During the past couple of weeks, I’ve worked at setting up an interview with another of James‘ contemporaries, now in her 80s — we’ll call her Liz. On my lunch hour yesterday, I was finally put in touch with the person in the best position to make that happen, so I’m optimistic.

But talk about coincidences: On my way home from work, I was listening for the first time to a commercially available collection of decades-old interviews when the questioning unexpectedly shifted to a different interviewer: Liz herself, at age 19.