Rex Whistler

The work, you know, being in the archives, it's my favorite part of the entire experience.

Yeah, just that immediacy and intimacy with my first book when I was writing about Rex Whistler and Edith Livio.

I worked on Edith's diaries and I was there for weeks and I went through all these years and she wrote a daily diary and that was extraordinary.

And following the quality of her handwriting or the different inks she wrote with and how writing disintegrated as she got older, how it became less coherent.

rex whistler's family gave me boxes of things to work through and then edith olivia had kind of ephemera napkins and you know party invitations and stuff and i love all that you know the archaeology of it and that's the intimacy but i you know i didn't really have that as much with this story i purposely chose to kind of step back a little bit but i did work with letters i wanted to focus on the letters and the texts and photographs

When you were in the archives, did you take photos or scan everything and then come home and analyze it? Or in the archive, did you take notes? How did you work?

I did a bit of both.