Pandora's Box: Grace Metalious and Peyton Place

She was born Marie Grace de Repentigny on September eighth, nineteen twenty-four, in Manchester, New Hampshire, to a family of French-Canadian descent so poor and so fractured that her father left when she was a child. She spoke French before she spoke English. She attended Manchester Central High School, married at nineteen, had children young, and by her mid-twenties was living the life of a young New England housewife in a way that felt, to her, like a kind of entombment.

She wrote to get out. In the fall of nineteen fifty-four, at thirty years old, she began a manuscript about a fictional New England town she called Peyton Place. The town she built drew on multiple real places: Gilmanton, where she then lived; Laconia; and the surrounding communities that she had watched closely.

The book was about what she called the dark secrets of small-town life. Abortion. Class cruelty.

Sexual violence. The gap between the public face of respectability and the private life underneath it. The novel was published on September twenty-fourth, nineteen fifty-six.

Critics dismissed it as sensationalist. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. It eventually sold many millions of copies.

It became a film and then one of the first prime-time television soap operas, running on ABC for five seasons. Manchester has had an ambivalent relationship with its most famous daughter. Grace Metalious was a Franco-American working-class woman who became one of the best-selling novelists in American history, and she did it by refusing to look away.

She died of liver disease on February twenty-fifth, nineteen sixty-four. She was thirty-nine years old.