Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. When Leslie Jamison became friends with fellow author Rebecca Godfrey, they bonded over motherhood, marriage, and of course, writing. At the time, Rebecca was sick with lung cancer. She was also in the midst of a decade-long project, a novel about famed art collector and heiress Peggy Guggenheim. Rebecca passed away in 2022. After her death, Rebecca's husband and literary agent approached Leslie with a request. Would she finish Rebecca's novel? Leslie took the manuscript, which is about 2/3 done, and Rebecca's copious notes and research, and set to work on finishing what her friend could not. The result of this unusual and emotional creative process is Peggy, a novel that captures the visionary, rebellious spirit of Peggy Guggenheim. From her childhood in New York City to her exploits in Paris to her years exhibiting her collection in Venice. Peggy is out now. Leslie will be speaking tomorrow evening at the Center for Fiction at an event honoring Rebecca's life and work and along with other authors. First, she joins me now in studio. So nice to meet you, Leslie.

Leslie Jamison: Thanks so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: How did you and Rebecca become friends?

Leslie Jamison: Rebecca and I met because we both taught at the Columbia University MFA program where I still teach. Rebecca taught this legendary iconic seminar called Antiheroines. I had many students who had passed through this course and were forever changed by it. They felt like Rebecca was making a clearing where they could write the kind of female characters they wanted to write. Female characters who were rejecting claustrophobic gender scripts, who were rebellious, who were, ''sleeping around,'' who were carving their own paths, who were unlikable in a variety of ways. In a way, one of the many joys of Peggy is that Rebecca herself was creating this phenomenal anti-heroine, even as she was mentoring all of these younger writers and making room for them to do the same.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it sounded like you were talking about Peggy immediately.

Leslie Jamison: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: When you were first approached about finishing Rebecca's novel, what was your initial reaction?

Leslie Jamison: Yes, so, okay. Well, I feel like I have to go back a few beats just to say that part. I only knew Rebecca when she was sick. I met her just a few years before the end of her life and we didn't know how much time she had left and we fell into this really deep connective friendship. I feel grateful for the time we had. One of a thousand things that I really admired about Rebecca was that art and making art was not an extra for her. It was not something she did if there was room for it. Instead, she needed it. She needed to be making art.

She needed art-making like oxygen, and so even when she was really sick, even when she was in tremendous amounts of pain, suffering from her illness and from the cure or the treatment, she still was so ferociously committed to this book. I have so many memories of being with her in her hospital room overlooking the East River talking about this novel and talking about specifically how she imagined the third section of this novel, which we can talk more about. Those conversations were an important backdrop for this eventual request.

We all hoped that she would live long enough to finish a complete draft of the book. She didn't, but she did leave a tremendous amount behind. She left so much of the manuscript behind, really, probably closer to 3/4 or 4/5 of it. She left a lot of notes, many of which were taken with her husband in the last couple of months of her life for the final movements. She was also very, very clear about the fact that if she did die before she finished the book, she wanted it to be finished.

It was under contract, and she wanted it to come out into the world as a complete manuscript rather than truncated with a note at the end saying, ''Okay, here's where the rest would have been.'' Even though she didn't name a person she wanted to finish the book, she was so clear that she wanted it finished. I think when Herb, her husband, and Christy Fletcher, her agent, initially approached me, the clarity with which Rebecca had articulated her desires was a gift to all of us because I felt like this was what she would have wanted was for the book to be finished.

Alison Stewart: What were your concerns about taking on this project?

Leslie Jamison: Where do I begin? I had never-- I obviously had. I don't know if it's obvious. I had never undertaken a project like this before, and my biggest worry was that my voice would somehow start to crowd Rebecca's out. Like always my priority was, how do I try to inhabit Rebecca's voice fully enough, kind of work with everything she left behind to really make the end of this book the manifestation of her vision? Because, yes, I'm a writer, too. I devote my life to making my own books.

I have lots of ideas about character. I have lots of ideas about language. I'm aware of my own reckless artistic impulses, and I didn't want them to be like an invasive species taking over the landscape. I really wanted to honor as best I could, knowing it would always be imperfect. Honor my sense of what she would have wanted the rest of the book to be.

Alison Stewart: Do you know why she wanted the book to be completed?

