Today on the site I’m thrilled to be hosting Linda Epstein, Ally Malinenko, and Liz Parker, the three coauthors behind the queerified Little Women reimagining The Other March Sisters, which releases February 25th from Kensington! Here’s the story:

The Other March Sisters by Linda Epstein, Ally Malinenko, and Liz Parker

Four sisters, each as different as can be. Through the eyes and words of Jo, their characters and destinies became known to millions. Meg, pretty and conventional. Jo, stubborn, tomboyish, and ambitious. Beth, shy and good-natured, a mortal angel readily accepting her fate. And Amy, elegant, frivolous, and shallow. But Jo, for all her insight, could not always know what was in her sisters’ thoughts, or in their hearts.

With Jo away in New York to pursue her literary ambitions, Meg, Beth, and Amy follow their own paths. Meg, newly married with young twins, struggles to find the contentment that Marmee assured her would come with domesticity. Unhappy and unfulfilled, she turns to her garden, finding there not just a hobby but a calling that will allow her to help other women in turn.

Beth knows her time is limited. Still, part of her longs to break out of her suffocating cocoon at home, however briefly. A new acquaintance turns into something more, offering unexpected, quiet joy.

Amy, traveling in Europe while she pursues her goal of becoming an artist, is keenly aware of the expectation that she will save the family by marrying well. Through the course of her journey, she discovers how she can remain true to herself, true to her art, and true to the love that was always meant to be.

Purposefully leaving Jo off the page, authors Liz Parker, Ally Malinenko, and Linda Epstein draw inspiration from Alcott’s real-life sisters, giving the other March women room to reveal themselves through conversations, private correspondence, and intimate moments—coming alive in ways that might surprise even daring, unconventional Jo.

Buy it: Bookshop | B&N | Amazon

And now our fabulous authors will take it from here!

Liz: The three of us have talked at length about Little Women over the past few years. With The Other March Sisters coming out on February 25, I wanted to chat about why now is the time for a queer Little Women retelling and how our book ended up becoming one. Also, for everyone just learning about our book for the first time, we each wrote a different story. Linda wrote one for Amy March. Ally wrote one for Beth March. And I wrote one for Meg March Brooke.

Linda: Can we back up a minute? Can we talk about what it feels like to be doing an interview on LGBTQ Reads? Because I’m having feelings.

Liz: It’s really a dream.

Ally: It’s incredible.

Liz: And it’s the perfect place to be having this conversation!

Linda: I keep pinching myself.

Ally: But to your question, Liz, for me, Beth’s love story couldn’t have been straight. It could only have been queer.

Linda: Why did you want to give her a love story at all, Ally?

Ally: Because Beth’s story is defined by her death. It’s all people think about when they think about her character. It bothered me when I was younger, but it bothered me even more after my own cancer diagnosis. I don’t want to be defined by my illness, and I didn’t want Beth to be defined that way either. I wanted her to fall in love, have a life, even if it is shortened.

Linda: I love that. I feel like so much of your work is that. I think we all bring something of ourselves to the things we write. I know I brought myself to writing Amy. As I’ve told you both many, many times, I always thought I loved Little Women––and Jo in particular––because Jo inspired me to be a writer. But when I compared Jo and Amy, I realized that my artistic sensibility is way more in line with Amy’s. I think I loved Jo and Little Women when I was a young girl because Jo is so queer. It was probably the first time I’d encountered a queer character in a book.

Liz: That’s a really good point. Jo is very queer (whether some readers want to acknowledge that or not). Which is really no surprise because if you look at Louisa May Alcott’s letters and journal entries, she certainly comes across as queer—saying she only ever loved women, that she felt like a man trapped in a woman’s body.

Ally: And Jo refers to herself as their “sister-brother” in the book. It’s not subtle at all (regardless of what readers want to acknowledge as you said Liz).

Linda: We probably don’t need to convince readers on this platform about that!

Liz: A fair point. That being said, we did end up bringing that queerness into what we wrote. We didn’t exactly set out to make Little Women queer–Louisa did a fine job of that on her own–but at least for me, in telling Meg’s story, the queer themes were already there. Meg has this friendship with Annie Moffat when they were teens where Annie gives Meg a pet name of Daisy (which Meg then used as a name for her own daughter!) and the dynamics between them read a lot like bisexual teen girls who develop romantic relationships with their friends.

