It was while I was researching and rehearsing that I came up with the idea for the book. I was staging the play in March of 2015 so I did my auditions in January of 2015. KM: Everything was sort of all tied up with the play. NJ: When did you start writing “The Radium Girls” and how long did it take you? I thought they deserved to be remembered and readers deserved to know about them.Ī shot of the dial-painting studio in Orange, New Jersey in the early 1920s There were books about their legal legacy, books about the science, but no book that sort of took you on the journey with them and that celebrated them, the individual women.Īnd I really thought they deserved a book that did that. The book came about … because I was just amazed there wasn’t a book, a narrative book, that told their story in nonfiction. Everything about the play was just so powerful to me. This story and these women were just so incredible-their dignity, their courage, their strength, the way they fight, their sisterhood. One of the plays that came back on that Google search was “These Shining Lives” by Melanie Marnich. So I literally just typed into Google “great plays for women” because I wanted to direct a play with strong female characters, great opportunities for actresses and so on. Literally about a week before I had closed my directorial debut, which was Lorca’s “Blood Wedding.” I enjoyed the process of directing so much that I was like, I All that happened was, I was sitting on my sofa in London in the spring of 2014. Kate Moore: This whole journey has been such a sort of serendipitous one. How did you come to know about the play, and what about these women made you want to write a book about them? National Jeweler: You learned about the “radium girls” when you directed a play in London, “These Shining Lives,” about the dial painters who worked at The Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. So I dusted it off, devoured it, and set up a Skype interview with the author, in the hopes that others who are still safe at home might add it to their reading lists too. London-based Moore is the author of “The Radium Girls,” published in 2017 by SourceBooks.Ī gift to me from the former publisher of National Jeweler, I must confess that this book has been in my to-read pile for a while.īut right now, like so many others, I am trying to use my time in isolation constructively. But there was never really a book about their lives until a couple years ago, when a woman named Kate Moore wrote one. These women became known as the “radium girls” and over the years, they’ve had their struggles documented in scientific journals and law reviews. The big problem with this method: Radium is toxic and, even though their employers knew it, nobody bothered to share this fact with the women.Īnd so they got sick, and had to go to court to fight the radium companies for money as their medical bills mounted and most found themselves unable to work. The women would apply this wonder substance using fine camel-hair paint brushes brought to an even finer point by sticking them in their mouths, a technique known as lip-pointing. Starting in the early 20th century, this was the process thousands of women used at factories across the United States to apply a newly discovered element to watch and clock dials that made them glow in the dark-radium.
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