The biographer’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife examines both the lived experience and the myth-building around the legendary modernist writer. Wade’s previous book, Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her other writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, and Granta. Here, she discusses the process and nature of literary biography, and the pleasures and complexities of diving into Stein’s life and legacy.

Why Gertrude Stein?

There hadn't really been a biography of her in about 30 years, apart from Janet Malcolm's Two Lives, which was my starting point for this project. I also had access to the interviews done by Leon Katz, a PhD student in the 1950s who interviewed Alice B. Toklas over four months but never published the book he planned to write from their conversations. Malcolm tells Katz’s story as one of scholarship thwarted and material withheld; I wondered what happened next. Katz died in 2017, and his papers had recently gone to Yale’s Beinecke Library, so I went to see them. I’ve long been fascinated by the workings of biography, the kind of fictions inherent to turning a messy, complicated life into an orderly narrative, and how a subject can make it more or less possible for biographers to approach them through what they leave behind. This book’s structure came from a desire to expose the artificial constructs that tend to support a conventional biography.

But what really drew me in was Stein’s writing, and the story of her life as a kind of intellectual wrangling with questions of what language and words can do. It was somewhat later in the project that I had the idea of telling the story in two halves. The first half is about how Stein narrated her own life, telling her story for those who might be new to her; the second complicates and challenges the more straightforward narrative to explore where the gaps lie.

Which piece of Stein's writing would you recommend to someone interested in reading her for the first time?

I mean, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a wonderful starting point. It's such a pleasure to read, and it also sends you back to much of her other work. Her lectures, too. They’re the closest Stein came to a kind of aesthetic manifesto.

What's your personal favorite work of hers after spending all this time with her?

Probably Tender Buttons. I love The Making of Americans as well. It took me a long time to take the plunge with it, but once you're attuned to Stein’s rhythms, I find she invites the reader right into her mind. She wanted to hold them in what she called a “continuous present,” in which time would almost stand still.

Who is your favorite secondary character in Stein's life?

There's so many! Because Stein's life is full of characters, there were so many instances where I went down research rabbit holes with people who turned up incidentally.

I loved learning about Claude Fredericks, the young proprietor of the Banyan Press, which published Stein's novel Things as They Are. He kept a diary every single day of his life from the age of eight to his death, and it's one of the longest narratives of a single life in literary history.

The book’s other major character is Stein’s life partner, Alice B. Toklas. It feels like the second half is partly a later-life biography of her.

Yes, definitely. The second half is where Toklas’s voice really comes out. People thought they knew her through The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but of course, it's not her autobiography, it's Stein channeling her voice, and no one was ever quite sure how much of a hand Toklas had in it. I wanted to slightly mirror that dynamic: of course Toklas is everywhere in the first half, but it's really the second half where she is in her own timeline, grappling with her new role as the custodian of the Stein estate. She felt she had a duty to keep Stein's memory alive and make her work available, and she did that work with a devotion comparable to the devotion with which she tended Stein in her lifetime, but the Yale archive let me into a more private, intimate side to their relationship.

The second half of the book reads almost like a detective story, as Leon Katz pursues new information about Stein's earliest years in Paris. Was that a genre that you were thinking about as you wrote?

I think the analogy is quite compelling. I love books like The Quest for Corvo, which views the biographer’s journey as a bit like a detective story. So, yes, the detective story allows an interesting way into unpicking the biographer’s craft. I wanted to show that a life story is not just there for someone to tell—it's made up of all the material available, the different forces acting on the biographer, and their own perspectives and decisions.

What are some of your favorite literary biographies?

I love Janet Malcolm's work on biography. I've been fascinated by The Silent Woman, which explores the afterlife of Sylvia Plath. I also love Heather Clark's Sylvia Plath biography, Red Comet, which takes her seriously as an artist beyond all this wrangling over her legacy. And I’d love to mention two friends' biographies that just came out: Nick Boggs’s James Baldwin book and Lance Richardson's biography of Peter Matthiessen. They're brilliant examples of hefty, immersive, intimate stories of fascinating individuals.