A great many books went into the making of this one. Direct quotations are attributed in the endnotes. But this book could not have been written without the work of prior biographers. They were integral to assembling the chronology of this book, and I stand on all their shoulders. I list the biographies and secondary sources I relied on in constructing the chronology of this book in the selected bibliography, whether or not they are directly quoted in the book.
Because I was examining these women’s personas as laid out in their writing, I worked mostly from their published texts. I did look at letter collections and on occasion did my own archival research, fumbling around for the light switches on certain issues that other biographers hadn’t fully explored.
Although I did not set out to report anything like a thorough biography for any of these women, I was lucky enough to briefly interview Janet Malcolm in 2014, and to meet Renata Adler at a presentation I gave about my research in 2015. Certain things they said and did in those encounters are threaded into this book.