Across the vast interwebs, this month has been designated as Nonfiction November. Please celebrate in a responsible manner.

I’ve been delighted and relieved to have been pulled out of my nonfiction reading slump with two excellent books that are coincidentally rather related to each other.

I’m about halfway through Keri Leigh Merritt’s excellent biography, An Inconvenient Woman, about the white Southern writer and civil rights activist Lillian Smith.

And I’ve just begun the group biography of the women who made the 1963 March on Washington, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Marcia Chatelain and titled How Bright the Path Grows.

If women’s history isn’t your thing (gasp!), maybe you’ll find something intriguing in LitHub’s November nonfiction recommendations.

Meanwhile, I continue my own journey of producing a new work of nonfiction—the story of another inconvenient woman. I’m still dealing with chapter five revisions. The opening paragraph has survived, as has the original length and contents of the chapter, more or less. And I think I’ve put Harold Ross in his proper place, so that’s all good.

But I ran into an issue with what I thought would be a brief character sketch of one of Jane Grant’s friends who was also a member of the famous Algonquin Round Table. I was once again reminded about the necessity of triple-checking (and more) sources, which is why finishing a book takes me so long.

From the start, I’d been uncomfortable with relying too much on the most recently published biography of Jane’s friend. The main reason was the lack of citations in the book. While it contained a bibliography, there was no way of knowing exactly where the author got their information and how they used it. (I don’t want to name names because this isn’t about criticizing another biographer, especially because the decision about citations is often made by the press.)

The biographer included a piece of information about the friend’s life that, based on my knowledge of the historical time period, didn’t quite ring true. I couldn’t directly trace the biographer’s source because of the lack of citations, so I had to find some sources on my own.

Jane’s friend, while well known in their own lifetime and still historically important today, left behind no extant papers, so I couldn’t contact an archive to find a particular collection. I settled for historical newspapers, which indeed yielded a few articles from the time period that seemed to clear up what had been nagging at me.

So far, so good.

But after taking notes from the articles and letting the information percolate for a while, I realized that the contents of the articles also didn’t quite ring true. (That history Ph.D. sure comes in handy sometimes.) I tracked down further information from what was printed in the articles (reporters and editors do make mistakes) and finally came up with an explanation that makes sense based on deeper dives into additional contemporary and historical sources.

That all took at least a week, and in terms of chapter five it translated into the addition of a few sentences. Is it an earth-shattering historical correction? No. Does it, in the end, help in any way to explain Jane’s life more clearly? I think it does, so I am satisfied with the time and effort. The writing life can get very exciting.

What Else I’ve Been Reading

I addition to the nonfiction I’ve mentioned above, I’m currently mesmerized by Katy Simpson Smith’s novel The Maltese Version.

I had a hard time with the beginning of Kate Atkinson’s Our Noble Selves, but since I love her work so much, I stuck with it longer than I typically would have. For me, that paid off, mostly because I liked the main character and found the situation he got into both quirky and appalling.

Fiona Mozley’s Awake Awake kept me turning the pages on the strength of the narrator’s voice. But at the end my only thought was, What the hell was that?

What I’ve Been Watching

The best thing continues to be the new season of The Great British Baking Show, closely followed by The Diplomat, both on Netflix. The second season of BritBox’s Ludwig has started off well.

We finished Neagley, the Reacher spinoff on Prime, and liked it well enough. I think the characters, especially Neagley, deserve a stronger plot. Cooper & Fry on BritBox was okay but I thought it had several plot problems. And Tommy & Tuppence, also on BritBox, was enjoyable. Netflix’s The Gentlemen was good, and we will probably watch the second season.

What Else Is Happening

Bowling, of course, with its usual ups and downs, but now with my very own, very groovy, bowling ball.

Thanks, as always, for reading. See you next time.