Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women marches on. The story of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy has not been out of print since it was published in 1868 and no one can get enough of it, even though Laurie married the shallow sister, Amy, rather than the exciting and weird one, Jo. Laurie was not the first man to be hypnotized by a great pair of legs.

Alcott lived for another 20 years. Little Women’s instant success transformed her from a scrabbling, scribbling freelance writer who had to support her family and her parents into a writer who never had to worry about money again. She still had a publisher, though, and, like all publishers, they demanded a sequel: Little Men, which appeared in 1871. Little Men was my introduction to the March family. I found this treasure in the attic of my grandparents’ house, left behind by one of my aunts (five sisters with their own book club). Being a kid in 1871 was not like being a kid a century later, and yet the story immediately engulfed me.

[Heretical intrusion: Little Men aims lower than Little Women and it’s never going to gather a fan club, but it’s a better piece of writing overall. Nobody in Little Men spends a hundred pages swanning around Europe, falling in and out love with idiots.]

In 1886, Alcott’s publisher prevailed on her to write a third book. She didn’t want to. She never set out to write a trilogy, and she was sick of these people, particularly Amy and Laurie. The result, Jo’s Boys, is what critics thoughtfully term “dreadful.” I read it in 2004 because I had given myself a reading theme of 19th-century American novels. I read all three books. I’m glad I didn’t start with Jo’s Boys because reading that one killed my theme. I rinsed my brain with someone’s memoir of their sex life.

“It is a strong temptation to the weary historian,” Alcott writes in Jo’s Boys, “to close the present tale with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it.”

After a brief rundown of how everyone turned out, Alcott concludes:

“And now, having endeavoured to suit everyone by many weddings, few deaths, and as much prosperity as the eternal fitness of things will permit, let the music stop, the lights die out, and the curtain fall for ever on the March family.”

Even in a doorstop like Jo’s Boys, Alcott’s talent is evident in three consecutive chapters, “Emil’s Thanksgiving,” “Dan’s Christmas,” and “Nat’s New Year,” in which she easily and convincingly handles a murder, German high society, and a shipwreck. What all those situations are doing in the same book is another issue.

A star is born, and she’s not happy about it

I’m writing about Jo’s Boys because of an early chapter, “Jo’s Last Scrape,” in which the author shows us what life was like for Jo Bhaer, the celebrity, in 1886—Jo of course being a stand-in for Louisa May Alcott. Her fans adored her. They sought her autograph, her advice, her money, her attention, her heart. “Strangers demanded to look at her, question, advise, warn, congratulate, and drive her out of her wits by well-meant but very wearisome attentions.”

Jo, trying to write, was beseiged in her own home, and it didn’t help that her kind-hearted but dimwitted family let these people in. She hid behind curtains, disguised herself as the maid, climbed out the window. Her own husband, Professor Bhaer, the most useless man in the literature of this country, brought home a troop of 75 young men from the YMCA in the middle of a rainstorm and they had to be entertained, too, because this was 1886 and good manners prevailed. (This being 1886, when the rain stopped, the young men gathered in front of the house and sang a song of farewell.)

If you’ve ever wondered why the McLean House, where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, is a reproduction, it’s because the souvenir-mad soldiers of both armies ripped the place apart after the surrender was signed.

I don’t ever expect to find super fans collecting sticks or grasshoppers from my yard or asking for an old scrap of my underwear they can weave into a quilt or a rug or reporters spinning fabrications from whatever bit of my life they spy through a half-open door. (All of which happened to Alcott.) I don’t have to disguise myself as the maid we don’t have or jump out a window and land on something in the garden that I’ll hear about later. But these pages from Jo’s Boys are a reminder that a good writer can make a good story from almost anything, and make me laugh 140 years later.