[00:00:00] Jane: Hello and welcome to a special bonus crossover episode of Historical Happy Hour. Today I’m so happy to be here with best selling British novelist Kate Thompson who is also the host of the very popular podcast From the Library with Love. The format today is a little different as we’ll be interviewing each other about all things historical fiction, And writing and I’m so excited.
We were talking so much we had to hit record because we had so much to share. So welcome Kate and thank you so much for doing this.
[00:00:31] Kate: No, my pleasure and thank you I should be saying. This is, I think this is a first isn’t it where two podcasts meet?
[00:00:37] Jane: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And have a first date.
Yeah, absolutely. So good. Okay, so I’m going to jump in with questions and then we’re going to go back and forth with questions and then talk about share some questions and talk about our craft and process towards the end. So we both had World War II books come out around the same time, 2024, right?
Yes, that’s right. Yep. The Wartime Book Club was yours and it takes place on the island of Jersey. During its occupation during World War II. I loved the story. I loved the premise. Yeah, and I loved the fascinating history. So talk about this book and the premise and how you ended up writing about it.
[00:01:18] Kate: Yeah, the Wartime Book Club. As you rightly pointed out, it’s set during the occupation of the Channel Islands by German forces. And for those that don’t know or haven’t read the book, The wait for it, the Guernsey Literary Potato Peel by Society, that mouthful, which most people have to be fair. So most people I guess will be aware that the Channel Islands were the only British territory to be occupied during World War II.
So in essence, what I’ve got is two protagonists who didn’t have to endure the blitz. and the rockets and so forth, but they did have to live under the heel of the Nazi jackboot. And I’ve long been intrigued by the Channel Islands occupation. All my previous novels are set in East End of London. So I geographically hopped over the water and I have two very different protagonists.
I have Grace who works in St. Helier library and who is utterly enraged at the censorship of her, the heavy handed censorship of her stock by German forces, starts hiding books and sneaking them to people that the Germans deem as Untermensch, so Jewish families in hiding. And then my second protagonist, B, who works in the post office who is equally incensed at the betrayal of her fellow Islanders, who start to write informers letters, she begins to steam open the letters in order to warn people who have been denounced.
So you’ve got two different, very different forms of resistance, two very different characters. And I think what underpins it all, Jane, is just this need to want to understand the kind of moral quagmire of living alongside the enemy. But also really. What is the backbone of the book, is exploring the joy and the solace and the sanctuary of a wartime book club, reading with friends in the darkest of times as one Islander said to me, okay, reading was our only true form of intellectual freedom and the Island became a spiritual food store.
And so the minute he said that to me, I thought, yeah, bingo, that’s it. I have to set a novel there in, in Jersey. So yeah, that’s. That’s the kind of themes and the essence of the book, Jane.
[00:03:16] Jane: So good. And I was immediately thinking of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society when I read it. Cause I, I love the book.
I love the movie. Did you like the movie?
[00:03:24] Kate: Oh my God. It’s one of those rare things where I loved the movie almost. As much, if not more than the book, it was so good. Wasn’t it so good? Yes.
[00:03:32] Jane: Yeah. They did
[00:03:33] Kate: a great job.
[00:03:34] Jane: Yeah.
[00:03:34] Kate: Yeah. And on the subject of movies, I was reading about your latest book, good night from Paris, which I believe came out earlier this year as well.
Is that right?
[00:03:43] Jane: Yes, it came out I’m sorry, it came out a year ago, a little over a year ago. Yeah,
[00:03:49] Kate: but that, but wow, what a premise. And that to me felt very cinematic as well. And of course, as soon as I started reading about this, I immediately Googled her. And I think, is this real? Was there this American film star?
And I was stunned to discover this extraordinary woman’s life, her role in the resistance, her broadcast to America, her internment in the monkey house. of a zoo and her escape. I was like, this is crazy. And reading it, I was reminded that nothing is stranger than the truth. How did you uncover this remarkable woman and breathe life into her story?
