Laughing out loud while reading a history book may seem unlikely, but that’s exactly what author Jennifer Wright delivers in her latest bestseller, Glitz, Glam and a Damn Good Time. Why shouldn’t history be accessible and entertaining? After all, Wright points out, “In the 19th century, they were human beings, bumbling through countless moments of idiocy just the way we do today.”
Enter Mamie Fish, Glitz, Glam and a Damn Good Time’s irreverent and witty heroine. Or, as Wright bluntly puts it, “Mamie pretty much said only inappropriate things.” Born Marion Graves and later nicknamed “The Fun-Maker,” Mamie rebelled against the stiff, strictly blue-blood parties of her era, replacing them with raucous, theatrical affairs—each one outdoing the last. Themes included a surprise monkey dressed as a prince, a donkey crashing a dance, and a dining table turned into a pond with live ducks paddling about, just to name a few. Mamie made quite the splash in Gilded Age New York and Newport high society.
More than a century later, at a time when the U.S. Secretary of Defense reposts his pastor’s video opposing women’s right to vote and TikTok trad wives perform subservience while making millions, Fish’s legacy feels like both a wink and a warning. It reminds us that domesticity can be a stage and a cage, and that social influence was one of the few tools women had to access power. As Wright writes, “In a world where entertainment was currency, [Mamie] was richer than a king.” It seems that when women are given even an iota of power, they can make kingdoms out of breadcrumbs—and that’s pretty kick-ass.
Speaking of kick-ass, Jennifer Wright is a fiercely funny, witty, and scrupulous author of seven books. Her subjects range from historical plagues (Get Well Soon) to an infamous 19th-century abortionist (Madame Restell) to the thirteen worst heartbreaks in history (It Ended Badly). She was also the political editor-at-large for Harper’s Bazaar, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Washington Post and last—but certainly not least—Observer.
Jennifer is also a friend. We met at Observer over a decade ago, back when I was writing “The J-Spot” column and she was covering style—which is fitting, because Jennifer sparkles in a ballgown like no one else. She wears them effortlessly, often in support of the arts and causes she deeply believes in. She’s a feminist in full regalia. When we caught up last week, she quipped that our long friendship was like a child—now old enough to be entrusted with responsibilities. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length.
First of all, congratulations on being a USA Today instant bestseller.
Thank you! I think a lot of that owes to the finale of The Gilded Age coming out at the same time. I think there were a lot of people who wanted their HBO Gilded Age fix who were happy to pick up a book about the era. Mamie Fish is a character on the show, and the actress who plays her narrates the audiobook, which was fantastic. I hope Mamie Fish gets her own spin-off.
It feels full circle that you’re being profiled in Observer. Tell me about your role there?
I edited the style supplement for a while, which was very fun. We got to interview people like Dita Von Teese and Kelsey Grammer. There were a lot of really fun interviews. It was great writing about New York parties at the time. It was a wonderful, glamorous little chapter of my life.
How did your first book, It Ended Badly, come about?
My first book sold about the same time I was at Observer. I was in my twenties, and I’d gone through a lot of breakups. My friends had gone through a lot of breakups. And a lot of people in the past had gone through breakups, and theirs were so much worse than anything we were experiencing. For instance, Edith Wharton, at 40 and after a long marriage, finally had an orgasm with her new lover, but then he ghosted her. She wrote him hundreds upon hundreds of letters, and he never replied. So if you ever felt guilty about sending 12 texts in a row to your ex, don’t. Like Edith Wharton has you beat. And she went on to write some of the best books of all time.
What were you doing before working at Observer?
I had been writing a column called “Shelved Dolls” for a website called The Gloss, which sadly no longer exists. It was about historical women and forgotten fashion icons of various periods.
Is this when you became interested in history?
Well, I’d always been interested in history, but it was the first time I realized that there was a real audience for women in history—and for a woman’s perspective on history, written in a chatty, conversational way. I think it made me realize that there were women alive in history. Funny things happened in history. And it was okay to say that those things were funny, and to take a somewhat more lighthearted, irreverent view of the past.
