✏️🛠️ How This Writer Got a Book Deal From Her Narratively Story About the Socialite Who Sterilized Her Daughter

Audrey Clare Farley always wanted to write a book about eugenics, and her essay about the remarkable story of Ann Cooper Hewitt opened the door.

Photo courtesy AP Photo/RJF

One of the things we’re most proud of at Narratively is how many of our authors have gone on to expand their longform articles into even bigger and more exciting projects. When Audrey Clare Farley wrote a Hidden History story about a 1930s millionairess whose mother secretly sterilized her to deprive her of the family fortune, it was a huge viral hit and Audrey knew there was a larger story to tell there.

Fast forward five years and Audrey has not only published her book, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt, but that book is also in development as a scripted TV series with a major actress and producer attached. And Audrey’s second book, Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America, was named a New York Times Editors’ Pick.

Audrey is paying her knowledge forward via her Narratively Academy class, The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel, an eight-week…