Yeah.
[00:04:21] Jane: The woman’s name is Drew Layton Tartiere. And I was, when I was, my third novel this, Secret Stealers was about the women of the OSS, the precursor to the CIA in World War II, and some of them were like undercover agents in on the continent of Europe and in Asia. And so when I was doing that research, I came across this story about how After excuse me, I’m going to press do not disturb so I don’t get any more beeps after World War II, after Pearl Harbor, after Americans entered the war several months later, the, in, in France, the Germans, France was occupied at the time, the Germans rounded up all the American women they could find in and around Paris and the surrounding villages, and they rounded up several hundred, and, They arrested them all, they put them on buses, and they imprisoned them in a zoo outside of Paris.
And and specifically in the monkey house. And they, their friends and family had to pay five francs to pay to go see them and shout over the fence at them and bring them supplies. It was wild. And one of the women, one of the women was actually Sylvia Beach, who was the owner of Shakespeare and Company.
Yeah. And and another was Drew Layton, who I’d never heard of before. Never, didn’t know anything about her story. And she came up a couple times in this monkey house story that I kept coming across. And first of all, like, When you hear a story like that, you’re like, surely someone has written a novel about this because it’s so wild and stranger than fiction.
But I couldn’t find any. And and I decided that Drew’s story was the most, Interesting out of all, a lot of the women that I read about who were in the monkey house and then went on to another camp in the mountains. It was a town called Vittel in the mountains of France. Drew was a 1930s Hollywood actress.
Stunningly beautiful, looked very much kind of the Hollywood, the old Hollywood part if you look her up online. She fell head over heels with a Frenchman named Jacques Tartiere. And in 1939, they got married and moved to Paris right as things were getting bad in France, and he went off to war, and she ended up becoming, she had this whole evolution during the war, she left acting and ended up becoming the voice of America, essentially the first voice of America broadcasting to an American audience about what was happening in, on the continent of Europe during the war, and she became so good at that job, that the Nazis actually put a bounty on her head and started broadcasting that they would, once they occupied France, they would execute her.
She would, and they did this several times. They meant, they announced it on their Berlin radio and she still kept broadcasting.
[00:06:59] Kate: And then after It’s enormous bravery, isn’t it?
[00:07:01] Jane: Enormous bravery. And then after that When France was finally occupied, she ended up becoming part of this underground network that was rescuing allied flyers that were crashing all over the country at that point, and getting them out of the country getting them papers, getting them money, getting change of clothes, and get, and getting them out of the country safely.
So her life took just this whole different trajectory because of the war, and and I just loved her story so much. So that’s why I ended up writing it.
[00:07:33] Kate: It doesn’t show as well what we’re really capable of, she was obviously a glamorous woman, an actress, destined for a, stardom and fame.
And yet, I suppose we don’t know what we’re capable of and that strength until it’s tempered in the fires of war,
[00:07:46] Jane: I think that’s so true. And I think that, was one of the things that I think the, they’re similar to your book. I was reading, you talked about Bea and Grace and the brave choices that they made and the quieter forms of resistance.
So talk about, how you developed these two characters and are they based directly on anyone on, in, in your research?
[00:08:10] Kate: So you and I were chatting a little bit about this before we came on air. I am very happy and in my comfort zone researching. If I could do nothing but go out and interview our wartime generation, go to archives and libraries, read books, then that would be, I’d be a very happy bunny if I never actually had to write a single word.
So the characterization is my, that’s the bit where I feel like I’m still learning my craft when it comes to that. So my characters are, yes, they’re always based on real people. people that I’ve met, but not solely just, I couldn’t just say that Bea or Grace is all just one person. They’re more like an amalgamation of various different people I’ve met.
I think as writers, we’re a little bit like magpies, aren’t we? Swooping around, picking up anything that glimmers that’s gold and then, working that into our characters. Yeah. So characterization is something that is ongoing with me, but I heard a very interesting interview the other day with Jojo Moyes, who obviously everybody will have heard of from, Me Before You and Giver of Stars, and she had a wonderful, and she, her characters are so strong, and she had a wonderful piece of advice, which is that you have to, in order to make your characters real, fully fleshed out, People that, that other people can resonate with, you have to almost stress test them, you have to understand where they’re coming from and who they are.