Leslie Jamison: I can only speculate, but I can say that it didn't surprise me at all because Rebecca was a lover of beautiful things. She wore a Chanel dress to a movie premiere when she was very, very sick. She loved beautiful books, she loved beautiful art, she loved beautiful places. She loved the palazzos in Venice. She shared that with Peggy. It was one of a few things I think she shared with Peggy. It made sense to me that she would want this to move into the world as a whole completed art object rather than an art object with a big asterisk attached to it.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with author Leslie Jamieson about the process of finishing Rebecca Godfrey's novel Peggy, about the famous art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Rebecca completed the book after Rebecca of cancer in 2022. Rebecca completed the book, I should say, excuse me, Leslie completed the book. You wrote a piece for the New Yorker, very long piece, and you mentioned that you established rules for yourself, Leslie. What were some of the rules?

Leslie Jamison: The biggest rule was to leave unchanged the portions of the manuscript, and there were many of them that Rebecca had left in pretty finished shape. I wasn't arriving on the scene and wholly reimagining the project to make it the best book I thought it could be in my vision, so to leave unchanged what was there. Then I really wanted to honor her vision of Peggy's character as best I could read it, and obviously, I was bringing my own analysis to it.

Her version of Peggy was smart, not beholden to other people's desires or expectations, kind of passionate, interested in passionate connections with other people, but also very much set to the beat of her own drummer. Wry, witty, sexy, interested in sex, interested in men, interested in friendship, devoted to her sister, devoted to the memory of her father. I really tried to take these strong thematic and emotional currents that were already so viscerally palpably present in the pages Rebecca had left behind and honor those strong emotional currents as I kept moving forward.

I also was really working with some of the things that Rebecca had said to me from her hospital bed around-- Really, the most unfinished portion of the book was this third movement, the third section that basically tells two intertwining stories. The first is the story of Peggy opening her very first gallery in London in 1938. It's called Guggenheim June. The second story around the same time is Peggy's love affair, brief, tempestuous, but very powerful in Rebecca's estimation and in her narrative love affair with Samuel Beckett, which is just this fascinating historical chapter.

What Rebecca said she wanted for the character of Peggy in this final third movement was some bliss and triumph. I was really trying to think about how to give Peggy the character that bliss and triumph. Of course, with a novel, you don't want to wrap everything up with a tidy bow or a sentimentalized happy ending, but I kept hearing those words, bliss, and triumph, and so in that sense, I wanted to follow what Rebecca had been telling me at the very end as well.

Alison Stewart: Truthfully, were those rules hard to follow?

Leslie Jamison: Well, sometimes. There were times when I would feel, for example, my vision of Peggy and Beckett's love affair tending a little bit more towards the toxic or the knotted or the dark or the dysfunctional. I also, in addition to spending a lot of time with Rebecca's notes, I, of course, read the Mary Dearborn Peggy Guggenheim biography that she worked with quite closely. I read Francine Prose's Peggy Guggenheim biography. I read Peggy Guggenheim published three versions of her memoirs, and I read them all. I also had a lot of contextual material about Peggy.

Some of that material sometimes suggested she chased Samuel Beckett for a long time, and he was basically running away from her. Ultimately, I felt like Rebecca's vision of this love affair was not at odds with what actually happened. She was just interested in focusing her narrative energy on a particular part of their affair, the early weeks of their affair, when they were basically just in bed together in a friend's apartment in Paris and seeing something in each other that other people couldn't always see in them.

It was like being able to see maybe the version of this love affair that I would be drawn to narrating is a slightly different one, but how can I get interested in and stay committed to this fascinating and rich angle that Rebecca brought to it?

Alison Stewart: Yes. In the piece in the New Yorker, you said you wanted to excavate Rebecca's intentions. What did her final pass, the final version that you got a hold of, tell you about her intentions?

Leslie Jamison: One thing to say, I'm glad you asked that question, because first of all, there were just lots of pages, even of this unwritten third section. She left pages behind that had scenes, bits of dialogue between Peggy and Beckett. I could read from those fragments she saw in them. She saw this witty banter. She saw intellectual camaraderie. She saw a lot of physical connection. She saw a simultaneous presence and absence, I think, in Beckett's way of being, where she felt both intoxicated by who he was, but also that there was always a part of him that was somewhere else looking out on the horizon.

I could find those in the pages she left behind, but it was also an incredibly-- Excavating her intentions was always, and I'm grateful for this, a very collaborative effort. For example, in the last few months of her life, many of those pages she left behind, she narrated to her husband, Herb, literally from her hospital bed. The fact that I could work with them when I was finishing the book was a function of the kind of work she did and they did together to leave her intentions behind. She also left with her best friend, Janet Johnson, a really wonderful vision for a final coda for the novel.

