These stories were prepublished in a French newspaper Le Monde every week, and I carefully read the comments there because sometimes they were very useful for making corrections before printing.

Thousands of years later, access to quality women’s healthcare is still a problem all over the world.Īs a disclaimer, she is the only woman about whom there is doubt about whether she existed or not. You wrote about Agnodice, who brought women’s healthcare to ancient Greece. Narrowing the list down seems impossible. It was much harder to find books about them, because some of them were so little known. Once I started opening that door, it seemed like a million of them just fell onto me. Then I started thinking about all these other woman I had heard about, and their amazing stories. At first I thought of making a book about Katia Krafft, the volcanologist, or Peggy Guggenheim. Some of them I had known a really long time. Initially, I had a hard time selecting only 30 of them, because I could have easily done a hundred. Once you train your eye to see them, they’re suddenly everywhere. Most of them are background characters in others’ biographies or in documentaries about someone else. You just don’t notice them because they’re not labeled as the hero of the story. How did you go about selecting these women? Even discovering them in the first place is kind of an accomplishment.Īctually, it’s not. Most of these women are, I believe, unknown or very little known, so this was my way to introduce them.Īs you say, many of them are not well known. If people want to know more about these women, they can look for more information. I figured that if I went that way, I would do nothing but biographies all my life, so I decided that I could make 30 of them as short stories. When I started thinking of the book to do after California Dreamin’, there was another woman I wanted to write about. I had, for years, this list of women I wanted to talk about - one of them was Cass Elliot. Pénélope Bagieu: Actually, that’s exactly what it was.

Brazen by Pénélope Bagieu