So any given point, you have to say to yourself, what’s in my character, what would be in Grace’s handbag? If Bea was walking down the street and she saw a stranger kick a dog, what would she do? So put them in situations that occur outside of your novel. And then you begin to really get to know them better.
And I, I really took that advice on board and I do that now with my characters. I just come up with their backstory. I live and breathe them. I try to think of what they do outside of the book until they become real people to me. And I think unless they feel real to me, they’re not going to feel real to anybody else.
Does that make sense?
[00:10:00] Jane: That makes complete sense. I absolutely agree with you. And it’s funny. I I love, I have a subscription to BBC Maestro. And so I took the course, Jojo Moyes. Oh, did you? Did you do that? I was
[00:10:11] Kate: thinking about that. Was it good?
[00:10:13] Jane: It was so good. Yeah. And she offered some of that exact advice.
And I am more of a fan of her now than I was before.
[00:10:22] Kate: Jane, I’m really sorry. Is it all right just to pause for a minute? My dog is going absolutely mental downstairs and I know she’s got herself locked. We’ve got, we’re on the river and we’ve got a jetty and she’s pushed the gate open and she’s trapped on the jetty and I can hear her crying and howling.
I was trying, I was hoping you couldn’t. I’m so sorry. I’ll be one minute. Oh
[00:10:46] Jane: yeah, we’ll figure it out. Actually, and my daughter keeps texting me. I got to tell her to stop. I’m going to be very quick.
[00:10:52] Kate: So Jane, I was looking through your website eagerly and of all of your books, I’m most, I found myself most drawn to the Saturday evening girls club which I believe is about the lives of four young immigrant women living in Boston in the early 1900s escaping tradition and the confines of the life that society has set out for them.
And I was thinking to myself, why am I drawn to this? I’ve ordered it. So I can’t wait to read it, but I think it’s because I just seem to return to female friendships again and again, whether I’m writing about them myself or whether I’m reading them. And I think that there’s so much power and solace in those relationships.
And I really believe that female friendships are amongst the greatest romances almost that we have in our lives. What drew you to this subject for your debut novel?
[00:11:36] Jane: Yeah thank you. And thank you for ordering it. That it came out in 2017 and your debut is like, it’s like your baby book.
It’s such a big deal. Yeah. It was life changing. Yeah. So I had written, I was a freelance writer, like a lot of authors, and I had written an article about this pottery this antique pottery that’s really collectible now called the Saturday Evening Girls Club Pottery and oh, that’s actually what it’s called.
It’s actually what it’s called. It’s also sometimes called Paul Revere Pottery. Because it was the Saturday Evening Girls Club was, like, directly across from the Old North Church in Boston. And so I, I read about the pottery and then I read about these young women and, this is early 1900s.
They were Italian and Jewish immigrants and they were poor. They had, their life was very tough in the, in Boston’s North End back then and yet they really, through this club, were able to and it’s really interesting to see how these girls, rise above their station and with supporting each other and the founders of the club, one of them was a librarian.
Edith Greer, another one was Helen Stero. We have Stero Drive in Boston. She was from a very wealthy family but she supported these girls. She helped them, some of them go to college actually And I was just really charmed too because they were all kind of first generation born in America. Their parents couldn’t speak each other’s languages, but they all, they were all American.
And so the kind of cross cultural friendships were really interesting between these Italian girls and these Jewish girls. And yeah, that story is like a quieter story and it’s really about their friendships and how that club and the friendships that they found in that club. Helps them have better lives.
[00:13:14] Kate: Despite the time. I love that premise. The idea of these women, making and creating pots together. And ostensibly not having much in common because they’re from very different cultural backgrounds. And yet they have, the main thing they have in common is that they’re first generation immigrants and that they are raised together as Americans.
