Q&A with Samantha Greene Woodruff

Photo by Julia Daggs

 

 

Samantha Greene Woodruff is the author of the new novel The Trade Off. She also has written the novel The Lobotomist's Wife. She lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Trade Off, and was your character Bea Abramovitz based on a real woman?

 

A: My inspiration for The Trade Off came from a 2021 event in the stock market, the GameStop “short squeeze.” GameStop was a business in decline and several hedge fund managers were shorting the stock when the price started to soar, costing the hedge funders a fortune.

 

It grabbed headlines because the people who drove up the price were a group of amateur investors—mostly day traders who were home because of the pandemic—who banded together to stick it to what they perceived to be “evil” hedge funders. It was so dramatic it even inspired the movie Dumb Money.

 

The stock market had never interested me before, even though I have an MBA and am married to an investor, but the larger questions of morality and wealth raised by the GameStop story piqued my interest. How could taking a position in the market be seen as such a marker of moral turpitude? Why were the hedge funders bad and the day traders good?

 

I wanted to explore the way the complex morality of wealth plays out on Wall Street, but in a historical setting where the short seller wasn’t the rich “bad” guy. That was the seed of the idea behind The Trade Off.

 

Bea’s journey is very loosely inspired by Jesse Livermore, a legendary turn-of-the-century investor who made a fortune shorting the Great Crash. I like to write about strong women struggling to find their place in men’s worlds, so when I decided to write about a short seller, I wanted her to be female and with the odds stacked against her. That led me to create Bea.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Bea and her twin brother, Jake?

 

A: Bea and Jake’s relationship is symbiotic and complementary. They couldn’t be more different, but they work well together. Yes, some may be frustrated by the lengths Bea goes to take care of and bail out Jake, but he also sees and understands her in a way that others in her family don’t. Of course, it’s not always smooth sailing between them, but then you wouldn’t have a novel if it were, right?

        

As a side note, I have marveled at the special connection between my two children, a girl (15) and a boy (13), throughout their lives. They served as my “research subjects” and helped to shape the emotional core of Bea and Jake’s relationship.

Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

 

A: I started my research for The Trade Off by reading economic examinations of the crash of ’29 like John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash of 1929 and Maury Klein’s Rainbow’s End, followed by books about Jesse Livermore who famously shorted the Great Crash, both to get a feel for early Wall Street and because I initially thought he might be my protagonist.

 

When I decided that I wanted my investor to be a woman, I read the limited material out there on the early days of women in banking, and stumbled upon a book called Ladies of the Ticker by a professor at William Paterson University named George Robb. I reached out to George directly and our conversations were critical to how I developed Bea.

 

It was from George that I learned the most surprising facts: that women who worked in finance in this era were college-educated, well-connected socialites and that while many prominent bankers were Jewish, there wasn’t much of a place for a poor Jewish woman in banking. These were obstacles that I wanted to highlight, so they became the ones Bea fought to overcome.

 

One of the hardest parts of my research was finding sources for what it looked and felt like in the back-office at banks in this era. To get this right, I was fortunate to speak to an archivist at J.P. Morgan as well as one for the New York Stock Exchange who sent me some fabulous primary source articles.

 

Hours of googling also unearthed a pamphlet called “Banking as a Career for Women,” written in 1928 by one of the early women in banking, Mary Vail Andress. That’s where I learned the details about the wire room. ChatGPT pointed me to some great sources as well.

 

I developed the world of the Lower East Side from images and exhibits at the tenement museum and the Eldridge Street synagogue, as well as World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe. And I relied on magazines and newspapers from the era to properly paint a picture of New York in the 1920s, one of the most fun being a nightlife column in The New Yorker.

 

Q: The writer Lisa Barr said of the book, “The Trade Off possesses all the literary goodies that historical-fiction lovers will devour: rags to riches, love, loss, redemption, and my personal fave--girl power, during a time when women had none.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: You mean other than loving it? I think Lisa captures all the high notes I hoped to hit in The Trade Off.

 

The only nuance I’d comment on (if you asked me to nit-pick) is that outside of banking, the 1920s were period of relative power for women. The suffragists had just secured women’s right to vote and flapper culture was giving women permission to be much freer than in the past. But it was undoubtedly still a man’s world. Especially on Wall Street.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am attempting to tackle something completely new for my third novel. I was an Eastern European history major in college and spent a semester in Budapest five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, so I have a soft spot for Eastern Europe.

 

The current political climate has me thinking about modern dictators, so I’m working on a novel about Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, the communist dictator and his evil, power-hungry wife who ruled Romania form 1964-1989, until they were executed in the most violent of the Eastern European revolutions.

 

It’s a dual timeline story that takes place in Manhattan in 2019 where a woman in her 30s accidentally discovers she was one of the hundreds of thousands of children who were found living in squalor in orphanages all over Romania after the Ceausescus fell from power in 1989.

 

The second timeline is the early 1980s in Romania, where a fictional fourth daughter of the Ceausescus goes from believing all the propaganda about her parents and her charmed life, to learning the truth about their punishing reign.

 

Nice and light. ;)

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I am a longtime yoga devotee and a trained instructor, have two dogs, and two teenage children. While I have an MBA, I still consider myself to be a business neophyte. And in addition to The Trade Off, I have an essay in the forthcoming anthology On Being Jewish Now, edited by Zibby Owens.

 

Thanks so much for having me! (And I look forward to meeting you in person at the Rockville Maryland JCC in March!)

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Samantha Greene Woodruff.