Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World by Julia Cooke

She hid on a Red Cross boat to reach Omaha Beach on D-Day. She walked the abandoned streets of Hong Kong to take food to her daughter’s father, a prisoner of war. She fought off the advances of overzealous Yugoslavian diplomats, found overlooked details of world history in a dentist’s kitchen in Sarajevo. She traveled alone to Mexico. She traveled alone to Congo. She traveled alone to the American South. She married Hemingway. She married a Chinese poet-playboy-publisher, then married a British war hero. She fell in love with H. G. Wells. She gave birth and raised a child on her own. She landed on the front page of the newspaper. She wrote for the great magazines of her time—Vogue, The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar. She wrote a play. She wrote a memoir. She wrote a genre-breaking travel narrative. She wrote bestsellers. She wrote and wrote and wrote. She changed the very way we think about writing and the way journalists craft stories—which sources are viable, which details are important—and the way women move and work in the world. She was Martha Gellhorn. She was Emily “Mickey” Hahn. She was Rebecca West. Each woman was starry-eyed for success, for adventure, and helped ensure that other starry and restless women could make unforgettable lives for themselves. They fought for their lives and their work. They were praised and criticized for it all. In language as lively and nimble, in passages as intimate and adventurous, and with conviction as fierce and indefatigable as her subjects’ own, Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless plays out the stories of three women across three decades and five continents. Martha, Mickey, Rebecca—journalists, authors, mothers, lovers, friends. These women didn’t just bear witness to the great changes of the twentieth century; their curiosity, grit, ambition, and stories changed the world.

About the Speakers

Julia Cooke is the author of the books Come Fly the World, a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist and a Malala’s Book Club pick, and The Other Side of Paradise. Her essays have been published in A Public Space, Salon, The Threepenny Review, Smithsonian, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and her reporting has been published in Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, Playboy, and more. She holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Nina MacLaughlin is the award-winning author of Wake, Siren (FSG), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award; the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the New England Book Award; as well as Summer Solstice and the bestselling Winter Solstice (Black Sparrow), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. She writes a newsletter on New England literary news, and her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, AGNI, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times Book Review, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.