What a fascinating concept.
[00:13:34] Jane: Yeah. Yeah. And I encourage you to look on eBay at Saturday Night Girls Club Pottery because the pieces are worth like thousands of dollars now. Like they’re really highly collectible. And it’s just I have. One piece my husband gave me when the book came out and a couple little broken pieces I got on eBay that like were put back together to show, like show and tell when I do talks and stuff.
But but yeah it’s fun. It’s really fun to look at. Isn’t this amazing thing
[00:14:01] Kate: about podcasting? I have never heard of the Saturday evening girls club pottery or anything. So I’m, that is the immediately when we get off, that’s the first thing I’m going to do. Cause I love pottery. Yeah. Yeah. I actually began learning to to do some pottery myself, as a sort of antidote to the stress of writing doing work in the potter’s kiln and so forth.
And it’s lovely. It’s just incredible to feel, to do. So yeah, that’s why I’m subconsciously drawn to it.
[00:14:27] Jane: Oh, that’s awesome. I hope, let me know how you enjoy, if you enjoy this story. Thank you so much. Oh, I’m going to. Yeah. Oh, you’re welcome. So I wanted to ask you, because I think we’re both total research nerds and love, yeah. And your notes on the, in the back of the wartime book, like astonishing research notes in the back. They’re almost as long as the
[00:14:49] Kate: novel.
[00:14:50] Jane: Oh, I loved it though. I loved it so much. And I was like, Oh my gosh, you did, So much research and it was so I’m so glad you put so much of it in the back notes because it gives You context for what’s real what was real and who things were near store like storylines that were based on real people And it was amazing.
So talk about your research process for this book. Yeah
[00:15:14] Kate: So firstly, I just, I’ve just started doing that more and more now, even though, as my editor pointed out, my God, Kate, there’s so much content at the back, it’s almost equal in weight to the actual narrative of the story. But I got away with it because I said to her, look, I get all these emails from people and they all say the same thing that they liked the book, but they loved the information at the end.
And I think people like getting a, a peek. behind the scenes, the story behind the story, the glimpse at the process. And also knowing what you did and who you interviewed and who’s, what’s based on real people and what isn’t. So I did. So with this particular book, obviously I’m not from Jersey.
So whereas my previous books, I could just get on a train to the East end of London here. I couldn’t, so I had to be a bit more meticulous in my planning. And then of course, COVID. Interrupted it. So I, in the end, I went to the island five times and I would try and ram those in for, cause it’s like trying to get time away from the home and the family.
So I would try and ram those trips and, fill them as many interviews as possible. So I did the usual things. I went to the archives, I interviewed historians, I went. On local radio and put appeals in the local newspaper. But the most interesting form of research came when I quite often would turn up to Age UK, Age Concern coffee mornings and just sat and listened, spellbound to that, to the wonderful back and forth memories and that, that unfiltered gush of social history that you only get when you sit in a room full of people that could remember the occupation.
And I became acutely aware that every time I would come and I would interview somebody. My next visit, somebody had passed away and, therefore, and I was thinking, God, I had that last interview with them. And it was almost that sense of the past just crumbling before me, that every, there was a wonderful saying I heard that every time an older person dies, it’s like a library burning down.
And I really had that in my mind when I was out there. And yeah, I just was like a sponge just running around the island, just interviewing as many wartime people as I could. And. Some Islanders were suspicious about, in inverted commas, what sort of book I was writing. I think they were fearful that it would oversimplify or focus on the very clumsy and tired kind of collaboration narrative.
There was only one woman, quite interestingly, who I interviewed, or I was trying to interview. She heard me ask a question about Silvertide, which is the headquarters of the German secret field police. And she said, Oh, I’ve got a good story to tell you about that. Come to my home tomorrow.
Curiosity peaked. I went along the next day and she opened the door a crack and she said, I’m really sorry, I’ve changed my mind. You can. Go away and forget what I’ve told you, but I will have to live with it all over again, going round and round my head. And, the door closed in my head and I walked away deeply saddened at a time because sometimes it’s not the stories you hear.