So the novel actually ends in Venice with Peggy in her palazzo looking back on her life and Peggy and Rebecca. Sorry, it's not the first time that's happened. Rebecca basically described this coda, this ending that she imagined to Janet. I had that to work with. I really felt like we were all piecing it together together and that was easier for me, I think, than if I was just trying to do it on my own, because, again, it pushed back against this sense of my own presence is too invasive when I was like, no, I'm working with what Christie's found these documents about Samuel Beckett that Rebecca wrote five years ago.

Herb has these final pages she dictated to him. Janet has this vision for the coda. We're all working in the best way we can to figure out what she might have wanted.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with author Leslie Jamison about the process of finishing Rebecca Gottfried's novel Peggy. It's about the famous art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Leslie completed the book after Rebecca died of cancer in 2022. By the way, Leslie will be speaking tomorrow at the Center for Fiction at an event honoring Rebecca's life. We'll have more with Leslie Jamison after a quick break. This is All of It. You're listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. I'm speaking with Leslie Jamison, the author, the writer, about the process of finishing Rebecca Godfrey's novel Peggy.

It's about the famous art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Leslie completed the book after Rebecca passed away from cancer in 2022. She'd been working on this. Rebecca had been working on this novel for a decade. Do you know why she had a love affair, sort of, with Peggy Guggenheim?

Leslie Jamison: I think a love affair is the perfect phrase. She was fascinated by Peggy and even inside of that fascination, she also really wanted to offer a different vision of Peggy than the one she thought was often in the popular imagination. People have a lot of different ways of imagining Peggy Guggenheim, but certainly, she has often been understood as a bit of a dilettante, this wealthy heiress who had a lot of money to sling around, and so she threw it at a bunch of art and actually also threw herself at a bunch of artists.

Her sexuality has always been bound up in some of the ways she's been dismissed. I think when Rebecca looked at Peggy Guggenheim's life and legacy, she saw something very different. She saw an incredibly intelligent woman who was deeply committed to art. When you look at Peggy Guggenheim's legacy, it's hard to deny its importance. She ended up discovering and giving early gallery shows to so many important American artists. Most notably Jackson Pollock.

She brought together abstract expressionism and surrealism, gave them a place in the early American World War II and post-war era, and honestly helped a tremendous amount of important art survive World War II after the Nazi invasion of France. She did a lot of incredible things, but she's often been dismissed as doing those just because she was too rich not to do some good if she was throwing a lot of money at art. Rebecca saw something different. She saw her intelligence. She saw a vibrant, witty woman who'd grown up in this New York aristocratic household and wanted something very different for herself.

Wanted something different from this stifling world of debutante balls. I think she saw a woman who was drawn to beauty, a woman who was drawn to passionate connections and relationships. I think she identified with those parts of Peggy. I think she identified with this tension or I guess I should just say simultaneous commitment that Peggy felt to her vocation and to being a mother. Peggy had two children and was a bit of a-- She was a fraught presence in their lives but she was committed to her children, and she was committed to making a life for herself and leaving a legacy behind.

Rebecca was also a woman who is just a tremendously committed mother. Her daughter Ada is an incredible human being. She was committed to motherhood and she was committed to making art. I think that part of Peggy's identity was also deeply compelling to her. I think there were these ways that Rebecca felt connected to Peggy and saw some of herself in Peggy and put some of herself in the character of Peggy that she ended up imagining and building on the page. I think there were many, many layers to the gravitational forces that drew her to this project.

Alison Stewart: Have you ever found yourself that obsessed with something you're going to write about? Someone you're going to write about?

Leslie Jamison: Yes, I follow obsessions deeply in my work. Actually, one of my essay collections, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, is in large part about obsession, and a lot of the reportorial pieces in that book I'm interested in people who become obsessed with this particular whale that's known as the loneliest whale in the world. I'm interested in families who become obsessed with the idea that their children have past-life memories. I write about people who become obsessed with their alter egos online.

I think there's a way that part of what I loved about Rebecca's art practice I also really identified with, which is getting so fascinated in a person or a story that you just want to live it and breathe it. I saw that I think, because of that obsession, working on this project near the end of her life, it made sense to me that she didn't let it go. It made sense to me that she held onto it until the very end because it wasn't just draining energy from her. It was giving her energy. It was giving her vitality.

