ChronologyNotesPublished Writings of Ursula ParrottBibliographyIndex

"As Marsha Gordon argues in her engaging new biography, Becoming the Ex-Wife, the novel 'offers a strong case for the protections of marriage and the dangers of being an unattached woman.' . . . In her biography, Gordon makes an excellent case for Parrott as an unjustly forgotten historical figure: a sociological flash point, a beneficiary of feminism and victim of patriarchy who got her enemies mixed up."