It’s the stories you don’t hear that come to have an influence on you. And really, the takeaway from it was just that go out and interview those people because the window of opportunity is closing all the time to capture those unique, remarkable kind of stories. And I definitely got the feeling that, especially in Jersey where the occupation is such a volatile, contentious, difficult subject, you know, for five and a half years, they lived alongside the enemy.
They were called collaborators at the end of the war by the British government even. So there’s a lot of suspicion and. anger and, occupations inject poison into the areas that have lived through them. But I got the feeling that, nearly next year will be 80 years since the end of liberation, that the need to share is overcoming the desire to forget.
And that Jersey is an island just simmering with stories. You could almost feel it bubbling in the air. And That’s what kind of kept me going back and back. I probably should have stopped at three research trips. Financially, I definitely should have stopped at three research trips. I think, I have a feeling Jane, you’d have been the same as me.
I just kept boarding that plane and going back and each time I went back, I was, rewarded with more stories. And yeah, I love it. I just love interviewing our wartime generation. The more you listen, the more you hear, I feel, do you get a sense of that? Cause your book’s all set World War II as well.
Yeah.
[00:19:13] Jane: I do. And I think that one of the reasons I’m drawn to it is because we’re losing that generation. And I think that’s why a lot of other people are drawn to the stories as well. We’re starting to lose that direct connection to that history because that whole generation is passing. You saw the D Day celebrations and it was so moving.
Oh my gosh these old men who are like, just their stories were all incredible and there’s not many of them left anymore. So yeah,
[00:19:43] Kate: this is exactly it. And I’m always aware when I go into an interview with somebody and. You never know where the conversation is going to go, you but suddenly the past isn’t just dusty or dry or sealed off behind a door is bright and real and fantastically vivid.
And I really took a piece of advice. Actually, I interviewed Heather Morris, who obviously wrote the Tattoos Demowschvitz, who. about her book for the podcast. And she said to me, active listening is a skill and I really took that on board. And actually I’d take it a little bit further. I’d say it’s an art form.
And I’m constantly reminding myself when I go out and interview that generation to listen more. And instead of thinking, what would I like to add to the conversation, what would I say? I just try to listen with open ears and an open heart because it doesn’t, you will always learn things about the war.
And that was definitely the case in, especially with the Jersey book, as people began to those stories began to leak out and you really got a sense of what it was. The horror and the privation and the fear and the desperation of living under that Nazi jackboot, like I said. So that was my, there was no, I’m not very organized with it, Jane, if I’m honest.
I just turn up and run around like a mad thing, running around the island, just doing as many different interviews as I can and knocking on doors. But it’s so rewarding. It’s the huge joy of the job. Oh yeah. And of course it’s a great procrastination tool, isn’t it? Because while you’re researching, you’re not writing.
It’s a huge procrastination. And what a
[00:21:08] Jane: beautiful place to visit too, by the way. Oh, it was no hardship. It
[00:21:12] Kate: was no hardship at all. Honestly, it’s a beautiful, it’s only tiny Jersey, but it’s, soaked in sunshine a lot and it’s got the most beautiful countryside and beaches. And yeah, there was no problem there.
[00:21:24] Jane: Yeah, no I was thinking too, when I was reading it how that their experience was unique to Europeans. The UK, London, they had the Blitz and, the continent of Europe had their own troubles, but Jersey’s experience with the occupation, with living, you with those Germans for years.
I didn’t, I guess in the back of my mind, I knew that, but then when you read about it, you’re like, my God, how did they get through it? It’s unbelievable.
[00:21:53] Kate: It is unbelievable. And how did they get through it? And I think people are quite often shocked when they read the wartime book club.
I have people getting in touch saying, I didn’t know it was that bad. And I think, they were still, starving, Islanders from after D Day and their supplies from San Marlo were cut off. And before the SS Vega arrived, which is a Red Cross ship, which bought rations eventually on New Year’s day, 1945.
