AUTHOR'S NOTES: Some of this story is true. Some is not. It's a modern tale of what it means to be a woman, an actress, and a sexual being. In life, Louise Brooks was rarely able to balance these elements — a problem hardly unique to her time. Brilliant people with enormous promise still, heartbreakingly, sometimes soar brightly, then crash and burn.
Though based on real incidents that happened to real people, this is most definitely a novel. Much of what I write about occurred behind closed doors to people who died long ago. Only they would know the truth, and what evidence exists shows that they disagreed with one another about what that truth was, and about whether or not truth is even a concept that applies to memory. Fictionalizing parts of the story gave me the freedom to imagine the actions and feelings of these dazzlingly talented people at a moment in their lives when everything seemed possible.
In a letter to her friend Jan Wahl in 1964, which he included in his book, Dear Stinkpot: Letters From Louise Brooks, Louise wrote, "I found out about being able to write truth only in fiction. In a biography you start telling lies to fill in the gaps. In an autobiography you have to make everybody else a sonofabitch in order to justify yourself."