Alison Stewart: Rebecca was obsessed with Peggy. You had to step into those shoes. Were you obsessed with Peggy when it first started? When you first started researching?

Leslie Jamison: I knew a bit about Peggy Guggenheim and was really interested in her, but absolutely the obsession really took hold vicariously. It was almost like I felt like I caught this beautiful virus from Rebecca or something insofar as she really introduced me to developing this deeper relationship with Peggy's biography. There was this strange triangle that I felt like I was inhabiting during the composition process. The triangle was me, Rebecca, and Peggy and there was a bit of almost like a Russian nesting doll's logic to it where Rebecca was imagining her vision of Peggy I was trying to imagine Rebecca.

I was trying to imagine that vision. For example, when I went to Paris and Venice to try to gather the sorts of sensory information and vibrancy that you want to bring to any novel, but particularly, Rebecca writes in a very visceral, embodied particular way. When I went to those places, like when I went to the graveyard in Paris near where Peggy and Beckett had their hold up during their early love affair, I found myself thinking, looking at these tombstones, thinking not quite what would Peggy have thought as she was walking through this graveyard, but what would Rebecca have thought Peggy would have thought as she was walking through this graveyard?

Which is a weird exponential empathic speculation to embark on. I also think there was something to me that felt a bit easier about working with material that had a third term. If it had been a novel that had been entirely Rebecca's imagination, I think I would have felt like I was stepping into this world that wholly belonged to her. In this case, it was like the triangulation of it that Peggy had been real even if we were very much working with a version of Peggy that Rebecca had imagined. That made me feel like it was a little bit easier to gain footing or gain some kind of entry.

Alison Stewart: Yes, you went to Paris, you went to Venice. Where did you go that didn't spark energy in you, didn't really give you the excitement that you knew you needed to have?

Leslie Jamison: That's a great question. I have to say. Paris and Venice are not great at not sparking creative energy. I was pretty inspired by both places, and especially Venice I had never been to. It felt like this very haunted, saturated trip. I will say something that surprised me, although in retrospect it made sense, was when I went to Venice, I went to the Peggy Guggenheim collection, which is housed at her old palazzo. I went there a few different times, and on one of those times, I actually had the pleasure of speaking to Karole Vail, who's the director of the Peggy Guggenheim collection and is also Peggy Guggenheim's granddaughter, so very invested in her story and her legacy.

That conversation was absolutely fascinating, absolutely sparked a ton of ideas, but I realized that in that conversation I was getting closer and closer maybe to some vision of who Peggy Guggenheim had actually been or who she had been in the eyes of her granddaughter. While that was tremendously illuminating, it wasn't necessarily what I needed in order to keep writing Rebecca's vision of Peggy, which was not an inaccurate vision, but it was a work of fiction and a work of imagining.

There was a cautionary moment where I was like, ''Right. The point is not to bring the actual Peggy Guggenheim to the page. The point is to bring Rebecca's Peggy Guggenheim to the page.'' There were almost moments where I felt like I flew a little bit too close to the sun in terms of gathering more and more about Peggy. It's like I needed to do all that gathering, and then I needed to let some of it go to try to just steer as close as I could to Rebecca's vision.

Alison Stewart: This is hard to ask, but I'm wondering, what are the biggest differences between your writing style and Rebecca Godfrey's writing style? When did you have to stop and say, ''Oh, wait a minute. I'm writing like Leslie Jamison now. I'm not writing like Rebecca Gottfried would?''

Leslie Jamison: Yes, this is such a great question and I love talking about this part of the book because I think the fact that it felt messy and hard and just real made me feel closer to Rebecca. The struggle made me feel closer to her in certain ways. I guess I'll say two things. One is that during my initial months working on this project, I felt so tentative. It was really hard for me to insert any sentences into the documents that Rebecca had left behind. When I was writing, I felt like I was writing in this very cautious, stilted way, which it's not how I write.

It's not really how I think any writer totally feels about their writing. It was because I didn't want it to be my voice. I wanted it to be Rebecca's voice. What I realized at a certain point was Rebecca's voice is brave and reckless and wild, and I'm not going to be serving her voice in any way by writing timid, cautious, careful prose. In order to honor Rebecca, I had to leave my timidity behind and risk bringing a little bit more of myself because the alternative to leave all recklessness at the door really wouldn't have yielded a text that had the kind of energy that Rebecca always brought to her writing.

