PW: How did you come around to the idea of The Lives of the Muses?

FP: It started with a letter that's in the book, from Samuel Johnson to Hester Thrale, which I found in a collection of great letters of the last 500 years. And it made me curious about the muse-artist relationship. I realized no one had written about what this connection was and who the women were. I thought, the women's lives must be as interesting as the lives of their artists. It's a way of writing about a certain kind of woman's life. As it turned out, they were all incredibly different from one another. But they began to seem like parts of a kind of a life, of a way women can live. They were all extraordinary, all atypical. The stories just got to me.

PW: Few of these stories end happily. Is there something inherently tragic in being a muse?

FP: None of the women and none of the men with whom they were involved were likely from early on to have normal, happy, healthy, heterosexual fulfilled relationships. On the other hand, when I started the book, I realized how rare those relationships are and how much broader the idea of love is than we usually imagine and give it credit for. In an interview with Michael Silverblatt [host of public radio's Bookworm], he pointed out how few of the relationships actually involve sex.

PW: This is your first work of nonfiction. How did it feel to write nonfiction, as opposed to fiction?

FP: It was so much fun. It was very different. For one thing, the stories were already written. In certain ways, it was like fiction. I had to find structure. And in each case I tried to find a kind of emblematic and dramatic scene to start with, for example, poor Lizzie Siddal's exhumation [by Dante Gabriel Rossetti], or the scene when Samuel Johnson begs Mr. and Mrs. Thrale to restrain him from his own madness. So it was structural in the same way that writing fiction is structural. On the other hand, there wasn't the same panic I get with a novel that I'm not going to be able to finish it. I knew the stories had an ending.

PW: How did you select the nine muses you profile?

FP: I wanted stories that were as different from each other as I could find. Once I did Lou Andreas-Salomé, I thought, okay, I'm not going to do Alma Mahler—they were both involved with a number of great artists. Alice Liddell was an obvious choice. Then I thought, no more child muses. Once I did Siddal, I thought I didn't want anyone else who was that passive. And then with Charis Weston, I wanted someone who did become an "art wife" and wound up leaving that life. With [Suzanne] Farrell, I wanted someone who was a real, genuine collaborator, in which the artist-muse delegation of activity wasn't so clear. I wanted people from different periods and disciplines.

PW: Does an artist have to have a muse?

FP: No, I think most don't, and I think very few contemporary artists do or get the concept. Because it is such a strange concept. The thing that would be interesting that I haven't really thought about is—is there a difference between art that's produced for or with a muse, and not? My feelings about the muse and artist were so colored, finally, by how I felt about the art. It just didn't seem to me that Rossetti's paintings were worth sacrificing Siddal's life for.

PW: Have you had a muse yourself?

FP: Well, no. Certainly, I have to say my husband has for many years made it in every way easier for me to work—he's an artist himself—but that's not quite the same as a muse.