America's Book Club – Stacy Schiff on Cleopatra

David Rubenstein: "And how did you come to write a book about Cleopatra? What was the appeal of that subject?

Stacy Schiff: "It was an idea that we were we were literally sitting at dinner one night and the question of 'what did Cleopatra do all day?' came up, and this became kind of a family joke of like, you should write a book about what Cleopatra did all day. And then the joke became, when her diaries turn up, you can do this. And it just kind of got tossed around. It was on all my lists of possible subjects for a long time. And then, as I said, I went to France and wrote and researched and wrote the Franklin book. And somehow at the end of that process, I thought, you know what, the idea of someone where there's a great deal of just give around the edges of the story where we don't really know the narrative was an interesting narrative challenge. And I went back to read Plutarch, as one does, and, realize that we have like actual quotations of we have actual speeches between Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and that's when I thought, you know, we have if we have dialog of some kind, you could maybe write an episodic, you know, Cleopatra in five scenes kind of book. And then the more I researched, the more I realized there was actually a fabulously rich vein of material. And that if you wrote the book with a certain, from a certain angle, you could you could actually weave a complete narrative.

SUNDAYAmerica's Book Club with Stacy Schiff 6pm ET on CSPAN

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