I think at a certain point, I was like, ''All right, I'm just going to do this. I've absorbed a lot of Rebecca's vision. I'm just going to go for it and not try to shut down the superego on my shoulder that at every moment is like, is this too much you and not enough her?'' That said, I'm sure there is a little bit more of my DNA in the text. To your question, I think my writing tends to be a bit more interior than Rebecca's. I think it tends to be a little bit more reflective, a little bit more interested in emotional exposition and my sentences are longer.

There were some syntactical things that I did, although I'm sure there is still a bit of a shift in the text. I tried to shorten my sentences. We have different tics. She uses semicolons a lot more. I use em dashes a lot more. I became aware of all of those nerdy writer differences between us as well. Yes, I tried allow myself to get into that exuberant, passionate state that would honor the energy of her text while also accepting that, yes, that meant there was going to be some of what I always bring, like an interest in deep feeling, an interest in these knots of emotion.

I'd like to think that there's a way that the arc of the book actually justifies a bit of that transition that, especially the coda in Venice. It makes sense that Peggy in her late 50s is going to have a little bit more of a reflective energy in her voice than she did when she's 20 years old and moving to Paris for the first time. I think any novel is invested in some evolution in its characters, their relationship to each other, their interiorities, their voices. I don't think Rebecca's hope for the book would have been that Peggy's voice would have stayed exactly the same throughout.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the book Peggy with Leslie Jamison. Peggy lost her father in a tragedy. He was aboard the Titanic, of all things, and he was with his mistress.

Leslie Jamison: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How did this affect Peggy's life?

Leslie Jamison: Peggy, and again, I should say I speak mostly for Rebecca's vision of Peggy and the character of Peggy in this book. Yes, this Peggy worshiped her father. She worshiped her father's big dreams, his ambition. He was in Paris working on a project developing elevators for the Eiffel Tower and this obsessed her. She loved that he was building vessels that were shooting people up into the sky. There was something about the combination of his big dreams, his fairy tale contours, and quite honestly, his absence or his absences that I think made him larger than life.

Then when he died in such a tragic, cinematic, but also devastating way, I think that only made him even larger than life. He was always a bit of a north star or a patron saint that kept shaping her profoundly in his absence. They had these conversations, early conversations about art, where she felt like he saw something in what she saw when she looked at art that she wanted to keep manifesting. She wanted to make good on something she felt he always had seen in her.

Alison Stewart: It was so interesting, so you take the fact that he died on the Titanic and then take Rebecca's turn on what her Peggy would be like. It seems like it's the way it works.

Leslie Jamison: Yes. Yes. I think it's a combination of working with what was and all the elements of this fascinating story that are in play. Peggy, her life brushed up against history in all sorts of compelling ways. Her father died on the Titanic. She was living in Paris at the advent of World War II, and communing with all of these artists and acquiring a lot of their art at the eve of the war, but also helping to preserve a lot of their work through the war. She ended up founding an incredible gallery here in New York during the war called Art of the Century on 57th Street.

Her life entwines with history in just a number of fascinating ways. I was trying to bring that into the book. Rebecca already brought a lot of it into the book. While also I think when you write fiction about history, there's always a danger that the historical information or the historical context is going to feel like this dutiful burden that the book is carrying on its back. You always want the language and the emotional crosscurrents to feel charged by a particular character with their particular feelings, their particular desires, drives, and flaws, and so allowing that fascinating history to be there, but not letting it weigh the text down or encumber this fiery central character, I think, was one of the tasks.

Alison Stewart: Are you happy with the book?

Leslie Jamison: I feel so proud of this book, and I feel so proud. I always think of it as Rebecca's book. It really is her book, but I feel just grateful for this singular, transformative experience to collaborate with her. It really felt, in many ways, like a posthumous collaboration, which was not even an endeavor that I had language for before I endeavored it.

Alison Stewart: We've been speaking with Leslie Jamison. The book is Peggy. We talked to her about the process of finishing Rebecca Godfrey's novel, Peggy. She'll be speaking tomorrow at the Center for Fiction, honoring Rebecca's life. Thank you for sharing your story with us. We really appreciate it.

Leslie Jamison: Thanks so much for having me, Alison.

Alison Stewart: That is All of It for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I'll meet you back here tomorrow.