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- Super-thin 4G LTE-enabled, Android-powered smartphone with extra-large battery and 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Advanced multi-touch display
- Dual-core 1.2 GHz processor; capable of running full Firefox desktop browser with optional accessories; Wireless-N Wi-Fi networking (with optional Wi-Fi Mobile Hotspot service)
- 8-MP camera; full HD 1080p camcorder; front-facing video chat camera; Bluetooth stereo music; 16 GB memory plus 16 GB microSD card; corporate and personal e-mail
- 3300 mAh battery for up to 21 hours of talk time, up to 380 hours ( 15.8 days) of standby time; released in January, 2012
- What's in the Box: handset, rechargeable battery, charger, USB cable, 16 GB microSD card, quick start guide
A captivating novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922, and the sum! mer that would change them both.
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Only a few years before becoming a famous actress and an icon for her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle is a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip. She has no idea what she’s in for: Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous blunt bangs and black bob, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will change their lives forever.
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For Cora, New York holds the promise of discovery that might prove an answer to the question at the! center of her being, and even as she does her best to watch o! ver Loui se in a strange and bustling city, she embarks on her own mission. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, it liberates her in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course of the summer, Cora’s eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive.
Curtis Sittenfeld Sittenfeld is the author of the bestselling novels American Wife , Prep, and The Man of My Dreams , which have been translated into twenty-five languages. Here she talks with novelist Laura Moriarty about her experiences writing The Chaperone.
Curtis Sittenfeld: You tell the story of two characters whose trajectories overlap--Louise Brooks before she becomes famous, and quietly co! mplicated housewife Cora Carlisle, who serves as 15-year-old Louise’s chaperone in New York in the fateful summer of 1922. Did you always know they belonged in a book together, or did you decide to write about one of them first?
Laura Moriarty: I always found Louise Brooks interesting. She was an icon of the silent-film era, and I knew she’d grown up in Kansas, and that she was smart and rebellious and sharp-tongued. But it wasn’t until I learned that she’d first gone to New York as a teenager with a 36-year-old chaperone that I saw a story I wanted to write. I’m drawn to intergenerational tension, and it must have been strong in the 1920s: I wondered how Louise’s generation of flappers appeared to the women who came of age at the beginni! ng of the century--wearing corsets, long skirts, and high coll! ars. Thi s older generation of women had campaigned for suffrage and prohibition of alcohol; they must have been bewildered by the very different values and sensibilities of their daughters. I liked the idea of a chaperone, someone thrown into this dynamic all at once.
Sittenfeld: Were you a fan of Louise Brooks specifically, or of movies from the 1920s and 1930s generally, or were you exploring an art form unfamiliar to you when you started writing this novel?
Moriarty: I wasn’t that familiar with silent films. I didn’t know, for example, how hugely popular silent films were in the 1920s, how people would go to the movies several times a week. While I was writing the book, I went to see Louise Brooks’ most famous film, Pandora’s Box, at the Tivoli in Kansas City, and it was a lovely experience. You can watch old silent films on DVD or even on YouTube, but it was a different feeling watching her up on the big screen, se! eing the film the way people saw it all those years ago.
Sittenfeld: You’ve clearly done a lot of research. What form did your research take? Were there discoveries you made--about Brooks, or the early twentieth century, or Wichita--that particularly captured your imagination? Was there any incredibly juicy details you came across that just didn’t belong in the book?
Moriarty: One of the first things I did, and maybe the most important, was drive down to Wichita and walk around Union Station, where Louise and her chaperone disembarked for New York in 1922. It’s boarded up now, but just seeing the physical place helped me see the story and the journey as real. I read Louise’s autobiography and Barry Paris’s biography of her. I read oral histories of Manhattan in the ‘20s, and I read travel guides from that era as well. I spent a lot of time learning about 1920s fashion, not just what flappers were wearing, but wha! t most women were wearing, what men were wearing. Overall I le! arned a lot of details about 1920s clothes, cars, kitchen appliances, and food. I had a character eating peanut butter in one scene until I learned that peanut butter wasn’t commercially packaged and sold until 1924. But the biggest challenge was probably getting into the psychology of someone living in that eraâ€"to know her values, and how she saw the world.
Here’s an interesting bit about Louise that didn’t get in the book: After she became famous, she and some friends were dining in a restaurant in Europe; she was bored, and she spotted a man she’d been friendly with, and she asked the waiter to summon him. The man didn’t come over right away because he was with a woman, and he didn’t want to be rude. When he finally did go over to Louise’s table, apologizing and explaining his delay, she picked up a bouquet of roses and sliced him across the face with it, the thorns actually cutting his skin so his face was dripping blood. This story, to me, says a lot abo! ut the dark side of Louise’s personality. Yes, she was beautiful and intelligent, and she could be very funny, but obviously there was a deep insecurity there, a real destructive rage and immaturity. I couldn’t work that scene into the book, but I knew what it told me about Louise, and I thought about it when I was writing her scenes with Cora.
