It was a bold move, one Dana Schwartz knew might cost her her job. It was 2016, she was 23 and an entertainment writer at the New York Observer, a newspaper owned by Jared Kushner.
Although not remotely political, as a Jewish woman online Schwartz was wearily used to receiving antisemitic harassment, frequently from people whose profile pictures showed Donald Trump, and was fed up with Kushner being used as a shield.
So she penned an open letter to Kushner “from one of your Jewish employees”, saying “when you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law, you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval” — and published it to the Observer’s website.
In a sign of how lightly managed the paper was, she had free rein to hit publish “before anyone could get mad”. But she assumed she might be fired “and that would be a worthy way to go”.
Anatomy
Dana's new book, Anatomy: A Love Story
In fact, many people were grateful she had started a much-needed conversation. Kushner, however, didn’t join in. “I never heard from him, which was almost more surreal; I just went back to work and it was like nothing had happened”.
For Schwartz, it was a “brief and limited experience in the political realm”, one she hopes never to repeat. But her willingness to take a big risk is mirrored in Hazel, the heroine of her new book.
Anatomy focuses on a young noblewoman in 19th century Edinburgh, who finds herself drawn into an underworld of early medical discovery and the Resurrection Men — grave-robbers who would unearth corpses and sell them to doctors studying anatomy. It’s a dark, gothic setting, drawn from real history, although there are also star crossed-lovers, and Hazel is a plucky heroine with more in common with Buffy than most Victorian damsels.
Schwartz admits there are historical inaccuracies in the book. “We’re not exactly in the real world,” she says.
“But I did want Hazel to feel of her era. I tried to reverse-engineer the circumstances that a woman in 1817 would be optimistic or delusional enough to want to break the mould and be a surgeon. I came to this idea that she grew up a little isolated from society, even though she’s a woman of incredible privilege.”
As a teenager, Schwartz lapped up Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Poe and more. “I’ve always had this passion for period and spooky, slightly gothic stories.”
And Anatomy, with its Edinburgh setting and medical men disturbing corpses, clearly owes a debt to Mary Shelley. “I was trying to think of a universe in which the Frankenstein science was possible; what else might exist? That was the initial spark,” explains Schwartz. “It definitely came from a desire to see that world expanded.”
The seeds were also planted on Schwartz’s post-university backpacking trip to Edinburgh; on arrival there “it was like the sky opened up”. As an American, the city’s winding cobblestone streets and castle on a hill fulfilled all her childhood fantasies.
I’d assumed that because of Covid she’d had to write from memory, but in fact she spent summer 2019 on a retreat in Edinburgh, then travelled through the highlands. In a bizarre coincidence, Anatomy also concerns a mysterious plague ravaging the population.
“It’s an invention, a fictional disease called Roman Fever,” she says. “And then an actual pandemic struck; I had hoped this was something we had left in the 19th century.”
A one-time medical student — she realised writing was her passion while at Brown — Schwartz’s career began with the creation of a viral Twitter account mocking pretentious arts students. Comedy and a journalism career followed, then a memoir about her wild university days and early 20s, as well as a contemporary novel, and more recently writing for the forthcoming Marvel TV series She-Hulk.
Anatomy is something of a departure, although Schwartz also hosts a highly successful podcast on royal history. It’s set to be her biggest book yet, having already been a bestseller in the US, and was a pick of the actress Reese Witherspoon, whose tastemaking has seen books and TV shows like Big Little Lies become enormous hits.
Being selected by Witherspoon was “an out of body experience”, says Schwartz. “I’ve written a memoir and this is still my most personal book because it’s all these aspects of my personality pulled together. To see it recognised by someone as incredible as Reese Witherspoon was beyond anything. She’s the icon of my childhood; she has done so much for books by women.”
Categorised as young adult (YA) fiction (your teenage daughter will certainly fall for Hazel and Jack), Schwartz is clear there’s something for older readers too. “Someone asked me would I write a version for adults, and I was like, this is it,” she says.
“To some degree it’s a marketing decision; I wrote this exactly the way I wanted to, I wasn’t thinking I can’t use big themes.” But the YA space tends to be more open to genre-blending stories, allowing Anatomy to straddle history, romance and even science fiction.
Schwartz grew up outside Chicago, in a close-knit Reform family with lots of siblings. Today she maintains that degree of observance; she and her fiancé belong to a synagogue in LA and if she has children, raising them Jewish will be a priority. Among other things, she credits her Jewish background for honing her comedic skills, which run towards the neurotic and observational.
“I learned my sense of humour from Borscht Belt comedians; I was always very proud of being Jewish because Jews were always the funniest people,” she says.
Having always lived in areas with prominent Jewish communities, the online abuse she received around the Kushner letter was unsettling.
“I don’t think I had fully realised, and I realise how privilege I sound, the extent of antisemitism and hatred that still existed,” she says. “I had thought I had developed a pretty thick skin, just because I am a woman on the internet, but even when you intellectually know those people are trolls, it really does hit you in the gut.”
Now we’re the other side of the Trump presidency, she thinks some of the concerns she raised with Kushner were borne out. We discuss recent synagogue attacks.
“Unfortunately in America and from what I can see to some degree in the UK and Europe, there’s been a galvanising effort among explicit and proud racists and antisemites who feel confident enough to crawl out from the rock they had been hiding under,” she says. “The way misinformation propagates through these conspiracy communities is genuinely frightening.”
She wishes she could regain “that cocky confidence I had when I was 23, and thought that me calling it out could do something about it” but five years later “I find myself overwhelmed and frightened, to be honest”.
At 23, as well as calling out the son-in-law of the future president, she was finding success writing about her personal life, often in stark detail. Like Lena Dunham or a millennial Carrie Bradshaw, she wrote explicitly about sex and dating mishaps, while her memoir Choose Your Own Disaster went into plenty of detail about her struggles with depression and bulimia.
At the time, such personal writing was all the rage. “The path forward as a young female writer on the internet during the time I was coming up was very autobiographical,” she says. “I thought for a long time the only way my writing would matter or I could get attention was by mining the autobiographical.”
Recently, some female writers have expressed regret about their openness.
Schwartz isn’t one, saying she found it empowering. “It was really important for me to write about some of the more traumatic experiences, so that I could find ways to talk about them with humour or at least hindsight, and hope that if anyone else read it that it might make their experience easier.”
That said, she’s happier writing fiction now — and especially publishing material her parents can read. Having categorically banned them from reading her memoir — “I gave them excerpts, but told them nothing in there would make them happy” — Anatomy is safer territory.
A sequel is already in the works, and a screen adaptation beckons. For Schwartz, it’s a thrilling time. “I’m grateful I’ve been able to write the book that I always wanted to read as a teenager.”
Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz, Piatkus, £14.99
