Greer Macallister Bases 'The Thirteenth Husband' on Real Gilded Age Heiress

Bestselling historical fiction author, Greer Macallister joins Writer’s Voices to discuss her newest historical novel, The Thirteenth Husband. Set during the Gilded Age, the book tells the story of a real-life Bohemian heiress named Aimee Crocker. According to Macallister, “She was an heiress from a well-to-do, California family. Her father was actually the lawyer for the Big 4 who built the Transcontinental Railroad. Her uncle was one of the Big 4, and then her father was the lawyer and made quite a bit of money, and then her father died when she was ten and left her 10 million dollars, which is the equivalent of 300 million dollars today, so she was a young woman with her own money, which was very, very unusual, and then what she did with it was even more unusual because she decided to travel the world and get tattoos, and marry and divorce a succession of younger and younger husbands over a series of decades and do all sorts of wild stuff, onto Broadway shows and live in Japan. She did so many things I actually had to streamline some of it because it would’ve made a much longer book…”

While Aimee’s character is questionable throughout the story, Macallister found her to be interesting and actually loved several things about her. “She made a lot of terrible decisions, but don’t we all? …I think particularly for the time in which she had what we would consider a pretty modern outlook about international travel and other cultures. She would travel to these places and she had that, sort of… ‘I don’t want to be tourist. I want to go live among the people and do what they do and understand them better because I am trying to be one of them,’ with the understanding you never can truly, but you learn more about other cultures by immersing yourself and not just going and pointing at the tallest mountain in Japan, so I loved that about her… I think she could’ve been a little bit smarter about her love affairs, and particularly the way that she tells things in her memoir, And I’d Do It Again. She was just falling left and right for, like, a whole bunch of terrible men, whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. Whether that’s part of the legend that she wanted to do, but if I had been her friend I would have definitely had some advice to give her…”