Ex-Wife (Faber Editions) (ePub)

Ursula Parrott (1899-1957) is the pen name of Katherine Ursula Towle, author of over twenty novels and fifty stories. Born in Boston, she attended Radcliffe College before moving to Greenwich Village and becoming a newspaper reporter. After marrying fellow journalist Lindesay Marc Parrott, their 1926 divorce - two years after he discovered that she had kept their son's birth a secret - inspired her anonymous debut, Ex-Wife, which sold over 100,000 copies in 1929. It was adapted into Hollywood sensation The Divorcee at the height of the Depression, and Parrott soon became one of the most successful female writers of the 1930s, adapting her bestsellers for the screen with stars like Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart. Her tumultuous private life included three more marriages and rumoured liaisons with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. After her popularity declined, amidst various high-profile court cases, Parrott eventually died, destitute and alcoholic, of cancer in a charity ward in New York.
Monica Heisey is an essayist, comedian, and screenwriter from Toronto. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue, Elle, the Guardian, Glamour, New York Magazine and VICE, among others. She has written for television shows like Schitt's Creek and Everything I Know About Love. She lives in London. Her debut novel, Really Good, Actually, was published in 2023.