Ally: For me, having decided to give Beth a love story, there was no way it could be a straight story. The dynamics made no sense. How would she meet someone? How would they connect? And I even have her say in the story that she could never imagine laying next to a man, and commenting on the rough scratch of his beard. But meeting Florida made sense.

Liz: Linda, rather than addressing Amy’s sexuality, you take on Laurie’s sexuality through Amy’s story. How did that come about?

Linda: Great question, Liz. When Ally and I first started writing (fyi readers: Liz came on later) our intention was to give “the other sisters” voices. It started as a conversation on Twitter (hisssssss) right after Greta Gerwig’s movie adaptation came out. That story clearly put Jo in the writer’s seat. Louisa was Jo was Louisa. So thinking about how the other sisters might have wanted to tell their stories instigated our writing. And––contrary to some readers’ opinions––we didn’t have a gay agenda. It wasn’t like, “Hey, let’s make everything gay in Little Women!” But the thing is… I’m queer and I can’t help bringing myself to my stories, the same way I brought my Jewishness to my first book, Repairing the World. If I were to have a gay agenda it would be to remind folks that we’ve always been here. When I was writing I tapped into queer artists creating at that time. And then… somehow? Laurie was queer? Long way around the block to say I don’t know! Amy’s just not queer to me. In Little Women or our story. And Laurie is!

Ally: I think that makes so much sense though because, specifically thinking of Greta’s movie, there is such a similarity between Jo and Laurie. They even wind up swapping clothes in the movie and if Jo was Louisa, and Louisa was the brother-sister then Laurie just can’t be straight.

Liz: I think the timeliness of the book itself is interesting. As you both mentioned, Greta Gerwig’s adaptation inspired the initial idea for the book. You brought me on a few years later. Now our book is coming out in 2025, which with current events in the United States is a scary time for a lot of queer people. I think there’s something to be said for being bold and brash with queerness in literature. Bringing that to a classic is a powerful statement.

Linda: You’re not wrong, Liz. The thing is though, for me, as a newly out person (Pride 2021!) I’m not used to publicly being boldly or brashly queer. It feels like a strange position for me to be in. I had no idea we’d end up being bold or brash! I just wanted to tell a story. And yes, it’s a scary time.

Ally: Speaking of bold and brash, Liz, you included an abortion in your story. Was it always your intention to address women’s rights to make decisions about our own bodies when you set out to tell Meg’s story?

Liz: It wasn’t! I did a very close read of Little Women before writing Meg’s story (actually my first time reading Little Women), and multiple times Louisa mentioned how much Meg loved plants. That combined with reading about Anna Alcott Pratt wanting to feel like she’d done more with her life, led to me making Meg an herbalist. While I was writing her story, Roe v. Wade was overturned. My rage over that decision got channeled into Meg’s story. Like I said before, Meg had a childhood friendship that reads as much more than friendship, and it felt important for me to include that friend, Annie, in the story. This became sort of the basis for how the abortion plays out. (No spoilers though!)

Linda: I think the fact that you’d never read Little Women before, and were bringing fresh eyes, adult eyes, to the story, without any sentimental youthful attachments, was one of the things that attracted us to you as a writer and to your story. It’s such a different point of view from someone who has been with the text for a long time.

Ally: Agreed Linda. I loved watching Liz experience this text for the first time and put her own spin on it.

Liz: I am now fully a Little Women fangirl, and I have a lot of takes.

Linda: I think all three of us were processing some of our anger at how things currently are in the world. What’s weird though is how much more timely our story is. Who knew things would roll out (politically) the way they have? We certainly didn’t know that when we first started writing.

Ally: I think one of my favorite aspects of the way we approached this story was to draw from Louisa’s sisters’ real lives. What did you both discover about them that made them different from the characters that Louisa created?

Liz: Ally, I think you should go first. Your Beth is so much more like Lizzie than Louisa’s was.

Ally: Okay sure! So there are many similarities between Lizzie’s experiences and Beth’s experiences in the book. They both had scarlet fever. They both recovered. And they were both left with residual long term heart problems from it. That said, Lizzie was older when she died. She was 21 compared to Beth being a teenager. While Louisa painted Beth as a “dear and nothing else” the real life Lizzie was sarcastic and biting and she signed off all her letters with “from your dear little skeleton.” When she died it was not peaceful. She was angry and rageful which is completely understandable. I wanted to give my Beth a little of Lizzie’s anger. I wanted her to acknowledge that it wasn’t fair that she got sick. Because, well, it wasn’t. And she had the right to feel that. I know Louisa did what she did because she wanted to give her sister a peaceful acceptance and I understand why her grief needed that. But I wanted to give my Beth a little of Lizzie’s anger. Because she deserved it.

