Here’s a song called Emma, inspired by Loudmouth! It was composed by Joe DeFilippo and performed by the R.J. Phillips band.
A photo “mug shot” my son Aaron and his spouse Sarah made for me for my birthday card a few cars ago. I wish I was as badass as Emma!
Rare Film Footage of Emma Goldman (1934)
Loudmouth
Emma Goldman vs. America (a love story)
A New York Public Library Best Books of the Year Selection: Top 10 Books for Teens
A Booklist Editors’ Choice
A Chicago Public Library Best Books of the Year
A Jewish Women’s Archive Winter 2025 Book Club Pick
A Golden Kite Finalist
National Jewish Book Award Finalist
An ALA 2026 Rise Book Project presents Top Ten feminist books for young readers
Available in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook.
The publisher’s description:
Emma Goldman made trouble her whole life. The first time was by accident. Her birth (in Lithuania, in 1869) angered her father. He had wanted a dutiful son, not a headstrong daughter. The other times were on purpose.
When she arrived in America as a young woman, she loved its democratic ideals but was appalled by its hypocrisy. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seemed to be only for those at the top. Something had to be done for everyone else. Someone had to speak up. Soon Emma was delivering rousing speeches on topics like workers’ rights, feminism, and the atrocities of capitalism.
This is the story of Emma’s complex love affair with America. It’s also the story of her many romances with the men she met while trying to change America. Emma believed marriage was disempowering to women and lived her life according to the principles of free love.
Emma called herself an anarchist and a freethinker. Her critics called her a troublemaker, a “loudmouth.” But sometimes you need to be loud, if you want your voice to be heard.
I wrote this article for Horn Book that mentions Loudmouth.
Click here for a Teacher’s Guide
A bit about RESEARCH: I have talked and written a lot about my research process (see below for a talk with Betsy Bird). I always go to primary sources first and stay with them as long as possible. Writing this book that meant Emma’s autobiography, Living My Life, Alexander Berkman’s, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, and other memoirs (all in my bibliography, of course) as well as newspaper articles and some oral histories. I also looked at photographs, of course.
One frustration was that there were no films or audio clips of the young Emma.
But ON THE LEFT, you will see two versions of a press conference she gave in 1934! I must have watched this dozens of times!
Reviews
★ “Heiligman’s latest YA biography, about Emma Goldman, solidifies her as one of the absolute best in the business. Goldman is fascinating: she was an outspoken advocate for workers’ rights, women’s rights, freedom from the shackles of marriage, and more, and her personal life was full of scandal. Despite lawsuits, arrests, and harsh—and often inaccurate—representation in the press, she was tireless in her zeal throughout her life. Heiligman treats Goldman with immense perception and compassion, providing helpful context around her subject’s contradictions and delivering a lucid portrait of a complicated, multifaceted, and dynamic individual who dared to imagine a better world, full of joy and unconstrained by rules established by people aiming to maintain or increase their own power. As a work of biography, Loudmouth is a master class, but it’s Goldman’s story in particular that makes this such a success. Goldman’s recognition of escalating poverty driven by wealthy business magnates; the importance of truly free speech and a free press for an enlightened, informed citizenry; the ways that conventional expectations of women engender oppression; the inalienable rights of immigrants; and more will resonate with today’s teens, who will surely see the clear parallels of Goldman’s era in the events of our own. Heiligman doesn’t push this connection, however, instead trusting her readers to notice those echoes themselves and letting Goldman be central in her own right, not as an object lesson. Juicy, empowering, extraordinarily well researched, and deeply intelligent, this is essential reading, and not just for teens.” —Booklist, starred review
“Activist Emma Goldman was a remarkable woman and, as this sharp, informed biography shows, a ferocious, engaged, observant, and compassionate child and teen as well . . . The book is fearless in exploring Goldman’s considerable strengths as an orator and activist, while also rounding her out as a full woman who became the unofficial spokesperson for the free love movement, who was a loyal friend, and who carried the scars of a nightmare childhood all of her life . . . Heiligman also does exceptional work in exploring how any single speech, warm exchange, or relationship that Goldman had also changed the other people involved.” —BCCB
“The complexities and passions that characterized Jewish, Lithuanian-born writer and anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940) drive this comprehensive, thoroughly researched biography by Heiligman . . . Drawing information from Goldman’s own works, Heiligman builds a vivid portrait of a resilient figure who navigated prejudices against immigrants, Jews, women, and the working class at the dawn of the 20th century.” —Publishers Weekly
“Well-researched and comprehensive . . . will feel relevant to contemporary teens. Vividly portrays the life of a champion who stood up—loudly—to injustice.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Heiligman’s newest work of nonfiction touches on a long list of hot-button contemporary issues: due process, free speech, gender equity, economic inequality, pacifism, prison reform, reproductive freedom, political violence, and sexual mores . . . True to form, Heiligman distills this remarkable, complex legacy for a new generation with a sure hand, using a conversational voice that draws readers into her meticulously researched narrative.” —The Horn Book
“An engrossing biography . . . Heiligman’s depth of research and absorbing, crisp writing makes for a page-turner about a fierce, complex, and influential dissident.” —School Library Journal
Here’s a song called Emma, inspired by Loudmouth! It was composed by Joe DeFilippo and performed by the R.J. Phillips band.
