Describe your latest book.
Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own is a memoir about the possibilities and perils of remaining single, starring six protagonists — five women who lived in the early 1900s, and me. These "awakeners," as I call them (a term I borrowed from Edith Wharton), are a mix of famous and obscure: journalist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton.
The story is set primarily in New York City at the turn of the last century and the turn of this one — two eras that have much more in common than you might think. In a sense, the book is a personal prelude to a cover story I wrote for The Atlantic in 2011, called "All the Single Ladies." The bulletin board above my desk is a slice of the book in miniature:
What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
I got my first job when I was 12, as a dishwasher at a local cafe, which means I've been working for three decades straight, but in all that time I've never had a job that was particularly strange or interesting, so I'm going with "most memorable juxtaposition": the summer before college I spent my days as an arts and crafts counselor at a YWCA camp and my nights making fried dough for leering drunk people at a seedy amusement park on the beach in Massachusetts...