Vibrant ... Cooke, whose previous book was about the stewardesses of Pan Am, writes with a similar verve and expansiveness, immersing herself in her characters’ perspectives, even as she sticks responsibly to the biographical record.
A whirlwind tour ... A fresh angle on the origins of literary journalism ... Lessons in steely grit and clever thinking abound ... The contributions of West, Hahn, and Gellhorn to the emerging genres of creative nonfiction and literary journalism have been overshadowed by male writers ... With Starry and Restless, perhaps they can be recognized anew.
The pace is thrillingly breakneck in the first half of the book ... I knew nothing about Hahn before reading Starry and Restless, but came away wishing she had been the book’s sole subject ... Reading about these irrepressibly curious careers at a time when the entire journalism industry has so fundamentally changed and degraded is decidedly bittersweet. Thirty years ago, the lives of West, Gellhorn, and Hahn were still aspirational; today they can only be admired.
Cooke manages to pull off the rare feat of profiling women writers without rendering their lives tragic tales of suppressed ambition, perpetual struggles against the limitations imposed on their sex, or exemplary narratives of triumphing over expectations ... She presents them not as a blueprint but as a kind of permission, above all, to evolve: to move through many iterations of oneself and of womanhood ... In Cooke’s book I find a rare kind of permission: it’s OK to be all the things at once, messy and jumbled; or maybe one thing for two years here, or five years there, or even several decades, and then something else entirely ... Mutability is unsettling. But the uncertainty and friction created by mutability is what makes great art.
Cooke immersed herself so deeply in troves of unpublished notes and letters, along with the colossal amount of published works by these three prolific, versatile, and radical writers, her chronicle of their complex, downright astounding lives has the vividity and fluidity of fiction ... Set within a revelatory history of women journalists, these entwined portraits are exhilarating, even at the darkest moments in the extraordinary lives of these courageous, true-to-self, spectacularly accomplished, world-altering writers.