Liz: I love that you did that. Your Beth is dark and biting and really aware of her own mortality, and yet she finds love, and I think that’s beautiful. What about you, Linda?

Linda: Well, Louisa based Amy on her sister, May Alcott Nieriker, who was a painter in real life. May, like Amy, was committed to studying and making art. She actually had paintings in the Paris Salons of 1877 and 1879. She ended up marrying late, a man who was supportive of her being a painter, which was not the case for most women. Many female artists of the time either stopped painting after they got married, or just never married. The struggle to find that balance was real. Before she got married May had Louisa helping her along financially. It was one of the things Louisa was proud to spend the money she was making from publishing Little Women on. The saddest thing for me is that May died so young. Shortly after giving birth to her daughter, she died from a postpartum infection. The thing I wanted to look at though is the struggle between creating art and having financial security, especially for women. It’s still something I personally struggle with. But then, as now, men have more opportunities and support financially and otherwise. What about you, Liz?

Liz: Anna Alcott Pratt wrote when she was a teenager, “I have a foolish wish to be something great and I shall probably spend my life in a kitchen and die in the poor-house. I want to be Jenny Lind or Mrs. Seguin and I can’t and so I cry.” She had wanted to be an actress, but she had hearing loss, which kept her from the stage. After she married more than a decade later, she ended up spending much of her life taking care of her family. She did it with poise and grace, but at age 57 (only five years before her death), she went abroad the first time, likening herself to Cinderella and finally starting her own life. All of this went into the story that I wrote for Meg. I wanted to give her something that was all her own—something Anna never got to have. So in a lot of ways, her story was to honor Anna’s life. Because I believe a woman can be a wife and a mother without losing herself in the process. And I think having this undercurrent of Meg being bisexual adds another layer to her story as so many bisexual women in our own era end up in straight-passing relationships and find their queerness erased by those around them. In fact, there have been reviewers who haven’t noticed Meg’s sexuality because I didn’t overtly say: “Meg likes men and women.” And I think that’s very telling.

Linda: One of the scenes I loved writing was when Laurie and Amy are talking about Laurie’s sexuality and Amy says, “I just never knew there were so many variations of romance and attraction, Laurie.” And he answers, “There are so many variations of love.” For me, that’s another of the things I’m proud to have brought to our story. We all gave our characters love, in some of the many ways people love.

Liz: I love that line so much, Linda. And I love that you saw the queerness in Laurie and brought it to the page, giving Amy a queer relationship as well. As a bisexual woman in a het-passing relationship, their whole dynamic made me feel seen as a reader. Going back to the beginning, we started this conversation asking about why now is the time for a queer Little Women reimagining, and while I do think we’ve answered that, I also think we’ve made it pretty clear that Little Women has always been queer. We were simply leaning into what Louisa put on the page (amidst the other things she had to include to get the book published).

Ally: I like to think that Louisa would have appreciated our take on her characters. I think we were able to be more open about things that she couldn’t talk about. I like to think she would have felt that she and her sisters were seen for who they really were. I hope my Beth would have made her proud.

Linda: Not only could Louisa not talk about it because it was one of the things “people don’t talk about,” but the vocabulary just wasn’t there yet, for anyone. I think if she would have had the words, Louisa would have talked about it. I like to think she’d give The Other March Sisters at least four stars or a thumbs up. Mostly though, I like to think she’d approve.

Liz: Me too.

Ally: Yeah, so do I.

***

Linda Epstein is a literary agent at Emerald City Literary Agency, freelance editor, and author whose novels include Repairing the World and The Other March Sisters. She lives in upstate New York with her ridiculous designer mutt, Gertie Gertstein. You can find her online at lindaepsteinauthor.com and @lindaepsteinauthor on Instagram.

 

Ally Malinenko is the author of Ghost Girl, the Bram Stoker nominated This Appearing House, and the forthcoming Broken Dolls (Harper) and The Other March Sisters (Kensington). She lives in Brooklyn.

Liz Parker is the author of Witches of Honeysuckle House, In the Shadow Garden, and The Other March Sisters. She’s also an herbalist and a witch. You can find her online at LizParkerWrites.com and on most social media platforms at @LizParkerWrites.