“Ex-Wife” was adapted into the hit movie “The Divorcee,” which won Norma Shearer the lead-actress Oscar. (“Fiction or confession?” a headline asked.) In October, 1929, amid the stock-market crash that precipitated the Great Depression, Parrott received her first royalty check, for the modern-day equivalent of almost three hundred thousand dollars.

No longer tantalizing readers by shrouding Parrott’s identity in mystery, the marketers of “Ex-Wife” now strived to make the attractive young author synonymous with her creation, insinuating that her novel was a barely veiled memoir. The Hearst tabloid the Daily Mirror serialized the novel and teased “the most talked about story of the day” with a full-page ad prominently featuring Parrott’s name and pixie-cut likeness.

Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist and radio host, called it a “sensational book about husbands and sex.” It was published anonymously-a not uncommon marketing gimmick of the time-but the author was soon outed in Winchell’s newspaper column as Ursula Parrott, a thirty-year-old first-time novelist, the daughter of a respected Boston physician, a Radcliffe graduate, a single mother of a young son, and a verified ex-wife. In the summer of 1929, a provocative New York novel titled “ Ex-Wife” arrived in bookstores, quickly selling out its first printing.

Chasing me to my grave book