A photo “mug shot” my son Aaron and his spouse Sarah made for me for my birthday card a few cars ago. I wish I was as badass as Emma!
Rare Film Footage of Emma Goldman (1934)
Research
This was my bulletin board while working on the book. It’s a timeline for me, with words of inspiration, encouragement and reminders of themes….
Learn about how I researched and wrote the book on Betsy Bird’s Blog about writing complex nonfiction for kids.
An Excerpt:
BB: You don’t work via formula. Every book you do is completely different from the one that came before. The connecting thread then, to my mind, is that you know how to siphon down a life or an event into critical parts AND you make them not simply comprehensible but interesting to kids. Do you have a process that you go through to do this? How do you maintain that balance between what’s appropriate and what’s necessary to know?
Deborah Heiligman: I think I’m at an advantage where this is concerned because I usually pick topics that I know nothing about. So when I am first researching, I write down all the things that make me go, “Oh, wow!” (I call these my oh wow notes) because I know that because those are things that excited me, that’s what I will want to tell my readers. By the time I’m done with the research for the book, I’m too inside it all, too much of an expert, so I am in danger of losing the perspective of the newcomer. That’s why I’m sure to take the oh wow notes. Though I usually do remember what astonished or surprised me, or made me desperately want to learn more, but in case I don’t, I have those oh wow notes to go back to.
Sometimes when I’m really well into a project something new will catch my attention and I have to ask myself, does this belong in a book for the newcomer to this topic, or am I excited by this because I’ve just spent four years on it and want to know the details because I’ve basically gotten a masters or a phD on it—sort of kidding, but not? Anyway, I have to be really strong and cut it if it’s the latter—usually. (Sometimes I can keep it, if I’ve earned it, if the reader will also be touched/wowed/upset by it….)
With my upcoming book, Loudmouth, at one point I started to get into the weeds about the different schools of anarchism, and after a few days working on that, I cut all but about two or three sentences, and I think those sentences ended up in different places. Kids wouldn’t care about Kropotkin vs Bakunin! (and if they did, they could look it up!) They would be much more interested in Emma’s views on marriage (con) and free love (pro), and etc. I sometimes have to give myself a talking to: The book is about Emma, and everything has to be seen through the lens of her as a remarkable, fallible person. So to see anarchism (her beautiful ideal) from her point of view, not as if from an encylopedia. So slash slash slash. This happens with every book. when I was working on Vincent & Theo and getting too into the weeds about color theory and art history, I put up a sign that says “You are a storyteller not a scholar.” That sign stays on my wall!
BB: Are there topics you’ve tried to write about in the past that have stumped you? Or is it truly possible to write about most complicated subjects for kids if done correctly?
Deborah Heiligman: I think it’s truly possible to write about anything for kids if you have the right angle for them, keep their knowledge base in mind, always, and write from the heart. Topics have stumped me but because I couldn’t find the story, not because I didn’t think I could write about them for kids.
BB: Why, personally, do you think that is it important for kids to read nuanced informational books on complicated subjects?
Deborah Heiligman: Oh this is an interesting question. Kids are starved for the truth, I think. But they don’t want it shoved down their throats. They want to be told some of it, sometimes, but on their own terms. Really the want to discover it for themselves. So if you tell them a true story, and there are nuanced truths in that story, they will discover the truths for themselves and they will become theirs. Their own truths. I never thought of this quite this way before, but I think this is why I write the way I write. I want my readers to discover truths from the stories I tell and I certainly I never want to tell them what to think.