AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT: Leslie Johansen Nack

​Leslie Johansen Nack’s debut novel, The Blue Butterfly, A Novel of Marion Davies has won two awards including 2022 CIBA Finalist for Goethe Late Historical Fiction. Her debut memoir, Fourteen, A Daughter’s Memoir, received five indie awards, including the 2016 Finalist in Memoir at the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. 

Before she started writing, she raised two children, ran a mechanical engineering business with her husband, took care of her aging mother, and dreamed of retirement when she could write full-time. She did everything late in life, including getting her degree in English Literature from UCLA. She lives in San Diego and enjoys sailing, hiking and reading.

Q: Why did you write this book?​
Answer: I guess you could say I became inspired by the ghost of Marion Davies. She’s on quite a few minds these days with two new books about her in one year, and I got swept up in the energy. It happened when I was on tour at Hearst Castle and the docent said, “Did you know Marion Davies loaned William Randolph Hearst $1 million in 1937 during the height of the Depression when he was on the verge of bankruptcy?” My reaction was “No. I didn’t know that.” And then my next reaction was, “How come we don’t know that about Marion Davies?” 
Do women ever get the credit for being heroic—for saving a man as powerful as WRH was in the 1930s? And just so you know, we’re talking about the equivalent of $17 million today raised in 24 hours. And she wasn’t married to him, but she had been his defacto-wife for two decades by 1937. So that’s how the ball got rolling, as they say, and I went home to research her and found very little. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t already a historical fiction novel about her. That’s when I decided to write her life story. 

Q: What do you hope people will take away from this book?
Answer: Please take away the true history of her life. And let’s set the record straight about Citizen Kane and how awful Orson Welles was to Marion when he made that movie. Citizen Kane took away Marion’s reputation in Hollywood and she became a laughingstock. We are now looping back into history and re-evaluating the whole thing. Orson Welles apologized to Marion, but the damage had been done. Let’s see her as a pioneer in the silent movie era, a hard worker who made more than forty films in twenty years, and a devoted lover of William Randolph Hearst, who stayed with him until the end, supporting and comforting him until the day he died. 

Q: Tell us about your writing process.
Answer: I am a writer who needs inspiration. My first book was a memoir, and I was inspired to write that, wanting to parse out the difficult details of my early life. My second book was historical fiction, and now I’m in the middle of writing another memoir. I am the type of writer who doesn’t have much discipline in writing every day, but when I get inspired, the story just flows out. 

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Visit Leslie on her website: 
www.lesliejohansennack.com 
Join Leslie on Faceboook: 
www.facebook.com/lesliejohansennack
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www.twitter.com/leslie_nack
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LINK for BOOK:
https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Butterfly-Novel-Marion-Davies/dp/1647423473
PRESS & MEDIA: 
​https://www.lesliejohansennack.com/media/