If I had learned history with your humor and if it hadn’t been centered on men, I would have been far more interested.
I think if you’re lucky, you have wonderful teachers growing up who do take that point of view. I think most professors have realized if you want to get students engaged in history, you’d better find a way to tie it to their lives today. And I think those people are generally very understanding and very happy about what I do. The people who are unhappy about what I do are, frankly, older men who want to feel smart because they’ve read a history book, while imagining themselves swilling brandy in a library lined with leather-bound volumes. I don’t think those are the only people history should be for. I think history should engage with women’s lives as they were and as they are today.
I read that you want history to be for people who care about Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
I do. I think if you enjoy gossipy modern-day things—if you want to talk about who your favorite couple is on Love Island—you might also enjoy talking about who your favorite couple is in the 19th Century because they were also having fabulously dramatic escapades and love affairs and very high profile divorces where they accused one another of giving them syphilis.
What do you think the impetus was for Mamie to throw these outrageous parties and how did that impact the greater culture?
This is a period where women couldn’t really make money and couldn’t enter politics. So if you are an ambitious woman, what is your outlet? It was crawling to the top of the social heap, which Mamie was able to do, rather surprisingly, because she was not the most beautiful woman of this period, and she was not the wealthiest either. She did it by the sheer force of her personality, her creativity and her wit. This was at a time when Mrs. Astor’s parties were never described as being much fun. A socialite wrote that the only way she kept herself amused at one of Mrs. Astor’s three-hour dinners was by rating everyone on a scale of one to ten on how boring they were, with one being just the absolute worst and ten being a genuinely fascinating person. Not a single guest merited more than a three.
Mamie kept her dinners to 60 minutes which could be a struggle. Some guests said they were clutching their plates as they were being whisked away. But Mamie always promised there would be something more than dinner—like circus performers, or a play where everyone would be roasted, or a party where guests would wear their clothing backwards, or one where they had to talk like giant dolls and be seated with actual dolls.
When Mamie entered the social scene, parties were very formal. How did she change that?
Mamie was lucky that she grew up in a household where—although they fell on very hard times—she had mingled with New York Society. She knew the basic rules, but she also knew how to break them just enough to avoid completely alienating people. One of the first parties she threw that was incredibly controversial was a lily pad dinner, where she turned her dining room table into a pond with ducks paddling back and forth. People thought that this was very clever and creative—except for Ward McAllister, who was absolutely infuriated. He wanted American society to run the way British aristocracy ran in Europe where it was very formal and there was a rule code. It was actually her husband, Stuyvesant, who was able to get Ward McAllister kicked out of society as Mamie Fish’s social star was rising. Stuyvesant loved his wife so much that all of her enemies were his enemies, forever.
Did the men gain status from these parties?
Absolutely. If you were a man with a wife or daughter who wanted to enter society, Mamie had an incredible amount of power to say, “I will put her on the guest list for one of the parties, but you’d better help my husband with his financial dealings, and you’d better vote alongside him in the board meetings.”
You’d have to be lucky enough to have a supportive husband.
Yes, but you have to assume that they at least want to make their wives happy, or certainly they want to make their daughters happy. So yes, women are still relying upon men’s largesse, but it was at least a way to exert social power. And all of this was also a relatively new thing. At the beginning of the century, the overwhelming majority of Americans lived in the remote countryside, so it was revolutionary when the country moved towards cities and suddenly you could go to a party in 15 minutes. Now you have a social life. Now you can start saying, “These are my female friends because we have common interests.”
I do think it’s interesting that there is such a fascination today with returning to this agrarian way of life, where TikTok trad-wife influencers are like, “I just live all by myself on a farm with my many children and my husband who’s in a photo once in a while.”
What do you think is behind the trad-wife trend?
