In addition to being an actress and a singer, Norma founded the Millay Colony for the Arts and maintained her sister’s estate. Vincent Millay’s sister, Norma Millay Ellis, is a featured character in Almost Famous Women, and Millay herself is mentioned in several of the stories in Flappers. Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford – Edna St. But what really makes these stories work as short stories is that Bergman gets to both speculate and offer commentary on the lives of the famous and almost famous women she is writing about. And you can feel that she both cares about them and cares to make as many of the details of the stories as authentic as possible. In part, the collection is wonderful because Bergman focuses on women on the periphery – women who probably wouldn’t get their stories told in a more traditional way.
I’m normally a nonfiction reader – I’d almost always rather pick up a biography over historical fiction – but I grabbed this one because I was curious how Bergman would approach telling imagined short stories about real people. The collection looks at women “defined by their creative impulses, fierce independence, and sometimes reckless decisions.” Some are famous in their own right, while others struggle with a life adjacent to the spotlight. In an effort to try my hand at Book Riot’s Read Harder challenge, I recently got out of my genre comfort zone and picked up Megan Mayhew Bergman’s second short story collection, Almost Famous Women.
Maybe there wasn’t a worthy place for the female hero to live out her golden years, to be celebrated as the men had been celebrated, to take from that celebration what she needed to survive.” – Megan Mayhew Bergman, Almost Famous Women Maybe the world has been bad to its great and unusual women. Maybe what I knew was that there was more mystery and hurt than I could have imagined. “Now reading her letters, I knew more about the woman I thought I loved.
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