Julia Cooke on Martha Gellhorn

In this episode, we welcome Julia Cooke to discuss her new book, Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, which profiles three pioneering women journalists: Rebecca West, Emily "Mickey" Hahn, and Martha Gellhorn. 

Cooke explores these writers' shared temperament and celebrates their work as a forerunner to New Journalism. Throughout our interview, we learn about Gellhorn: her life before Hemingway entered the scene (in a letter, she would describe her younger self as "starry and restless”), her short-lived relationship with Hemingway, and her later years in which she adopted a son and experienced a rather complicated motherhood. Cooke also immerses us in Gellhorn's writing, focusing on how her war journalism weaves together harrowing scenes with humanizing details and how her witnessing of Dachau toward the end of WWII was truly transformative.