When Gypsy was older, after she became Gypsy Rose Lee, I think she was both proud and slightly ashamed of her Seattle roots. She worked very hard to rid her voice of any trace of a local accent, cultivating an affected way of speaking that sounded as if she pinned the ends of her words.

In Gypsy [Rose Lee] the musical, her mother, 'Mama Rose', is portrayed as a slightly eccentric, pushy, ambitious stage mother, but that version doesn't come close to the truth.

Gypsy [Rose Lee] is as unique as she is timeless. Her story is classic Americana, and the strangest rags-to-riches saga you'll ever read; I like to call it Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.

When Gypsy was older, after she became Gypsy Rose Lee, I think she was both proud and slightly ashamed of her Seattle roots. She worked very hard to rid her voice of any trace of a local accent, cultivating an affected way of speaking that sounded as if she pinned the ends of her words.

I think Gypsy [Rose Lee] would be appalled at today's rawer, more blatant displays of the female form. She was, in her own way, a prude.

One of the biggest questions to me was whether or not Gypsy the person was capable of loving anyone or anything beyond Gypsy Rose Lee the creation, and even that was a conflicted, tortured relationship.

I thought both she [Gypsy Rose Lee] and her story would be ill-served by a conventional, birth-to-death narrative, and so I structured the book like one of her stripteases: revealing a peek of shoulder, then a glimpse of knee, pulling back a bit before you go a bit further, until all is revealed at the end.