Sittenfeld: One of your characters was part of the Orphan Train, which placed children with Midwestern families (who also happened to be strangers!). Is her experience based on that of anyone real, or is it more of an amalgamation?
Moriarty: The thing that got me about the Orphan Trains was that the experiences were so varied. Some of the kids went from neglect and hunger in New! York to loving farm families who couldn’t wait to fatten th! em up, w ho gave them medical care, an education, affection. And some of the kids became the victims of terrible cruelty, and more hunger, and more neglect--it all depended on who adopted them off of the train. Because the experiences of the children were so varied, I wouldn’t say this character’s experience is an amalgamation, though she isn’t based on any one real person either. Her story is just what could have happened to a child, and what probably did happen to many of them.
Sittenfeld: Like Cora, you yourself live in Kansas, and you’ve set earlier fiction there. What do you like about writing and living in a place that’s not considered a literary hotbed? (Admittedly, I ask this as someone who lives in nearby Missouri!)
Moriarty: I love my town, Lawrence, Kansas, so I’m glad I get to live here. I’ve never felt that wanting to write required me to live in New York. There are so many great authors living there, of co! urse, but I can get their books here, or I can read their stories online or in journals. And there’s a great community of writers right here in my town. I teach creative writing at the University of Kansas, and I have creative colleagues and thoughtful graduate students, and I have a writing group I meet with almost every week. I suppose it’s a little humbling to write from Kansas. I know I’m not at the literary center of the universe. But that might not be a bad thing.
Sittenfeld: I want to ask you a variation of a question I’ve been asked. I wrote a novel, American Wife, that borrowed from the life of a real person--Laura Bush--but I changed her name. You’ve written about a real person--Louise Brooksâ€"and used her real name, but she’s no longer living. Do you feel any moral qualms about portraying a real person saying and doing things that you’ve made up?
Moriarty: I was so excited about this book when I s! tarted it that I didn’t have a lot of moral qualms. But the ! more I r ead about Louise and the more I wrote about her, the more I started to really care for her, and I did worry about getting her right, portraying her in a way that was accurate. I tried to keep my depiction true to what I learned from her autobiography and biographies about her. It’s impossible to know what she’d think of my portrayal, but I hope she would approve. In any case, I don’t think Louise Brooks ever lost too much sleep over what other people thought of her.
Sittenfeld: Your descriptions of Cora wearing a corset are incredibly convincing. Did you--for the sake of research, of course--ever try one on yourself?
Moriarty: I don’t think I’ve ever tried on a corset, though a certain bridesmaid’s dress did require a torturous bustier that will stay forever burned in my sensory memory.
Photo of Curtis Sittenfeld © Ryan Kurtz
Photo of Laura Moriarty © Tracy Rasmussen
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 DROID strong. RAZR sharp. MAXX battery life. (view larger). |
 One of the thinnest 4G LTE smartphones (view larger). |
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DROID is a trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd. and its related companies. Used under license. KEVLAR is a registered trademark of DuPont used under license by Motorola Mobility, Inc.
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DROID RAZR MAXX by Motorola at Play
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 Eyeâ€"piercing col! or and blinding brilliance from the 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Advanced display (view larger). |
DROID RAZR MAXX by Motorola at Work
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Vital Statistics
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What's in the BoxDROID RAZR MAXX by Motorola handset, rechargeable battery, wall/USB charger, USB cable, 16 GB microSD card, quick start guide
Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Network
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Connectivity
Communications & Inte! rnet
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Android Gingerbread Operating System
 The Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX runs the Android 2.3 operating system (dubbed Gingerbread). It features a cleaner, more refined interface with new icons, improved top notification bar, and more intuitive navigation. Multitasking in Gingerbread allows you the ability to run more than one app at a time. If you're playing a game, you can easily switch to an incoming e-mail and then switch back to the game without losing your place. And like the previous version of Android ("Froyo"), Gingerbread provides support for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for access to the full Web. The onscreen keyboard makes it easier to type thanks to additional spacing between the keys and larger font sizes. And the more you use the keyboard, the easier typing will be as the enhanced suggest feature records previous input history to make better suggestions. The DROID RAZR MAXX also brings one-touch access to the popular Google mobi! le services you use every day. It also provides easy access to both personal and corporate e-mail, calendars, and contacts supported by Exchange Server and Gmail. And through Android Market, you'll get access to thousands of useful applications, widgets, and fun games to download and install on your phone, with many more apps being added every day. | Google Integration
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Also Available for This Android Device
 | Amazon Appstore for Android |  | Kindle |  | Amazon MP3 |
 | IMDB |  | Audible |  | Amazon Mobile |