So there was six months where they were, people were dying of starvation, malnutrition, disease, people that couldn’t get insulin were dying, diabetics were dying. So we tend to think of, the war, oh It was, there was no bombs, there was no active combat and that’s true.
There was no fighting, but people died constantly from those things. One woman I interviewed told me that she said halfway, during the siege, her pet dog Beauty went missing and the Germans had shot the dog and eaten it. I mean that even the German, the Germans were starving as well because they were cut off.
So they were seen shooting seagulls and eating them and that, so those sort of horrifying aspects, as well as this sense of. Again, we don’t think of the Channel Islands as something connected to the Holocaust, to the camps, to the horror of what was happening on the continent. But, there were islanders who were deported as I’ve mentioned within my book, a lady, a real woman I called called Louisa Gould, who was caught sheltering a Russian slave and was deported to France and died in the In Ravensbrück.
So that’s another untold story. I think, really, we look at the channel lines and we think, Oh it was just an easy occupation. It was anything, they were subject to the same horrifying conditions that a lot of people in France and mainland Europe were as well.
So I really tried to explore that within the book as well. Oh, and you
[00:23:31] Jane: absolutely did. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:23:33] Kate: It’s unbelievable. Yeah. And I have a question for you, Jane, because we’re talking about and you said about being acutely aware of that generation leaving us. I noticed on your website you mentioned that you’re drawn to it because your grandfather was in World War II.
Do you, are you happy to share something of that with me?
[00:23:50] Jane: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So he passed away over 20 years ago now, but I was very close with him growing up. And. But like a lot of that generation, he was very quiet about his experiences there. He was a firefighter on the Navy ships off the coast of Africa.
Yeah. On the, off the coast of Africa and Europe during the war. And, he just I try to get it out of him, but he was very private. And the interesting thing, this is an interesting story. We always thought that he was. He was stationed off of Normandy or that area of France, and and I didn’t know much else about it after he passed away, and for my parents 40th anniversary 15 years ago, we went to the south of France for a family trip, my kid, my daughters, my husband and I, my folks and I was We stayed in Nice, but I was obsessed with going to this village, Villefranche sur Mer, which is like 15 minutes away.
Yeah, and I’m just obsessed. I just had read about it, and I’m like, I just, I want to go there. I, and my, so we had the best day trip there, and my dad loved it so much that we bought him a little painting off the street. Like some, one of those guys doing the little watercolors, and gave it to him when he went back.
And then, A month after we returned from that trip, my dad found some old letters and, from my grandfather and learned that he had been stationed up in Villefranche sur Mer during the war. No! So you were drawn to it? Yeah, so I, I thought that, that was really a weird really odd coincidence that I felt so compelled to go there.
I’d
[00:25:22] Kate: call that, I’d call that serendipity, like you’re just drawn to it. What was his name? I don’t know. Joseph Healy. Yeah. Joseph Healy. Oh, that’s wonderful. He might have known my grandfather who was in the Royal Navy as well. The British Royal Navy. Oh, wow. Yeah. Oh, no way. I know, and like your, I know, and like your grandfather, he was, I didn’t know him actually, but by all accounts, he was a very quiet, withdrawn man.
He hardly said a word. And it wasn’t until after that I found out that he had been a submariner in World War I on a submarine. It’s only a boy, he can’t have been much help. the short trousers and he survived the battle of Jutland, which is terrible loss of life. He must’ve seen thousands of his crewmates drowned.
And the awful thing of that was that, then after the world war one, he gets married, he has children. And by the time of world war two, he’s still young enough to be drafted to that. So by that he’s back into the Royal Navy by the time of the second world war. And now he’s commander of Plymouth Harbor, which was heavily bombed and he was responsible for that.
So he never really, said much about it after the war. And I wonder now in reflection, when I’m going out and interviewing all these wartime a wartime generation, and I, one thing I’ve become to understand quite clearly is that, that obviously most of that generation must’ve had PTSD.
