Ex-Wife (Faber Editions)

Ursula Parrott (1899-1957) is the pen name of Katherine Ursula Towle, author of twenty books and over one hundred stories and articles. Born in Boston, she attended Radcliffe College and moved to Greenwich Village after marrying journalist Lindesay Marc Parrott. Their 1926 divorce inspired her at first anonymous debut, Ex-Wife, which sold over 100,000 copies in 1929 and was adapted into Hollywood sensation The Divorcee during the Depression. Parrott soon became one of the most successful female writers of the 1930s, with her work adapted into movies starring Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart. Her tumultuous private life included three more marriages and a rumoured liaison with F. Scott Fitzgerald. After her popularity declined, amidst various high-profile court cases and personal struggles, Parrott died of cancer in a charity ward in New York. Monica Heisey is a writer and screenwriter from Toronto. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, New York Times, Guardian and Vogue, among others. In 2015 she released I Can't Believe It's Not Better, an essay collection, and in 2023 published Really Good, Actually, her first novel. She has also written for television shows like Schitt's Creek, Everything I Know About Love and Smothered. Heisey lives in London.