The work of the Lost Generation is every young writer’s first crush. And why not?
That oft romanticized era of expats, art and all that jazz, circa the 1920s, featured larger-than-life characters like Hemingway, who brawled and wrote; Fitzgerald, who juggled gin and genius and wrote; and Gertrude Stein, who played the patron saint of modernism and wrote. Given the triumphs of this cohort, one can safely say that literary history is written by the victors.
But behind every legend are the lesser-known, the overlooked and, occasionally, the outright forgotten. Fortunately for one bright light dimmed by time—Sara Wiborg Murphy, a muse who inspired the aforementioned titans—Bay Area novelist Kirsten Mickelwait has reclaimed her story and placed her squarely in the spotlight where she belongs.
Mickelwait will discuss the resulting historical novel, The Ashtrays are Full and the Glasses are Empty (Koehler Books), at Corte Madera’s Book Passage on May 28.
“I initially discovered Sara and Gerald Murphy as a college sophomore; I read their first biography, Living Well is the Best Revenge, for a literature class on the Lost Generation back in 1973,” Mickelwait recalls. While the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds of the scene dazzled and drank themselves into immortality—or ruin—the Murphys embodied a quieter, nobler artistry.
“Their true gift was for love, for friendship, for parenthood, and for creating beautiful experiences and environments,” she says. In other words, they were the unsung architects of the era’s ambience—a trait as valuable as any bestselling novel or modernist painting.
If the Murphys were the designers of a golden life, Sara Murphy was its muse and steward. Mickelwait’s novel follows her from the lavish salons of New York to the bohemian utopias of Paris and Antibes. Her social orbit included the likes of Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker and Gertrude Stein. But glitter has a habit of tarnishing. By the 1930s the Great Depression had arrived, personal tragedies accumulated and the very culture the Murphys helped foster had begun its descent.
“I wanted to show the full arc of Sara’s story,” Mickelwait says, “which speaks to her strong character and integrity.” And in doing so, she mirrors a historical moment that, as it turns out, echoes our own. “We’ve recently undergone several global phenomena that echo what they also went through: a global pandemic, a stock-market disaster and a cultural leaning toward fascism,” she observes. Time, it seems, is a flat and occasionally cruel circle.
Memoirist to Novelist: Taking the Wheel
This isn’t Mickelwait’s first foray into excavating lives—her memoir, The Ghost Marriage, told her own harrowing and redemptive tale. But Ashtrays presents a different kind of literary terrain: The leap from factual recollection to imaginative reconstruction.
“With a memoir, readers expect you to tell the story in a novelistic way, but they also expect that you’re sticking to the facts of your life,” she says. For Ashtrays, the research was vast, “but perhaps the biggest liberation was being able to imagine scenes, characters and plots to take the story where I thought it should go.”
That said, Mickelwait is clear-eyed about preserving the emotional truth behind the known facts. “Rather than developing alternate plots, I wanted to use my imagination to go more deeply into the emotional truths of Sara’s story.” Her writers’ group initially nudged her to fully embrace fiction’s freedom: “Is this a novel or a biography?” they asked. By draft three, Mickelwait had taken the wheel and steered her story toward more personal and dramatic waters.
Case in point: Gerald Murphy’s sexuality. While biographies hint at his bisexuality or homosexuality, Mickelwait chose to depict him as “definitively gay.” The choice wasn’t mere speculation—it was narrative necessity. “It raised the stakes in his marriage to Sara: He wasn’t just attracted to others, but his identity as a gay man was a physical rejection of her, even though they were emotionally devoted to each other,” she says.
Such tensions breathe life into the book’s portrayal of love—not as a tidy, romantic ideal but as a complex, often bittersweet negotiation.
The Party’s Over (but the Story Continues)
The novel’s title—The Ashtrays are Full and the Glasses are Empty—is a direct quote from Zelda Fitzgerald, a woman who knew a thing or two about the price of cultural brilliance and personal breakdown. “I thought it was a perfect statement that reflected the ‘party’s over’ feeling after the Jazz Age ended abruptly with the stock market crash and the ensuing decades got very real,” Mickelwait says.
But if the party ended, resilience took the floor.
As Mickelwait dug deeper into Sara Murphy’s life, she began noticing uncanny parallels with her own. “The theme of a golden life followed by a great downfall was one that felt all-too-familiar when I was writing about Sara. But there’s also the theme of resilience; we both survived our hardships and tragedies to become whole people again,” she notes.
In a moment of delightful, if eerie, synchronicity, Mickelwait discovered that both Gerald Murphy and her ex-husband had a penchant for dramatic costumes. “Gerald also loved to dress in costume: as a Chinese aristocrat, as a cowboy, as an apache dancer,” she says. “Oddly, I didn’t even notice this parallel until after the book was being edited and a friend pointed it out to me.”
Navigating Love, Loss and Reinvention
At its core, Ashtrays is about how women navigate love, loss and the ever-elusive promise of reinvention—a subject as relevant today as it was in the Jazz Age.
“One of my favorite quotes is from A.A. Milne: ‘You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think,’” Mickelwait says. “I think that most women are phenomenally resilient, no matter what you throw at them.”
This resilience is not abstract. Writing about Sara Murphy’s devastating experiences as a mother forced Mickelwait into emotionally fraught territory. “What Sara went through as a mother is something I hope never to experience myself. It was definitely hard to write those chapters and have to ‘feel those feels,’” she says. Her solution? Empathy through questioning. “I put questions in her head that would have been my questions had I been in her shoes: Why do bad things happen to good people? If there is a God, why is He punishing me?”
Through this narrative empathy, Mickelwait doesn’t just reconstruct Sara Murphy’s world—she inhabits it, inviting readers to do the same.
A Muse Reclaimed
Sara Wiborg Murphy may have once been a footnote, but thanks to Mickelwait’s meticulous research, creative daring and uncanny personal connections, she emerges fully realized. The Ashtrays are Full and the Glasses are Empty isn’t just a historical novel—it’s a reclamation, a resurrection and, perhaps most importantly, a reminder that even as the party ends, the story continues.
Kirsten Mickelwait will discuss her new book, ‘The Ashtrays are Full and the Glasses are Empty,’ in conversation with Nina Schuyler at 6pm, Wednesday, May 28, at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. For more information, visit bit.ly/mickelwait.