There’s no acknowledgement was there of their suffering or so forth. And so instead they just suffered in silence. And I just think that, that pain, it doesn’t fade, but it festers. And I just wonder whether my writing is an attempt to make sense of my own, his suffering and I’m just, and perhaps to understand my own family history and I, cause I can’t explain it more than that.
I’m just drawn to it in a deep, visceral way that maybe perhaps you are too. And so this is why we do what we do maybe.
[00:27:05] Jane: I think that’s definitely part of it. I think that after I, I finally, 10 years got the Saturday in the Girls Club published in the back of my mind, I’d always been like, I want to write a World War Two story.
I have to, I’m just like, so drawn to that history, I think, because of my own history with my grandfather. And it’s funny when the when Saving Private Ryan came out, he was still alive. And my father was like, Dad, do you want to go? I will take you because a lot of veterans were going to see it.
And he was like, Nope. I lived it. I don’t need, I don’t need to say it again. Yeah. Yeah. I’m good. Yeah. Isn’t
[00:27:36] Kate: it so interesting that the reactions I often think like I was interviewing a woman who had lived through the blitz and in fact she was buried alive when in an Anderson shelter. And she said to me that no matter what happens, she will never go to bed at night without checking the kettle is full of water.
So if they get bombed in the night and the standpipes and all the water runs out, she knows she can always have a cup of tea in the morning. And she said, I know it sounds silly, but for 80 years, she’s done that. And wherever she sits, she has to make sure she’s near a door or she knows where the exit is.
She’s very sort of claustrophobic, understandably after that. I think the legacy is so deep in a way that we can’t even truly understand.
[00:28:15] Jane: Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about writing process? Yes, shall we? Shall we? I feel like we should.
[00:28:24] Kate: People are always interested, aren’t they?
Come on, let’s talk process. Are you Are you a plotter, would you say, or a pantster, as they say? I am very
[00:28:34] Jane: much a plotter. I really, and, yeah, I’m not, that’s not to say so I plot out beginning to end how I think the story’s going to go, but then every four or five chapters when I’m drafting, I’m like, okay, am I still on track?
Is this still going to, is this still going the way, do I need to tweak things? Is this still making sense? Is it holding together? So yeah, I’m a plotter, but that doesn’t say, I definitely deviate sometimes as I go.
[00:29:00] Kate: Yeah, I think I’m the same, but I’m I try not to be too deep, too deeply embedded within it.
So I have a historical timeline that I stay quite faithful to in terms of when things happen. And then I know my beginning, my middle and my end. I know my narrative arc. I know in advance. the journey that I want my characters to go on. But then contained within that, you’ve got, I think you’ve got to allow space for the magic to happen and for your characters to breathe and for your characters to get off the page and do something that surprises you.
And I think that’s where the sort of those moments of magic can happen. So I don’t want to almost plot myself into a corner. And I can’t, when I see people that have got post it notes everywhere and very detailed mind maps and whiteboards filled with, oh my god, it makes me feel nervous.
I just think, I couldn’t do that.
[00:29:47] Jane: I,
[00:29:48] Kate: loose structure, I
[00:29:49] Jane: get very stressed out when I see those as well. I’m like, I don’t understand that. Level at all,
[00:29:54] Kate: that’s too much for me. I’d say,
[00:29:58] Jane: Oh, go ahead.
[00:29:59] Kate: No, I know you please you go first. This is what happens to podcasters interviewing. That’s right.
[00:30:04] Jane: That’s right. So what you’ve been doing this for a while, like what, I’m sure people ask you about writing advice, publishing advice, those are two different things. What’s the best advice you can get?
[00:30:17] Kate: Oh gosh that question feels so enormous, doesn’t it? It is, yeah. I think in terms of public, getting published, the old advice of never giving up is true, and I think it’s such a difficult business, isn’t it?
