Jill Lepore Talks About Life, Death and the Stages in Between In "The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death" (Knopf), Jill Lepore examines the ways in which we've historically defined where life begins, where it ends and how it should be conducted while it lasts. In a recent interview via e-mail, Ms. Lepore discussed why death is a less contentious subject than conception, why the word "parenthood" had to be invented and more. Below are excerpts from the conversation. Most of the chapters in this book started as essays in The New Yorker, where you're a staff writer. Was this a case of seeing a theme emerging after you wrote the magazine pieces, or did you always plan to include them in a book? One day, I was playing The Game of Life, the board game, with a mess of kids, and I wasn't quite sure how, but it seemed different than the game I remembered playing as a kid. So I bought an old game, from 1960, and it was different. And I got to thinking, I bet you could write a whole history of life by studying games of life, because they go way back; they're ancient, and they're like tiny time capsules. I ended up writing an essay about Milton Bradley. A year after that came an essay about "Stuart Little," which I'm sure I wrote because I had been reading a great deal about the history of the stages of life, including childhood. Not long after that, I happened to write an essay about the history of the breast pump. You'd think I might have figured out that these essays had something in common. Years passed, and I kept meaning to return to the library all the books I had checked out for the initial essay, but I kept needing them for one thing or another. So I held on to them until one day, I opened up a letter from the billing department at Harvard's Widener Library to discover that I had racked up $6,000 worth of fines for overdue books. My first thought was, of course, "Oh hell." But my second thought was, "Hey, maybe I've been writing a book without knowing it." Daft of me, but there you have it. You say the word "parenthood" dates to the middle of the 19th century. Why was it necessary to label that as a phase of life? And why then? "Adulthood" used to cover it, because to be an adult was, almost always, to be a parent. You grew up, you had kids; your kids grew up; and then you died. Demographers talk about the "demographic transition" that began in the second half of the 18th century: the fertility rate began declining and life expectancy began rising. More people began living longer, while having fewer children. So the part of your life when you were an adult, but not a parent, got bigger. Also, and significantly, this happened first among wealthier families, for whom, by the middle of the 19th century, a whole new literature of parenting advice was being written. By the beginning of the 20th century, that development intersected with the rise of the mass-market magazine. I write in the book about the history of Parents Magazine, which started in the 1920s. Its premise was that if you grew up in a small family, where you didn't raise 10 brothers and sisters, and then you started having children late in life, and you had only a few, you probably didn't know what the hell you were doing. One thing I felt keenly while reading was the ignorance of even great minds, based on when they lived in history. Aristotle knew about as much about how babies are made as a curious but confused schoolboy. What life-and-death answer do you think we're most confident about now that might turn out not to be true? Most everything, probably. No one stands outside time. About a hundred years ago, Lillian Gilbreth promoted the notion of "Happiness Minutes," the idea that, if you could live your life more efficiently, you'd have more time for joy. She said stuff like this: if you make a lemon meringue pie in just any kitchen, you have to walk about 224 feet. Cupboard to counter, counter to icebox, icebox to stove. But if you used her design for a more efficient kitchen, you could make that pie in only 92 feet - leaving all kinds of extra time and energy for Happiness Minutes. Picture a Bain consultant telling you how to downsize your melancholy, and you might have some idea of what she was up to. Gilbreth's work now reads as so wacky that it's very fun to write about it. The problem is that writing about what is so delightfully nutty about Happiness Minutes can make it seem as if we know better. We just know different, and maybe not as different as we think. Gilbrethian efficiency is all over the place today. Aristotle was wise. Gilbreth was smart. My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read. Kant, Freud, Darwin: lost on her. She kept her stove in her cellar because that's where she kept her tomatoes. Also, she liked walking up and down the stairs. Everything took forever. But she knew a whole lot about death and sorrow and happiness, and it never escaped her that life's an awful mystery. Speaking of Aristotle, he divided the "ages of man" into three: youth, the prime of life and old age. But as you write, we've since invented adolescence, middle age and various other stages. Are there practical consequences for all of this microclassifying? Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. You can sell a lot of junk to a lot of people by inventing a stage of life and giving it a name. I'm surprised the case of Karen Quinlan, which you cover extensively, is not as common a part of the vernacular as Roe v. Wade. As we become more preoccupied with debates about end-of-life care, is the question of when death arrives going to overtake the question of when life begins as a contentious subject? Has it already? The Karen Ann Quinlan case is where the right to life and the right to die got bound together, and I don't think they've ever gotten untangled. The end of life is sometimes deployed politically - [Sarah] Palin invoking "death panels," for instance - but nowhere near on the scale of the beginning of life. I wonder if it's because while not everyone has faced an excruciating decision about a pregnancy (and some people would insist that there is no such thing as a decision about a pregnancy), very many people have faced a decision while watching someone die. I had to spend a lot of time in I.C.U.s over the last few years, and I just don't see people in those rooms looking smug and ready to tell other people how to act, or what's right and what's wrong, when it comes down to the next decision about the next test, the next drug, the next procedure. You say, "Matters of life and death are not, inherently, partisan." Why not? And if not, why did they get that way? In modern American party politics? In the late 1960s and early 1970s. It's not that matters of life and death weren't the subject of fierce political debate before then, but in those years, the two-party system re-aligned itself around these issues, which is horrible, because, while there are only two parties, matters of life and death don't generally have only two sides. Making these matters partisan makes them impossible to resolve, or even to talk about in any humane way. Over the last four or five decades, a great deal of political discourse has been reduced to a ham-fisted rhetoric of freedom and murder. It's as if there are only two possible issues and only two possible positions: Either abortion is freedom and guns are murder, or guns are freedom and abortion is murder. None of these issues and positions existed, in exactly this form, before 1968. I find that strangely comforting. Because something that has a beginning has also got an end.