Overview

'A forgotten classic: darkly funny and startlingly contemporary, full of witty one-liners and stop-you-in-your-tracks observations about romance, work, and life.' (Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually). Lord, I have been more chased than chaste . . It feels remarkable to be a deserted wife when one is only twenty-four. New York, 1924. Patricia and Peter are a thoroughly modern married couple. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work. Both believe in 'Love-Outside-Marriage'. Until they don't. Or, really, until he doesn't. So when Peter pushes for divorce with increasing violence, Patricia has to forge a new life as a single woman: as an ex-wife. A sensational bestseller in 1929, yet utterly timeless, Ex-Wife plunges us into the 'era of the one-night stand'. It evokes not only the Manhattan bars, fashion advertising offices, female friendships and all-night parties of a dazzling city, but the hollow affairs, emotional hangovers, backstreet abortions, and struggles for sexual freedoms amidst the moral double standards of a patriarchal world.

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Ursula Parrott (1899-1957) is the pen name of Katherine Ursula Towle, author of twenty books and over one hundred stories and articles. Born in Boston, she attended Radcliffe College and moved to Greenwich Village after marrying journalist Lindesay Marc Parrott. Their 1926 divorce inspired her at first anonymous debut, Ex-Wife, which sold over 100,000 copies in 1929 and was adapted into Hollywood sensation The Divorcee during the Depression. Parrott soon became one of the most successful female writers of the 1930s, with her work adapted into movies starring Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart. Her tumultuous private life included three more marriages and a rumoured liaison with F. Scott Fitzgerald. After her popularity declined, amidst various high-profile court cases and personal struggles, Parrott died of cancer in a charity ward in New York. Monica Heisey is a writer and screenwriter from Toronto. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, New York Times, Guardian and Vogue, among others. In 2015 she released I Can't Believe It's Not Better, an essay collection, and in 2023 published Really Good, Actually, her first novel. She has also written for television shows like Schitt's Creek, Everything I Know About Love and Smothered. Heisey lives in London.

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