How a 12 year old author inspired me to start writing
The fleeting nature of lipstick and Barbara Newhall Follett.
I have a visceral memory of standing in my mother’s bathroom as a child. It was a white attic room, sloping ceilings and a large ornamental silk fan propped next to the window by the bathtub, the cracking white paint on the cabinets where she kept her potions and vials is sticky, the way it feels when you paint too many layers of nail polish, never fully transitioning from one state to the next.
As a young girl the mysterious liquids and creams in her cabinets always fascinated me. The ritual, to a child, looking more like a magical baptism than a beauty practice. I would wander into the bathroom to watch mom get ready, and sometimes she would let me try her lipsticks. I can still smell them. A shiny green bullet, block letter “C” embossed on the cap. An unplaceable waxy scent (that smelled old even then), top perfectly round. A rouge sun in a solar system of colors in the bathroom cabinet.
As the eldest child I spent a lot of time observing my parents. Their everyday rituals and behaviors fascinated me. I spent hours inventing explanations for the strange world of adults. I think children are natural anthropologists in this way. At that age, adults seem like finished things. Fully formed, already certain about who they are. Even though they always felt a little out of reach.
But even then, watching my mother apply color to her lips, faint smile on her face, the beat of excitement when she pulled it out of the cabinet as the final touch of her practice, I found I understood that grown ups were once children too, with strange, obsessive interests of their own.
Years later (having plenty of lipsticks and a litany of “obsessive interests” of my own), I stumbled upon the story of a girl named Barbara. A child prodigy who wrote a novel at 12 years old. My imagined universe for my parents popped into my mind’s eye. This young girl turned her curious interior world into an entire universe of her own. Finding Barbara felt like finding another kindred spirit who understood the magic of lingering in doorways.
Born March 4th, 1914, Barbara Newhall Follett had literature in her blood. A schoolteacher for a mother and literary editor and lecturer for a father, Barbara hardly stood a chance of not being a storyteller. Showing a unique aptitude for reading and writing at a young age, Barbara began writing poetry at age four, and short stories by age seven. Many of her stories centered around the natural world and its many mysteries.
In 1923 at eight years old using a typewriter gifted to her by her mother, Barbara began writing a story called The Adventures of Eepersip (later titled The House Without Windows) about a young girl named Eepersip, who runs away from home to live in the wilderness.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t long until the first major tragedy of Barbara’s life struck. A house fire destroyed many of the Follett’s possessions including Barbara’s typewriter and manuscript. Starting again from page one, Barbara re-wrote her entire manuscript under the supervision of her father, who later helped her publish. When The House Without Windows was put to print in 1927, it immediately received critical acclaim. At 12 years old Barbara was now a famous child genius, being asked for her opinion on radio programs, and featured in the New York Times.
As an adult, Barbara went on adventures of her own. While hiking the Appalachian Trail in 1939, she met a man named Nickerson Rogers, who she ended up marrying. Although the marriage was initially happy, letters from Barbara to her friends after the first year exposed cracks in the marriage and a general unhappiness on Barbara’s end. According to Rogers, on December 7th 1938, Barbara walked out of their home with $30 in her pocket following a fight between the couple, and never came back.
He did not report her disappearance for 2 weeks.
Four months after notifying the police, he requested a missing persons bulletin to be issued for her, however, he used her married name of “Rogers” and it went unnoticed by the media who knew her only by her maiden name - which would have garnered more attention.
No trace of Barbara has ever been found.
I think about Barbara a lot. To me she exists somewhere between myth and reality. She was a real person with real troubles, not immune to the world. But my fascination with her didn’t stem from her uncannily young beginning, it’s the fact that she simply began at all.
She sat down and started writing. Without permission. Without the pressures or hang-ups about perception. Her writing was rooted in curiosity and close observation of the world around her. Thinking about her urgent need to share those observations more than a century later feels not only honest, but deeply brave. We spend so much time distracting ourselves with the imagined opinions of strangers, and yet we share anyway. Somehow, she understood that instinct as a child, and was able to turn it into something lasting, and beautiful.
Barbara’s disappearance invites so many questions: Did Rogers have something to do with it? Did she decide that conventional life was simply not enough? Did she set out on one last adventure to find a world of her own? Her disappearance almost inadvertently reflects her voice - mirroring the fleeting nature of ordinary things, the ephemeral nature of life itself.
That bathroom mirror in my childhood home flashes across my mind every time I apply my lipstick. The way my mother leaned toward the light, carefully tracing the shape of her lips. It was an ordinary moment, the kind that disappears thousands of times a day without anyone noticing. Like Barbara, we lost our home to a house fire when I was ten. After it happened, I pictured my mother’s lipsticks, once solid and steadfast like soldiers, suddenly melting like red lava into a river of flame. One day the tube is full, the next it’s gone. Worn away by the passage of time, swiped across the skin until nothing remains. Or cut short, lost in an airplane seat. Misplaced in the bathroom. Melted in a fire. Sometimes the end of things don’t happen the way you want them to, and sometimes it’s painful. But the color left behind still lingers in our memory.
Writing has a strange ability to grab hold of things like that: rooms, rituals, passing moments that would otherwise vanish completely.
I think that’s what writers like Barbara understood so deeply, even as children - that the world is always slipping away, and the only defense we have is to try, however imperfectly, to write it down.
Thanks for reading!
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Wow this was so interesting! I want to know what happened to her! I hope she got away and wrote under a pen name the rest of her long, creatively fulfilling life!