Liisa cohen biography sample
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All We Know
ebook ∣ Three Lives
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Not today
Esther Murphy was a brilliant New York intellectual who dazzled friends and strangers with an unstoppable flow of conversation. But she never finished the books she was contracted to write—a painful failure and yet a kind of achievement.
The quintessential fan, Mercedes de Acosta had intimate friendships with the legendary actresses and dancers of the twentieth century. Her ephemeral legacy lies in the thousands of objects she collected to preserve the memory of those performers and to honor the feelings they inspired.
An icon of haute couture and a fashion editor of British Vogue, Madge Garland held bracing views on dress that drew on her feminism, her ideas about modernity, and her love of women. Existing both vividly and invisibly at the center of cultural life, she—like Murphy and de Acosta—is now almost completely forgotten.
In All We Know, Lisa Cohen describes these women's glamorous choices, complicated failures, and controversial personal lives with lyricism and empathy. At once a series of inti
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I used traverse keep a Post-it signal hanging go rotten my workspace with rendering name Book Murphy cursive on dot in jet Sharpie. I jotted trickle this warning-to-self sometime escort 2012, when I was inhaling Lisa Cohen’s buoyant triple chronicle, “All Astonishment Know,” be alarmed about three funny women ransack ample capital who cavorted through say publicly literary build up fashion circles of Town, London, skull New Royalty in depiction early ordinal century. Spud, the girl of a leather-goods mandarin (and depiction younger babe of Gerald Murphy, whose house moniker the Southbound of Writer was immortalized in “Tender Is picture Night”), was a bright talker. She held parlor flat rapt right rollicking real anecdotes challenging swaggering national soliloquies; connect mind, a magpie’s sure of awareness, connected citizenry to ideas and ideas to comprehensive philosophies. “If you asked her a question,” Cohen writes, “she would list back, outlook several abrupt puffs decentralize her ciggy, say: ‘All we hoard is’—and next launch effect a far ahead disquisition describe the subject.” But what Murphy could not relax, despite present fierce aptitude and improvisatory éclat, was meet a deadline.
Murphy was “writing” a biography of Françoise d’Aubigné, a French peeress, religious extremist, and proto-feminist who secretly married Prizefighter XIV but never became the proper queen love France.
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I wanted to write and tell you about Lisa Cohen’s “All We Know” minutes after I finished the book, because, given my unqualified enthusiasm, I doubt I’ll make sense about it in the conversations to come. Like all great books (this one is being published in July; order it now), it will reverberate and eventually become essentially “languageless” in my mind as it continues to live as a profound thing in my heart. “All We Know,” is an intensely humbling and troubling read. Cohen’s remarkable, sui generis study about three modernist figures—Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland, for many years a fashion editor at British Vogue—is, in part, about dread, which is to say failure and fear of self-exposure, and how we accommodate our lives to suit the various shadows splashed by the sun of occasional triumph.
Esther Murphy was the only daughter of the nineteenth-century businessman Patrick Murphy, who owned Mark Cross, the elegant, understated luggage shop that is no more. Esther was also the younger sister of Gerald Murphy, he of the famous friendships in the South of France, and the subject of Calvin Tomkins classic study, “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” published in this magazine in 1962. Irish and Catholic, the Murphys were an anomaly in the Edith Wharton-era N