I think these women are playing at Trianon. Marie Antoinette had a lovely little rural estate where the servants would go out and clean off the eggs every morning before Marie Antoinette would go out. And like a child on Easter, she’d find the eggs sitting in a nest and be like, “Being a farmer is such fun!” These TikTokers are making millions of dollars cosplaying being a farmer’s wife. And a lot of them have tremendous help behind the scenes. I’m sorry, but your house does not look like that if you have seven children. I promise you, they have some help coming in, which is perfectly reasonable.
I do think, because we are all on our phones so much today and the grind of city life can be a lot, it is lovely to imagine that we might have a life where we just spend our days wandering through the fields, picking fruit from trees and watching our children run freely through meadows.
What drew you to writing about Mamie?
I wanted to write about this period partly because, in the course of writing Madame Restell, I had so much leftover information about interesting female figures from the period. In Madame Restell, I got to talk a lot about the poverty and the dark underside of the Gilded Age. But that meant that I was constantly brushing up against reports of fabulous parties, interesting socialites and Newport exploding. I wanted to write a book about what was glamorous and delightful about this period. And I do think women are behind so much of that. When we think about the fashion, the beautiful houses that were constructed, the writings, the art, the elegance of it, that was not masterminded by railroad tycoons (many of whose names we’ve forgotten today). It was masterminded by their wives.
I think that’s so interesting, because when I look at billionaires today, they seem to be spending their money on steroids that have blown up their bodies into these Michelin Man shapes, like one tire stacked on top of another, and on rocket ships going into space—which is the most phallic thing I can imagine. It’s not being spent in these feminine ways.
Who would you compare Mamie Fish and her circle of socialites to today?
I would actually compare them to influencers. They seem to have an incredible level of control over their own image. They seem to think very hard about how they’re presenting themselves and what is on brand for them.
I think it’s interesting that Mamie supported women striking in the garment industry but was against the suffragist movement.
I always wonder how much Mamie was really against it. I think you could say, “I don’t need the vote because my husband votes the way I tell him to vote.” Stuyvesant Fish was described as a knight who would ride into battle at Mamie’s slightest word, so he probably just voted however Mamie felt like voting. But there were very few women that this was the case. That is why it is better to have the vote for yourself.
As a historian, do you feel like you have any insights about where we’re headed as a society?
I think there’s this idea that the arc of history always bends toward justice, and that’s very pleasurable. But I think it gives people the false impression that the arc in history keeps getting ever more liberal and ever more compassionate. It can swoop back. In the 1850s, lots of people were having abortions and talking about them. By the 1880s, that would’ve been inconceivable. So yes, the fact that you have a right, as we have all found out with Roe v. Wade, does not mean that you get to keep it forever. The arc of history doesn’t always get better and better and better for you.
Do you know what you’ll be writing about next?
Hopefully, it’s going to be about Phineas Gage. He was the railroad worker in 1848 who was using a tamping iron to pound explosives into rock so that the railroad could go through a mountain range. His tamping iron caught on a piece of flint, flew backwards and exploded through his left eye socket and out through his brain. Miraculously, he survived, but his personality entirely changed. Before the accident, he was very upstanding, solid and responsible. Afterwards, he became filthy, profane and a conman. It was the first time people began to realize the soul might reside in the brain. So what did that mean for religion and for identity?
The screen rights to Madame Restell were optioned with plans for a TV series.
It was bought by a British production company, so I imagine you’ll see it on the BBC before it airs here. But my goodness, I’m amazed anything ever gets made. There are just so many steps to it. So fingers crossed!
There’s this running joke that whatever you write about comes true. Like when you wrote about historical plagues in Get Well Soon, and then Covid happened.
That is a running joke about my books. I started writing Madame Restell when Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land. It’s about a 19th-century abortionist and how abortion became illegal in America in the 1870s. And Glitz, Glam and a Damn Good Time is about parties—so everything’s going to be fine, you guys.
