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Around Town
4 •: 4, .* » 4
Joe Earle is editor-at-large at Reporter Newspapers and has lived in metro Atlanta
for over 30 years. He can he reached atjoeearle@reportemewspapers.net
A local author re-imagines the story
of Georgia’s amazing ‘Magnetic Girl’
Jessica Handler’s mother was the first to tell her about Lulu Hurst.
Handler and her mother shared an interest in stories of remarkable women, so years
ago, when Handler’s mother came across an article about Hurst, she emailed a copy to her
daughter. The article was titled “The Feats of the Magnetic Girl Explained.”
“I just fell in love with her, although I’d never heard of this girl,” Handler said. After
reading some of Greil Marcus’s musings on American folk music, Handler felt an attrac
tion to what Marcus called “the old, weird Ameri
ca.” The Magnetic Girl felt like a part of that.
Lulu Hurst was born and grew up dirt poor in
the Georgia mountains, but, for a few years in the
1880s, when she was a teenager and electricity
and magnetism were something exotic that hap
pened in faraway big cities, she toured the coun
try performing “magnetic tests” in towns large
and small.
She appeared in vaudeville houses across the
South, in cities such as Atlanta and Baltimore,
in New York, and even out west, Handler said.
While onstage, Lulu supposedly used magnetism
in her body to lift people seated in parlor chairs
or to knock grown men across the stage.
Later, years after she had retired from the
stage and settled in Madison, Ga., Lulu wrote her
autobiography and explained how her tests actu
ally were done. They were tricks, stagecraft, and
she was a charlatan. The members of her audi
ence were fooled. They saw what they were told
they should see and what they wanted to see.
Now Handler, who teaches writing at Oglethorpe University, has put together her own
book about Lulu the performer. “The Magnetic Girl,” Handler’s first novel, is winning at
tention from publications as varied as The Wall Street Journal and The Bitter Southerner.
As a writer, Handler isn’t a novice. When she was younger, she worked as a TV produc
er, on game shows, but since 2009, she’s published a couple of nonfiction books, including
a memoir called “Invisible Sisters,” about the deaths of her two siblings when they were
young, and a book on writing about grief.
She bears a physical reminder of her sisters in the form of a tattoo of a crow on her up
per arm. She chose the crow, she said, because she was once told the birds travel in threes.
Her other arm is tattooed with an image of a hummingbird, chosen, she said, “because
hummingbirds are beautiful, fast and fierce and wouldn’t that be a fun thing to be?”
She decided to write a novel about “The Magnetic Girl” rather than another nonfiction
work so she could try to get inside young Lulu Hurst’s head. A nonfiction account, she
said, could end up as little more than a list of Lulu’s performances.
“She was amazing,” Handler said over lunch at a coffee shop recently. “I wanted to look
at Lulu as a girl. She’s responding to the coming fear of the 20th century.... Old ways were
starting to change.”
Handler says she spent about a decade working on her novel. She read an original
copy of Lulu’s book and newspaper accounts of her shows. She traveled to Cedartown to
stand at a field where the Hurst family once had a home. And Handler tried to learn to
perform Lulu’s “tests” herself, but never fully mastered them. “The chair thing, I can’t fig
ure,” she said.
Still, Handler doesn’t see Lulu simply as another stage magician. “I don’t think she pre
sented it as ‘magic,’” Handler said. “She was willing to go along with the cultural assump
tion, the collective belief, that she had magnetism in her fingers.”
For her version of Lulu’s story, Handler invented a sick younger brother the teen want
ed to use her powers to save and portrays the teen’s relationship with her father and
mother, who enjoy the benefits of her small, but growing, celebrity. “What attracted me to
her was this question her autobiography didn’t answer: Why did she do it? When you’re a
teenager in a small town, maybe you just want to get out.”
Handler recognized something of herself in her subject.
“I was an awkward teen,” Handler said. “I don’t know whether Lulu was comfortable
with the way people saw her. In real life, she left the stage, and I don’t know why... In her,
I see a teenaged girl who is seen by the world in a way and she realizes in the end she is
going to have to be the one to change the way people see her.”
After all, the Magnetic Girl lived in a time of change.
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