And I think you have to develop quite a thick skin. And if one agent turns you down, then you just keep going. Because, if one thing I’ve learned over the years is that everything is circular and, everything is, Subject to trends and genre. And just because one person doesn’t like it, doesn’t mean to say in five years time, they’ll love it.
You just have to have that self belief and keep going. And really the best tips I think are the best way to make yourself a better writer is to become a better reader. If that makes sense. I try to fill my life with books. I’ve always got multiple books on the go, whether I’m reading non fiction as research, I’ve got a huge stack of books next to my bedside table when I’m in the car or I’m peeling potatoes or chopping onions.
I’m listening to books. I’m just a voracious reader. And I always have my mind tuned for the sentence or the prose or the description that stops me in my tracks that stands out to me. And I think to myself, what was it? As a reader that I loved so much about that. What made me love that book? And I try to become a tune my brain to be aware of it.
What stops me in my tracks with a book. And I think lastly, and then I’d love to hear your tips. I think it’s really helpful to get to know yourself as a writer and what your. Authentic voices. What are you bringing that’s unique, but also be aware of the traps and the tropes that you tend to fall into.
I know that I spend too long researching and therefore there’s a tendency to want to his like sort of information dump on the page. And I became aware of this actually went up through a review, which I know you’re not supposed to read reviews, but actually I say, do read your reviews because you learn a lot about yourself as a writer, if you can set aside your ego and think, actually.
Maybe what they’re saying is right because this one woman had put, Oh, Thompson’s done her research and I thought, Oh, thanks. That’s nice. And then she put, and doesn’t she want us to know it? And I was like, Oh, ouch! Yeah, what I took away from that, I guess what I learned is that they’re a delicate application of your history research, like brushstrokes as opposed to just a heavy coating.
Sometimes you can say more with a sentence than reams and reams. So I try to keep that uppermost in my mind. And also that the story is the king. The story is it. If it’s not serving the story, it can go. There’s a lot of stuff in books that isn’t actually related to the story. The story has to keep moving forward all the time.
What about you, Jane? What would you say? I could have
[00:32:57] Jane: said all of those things myself. Like I completely agree. And I, one thing that I always say is the history has to serve the story. That’s on the back of my mind. I’m always like the story. Cause I’ve been acute, especially with the first drafts of Saudi Indian girls club, my beta readers were like, Nobody cares that much about how the pottery is made.
I probably would, but yeah. Gotta take out some of that. Yeah, things like that.
Tell me because I ask this question to every author I interview and I think it’s so tricky, how you, how do you strike a balance between fact and fiction in your storytelling, and are there any strict rules you adhere to?
[00:33:37] Kate: Oh, that’s such a good question. I don’t think there was any strict rules that I adhere to.
I try to take each individual book on its merits. And as I’ve developed as an author, I think I’ve become more confident about weaving in real stories and real people. It was something that I was always very nervous of to begin with, but now, the wartime book club, I’ve featured, as I said earlier, Louisa Gould, who was a real woman who was executed by the Nazis for her act of resistance.
And so walking that line between truth and fiction, this is a real woman who has real relatives and survive, and people that are alive today that will read this book and might not like my interpretation of Louisa Gould. So in fact, I actually contacted her family members who told me very generously and magnanimously that they weren’t proprietorial about history, that my version of Louisa Gould was just that, my own, provided I did my research.
So that’s what I do. I research research, and I try to keep in mind. to be collaborative share and remain open to the feelings of others. And I think as authors, that’s our duty of care that we have to act with emotional integrity. So always I’m trying to play that balancing act between weaving in the truth, Into a narrative that is then creative and still works for the story, works for the reader.
It’s still a story, right? So not to be slave to the, to, to the facts as well. So it’s that dance almost between the two, isn’t it? But do you know what? I had a really good piece of writing advice from Christie Lefteri, who’s the author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo. And she said to me, look, you can’t.
Always write what you know. She said, it’s all about the connection, what’s going on inside you. She said, you can’t always write what you know, you have to write what you feel. It’s the feel, not the know. And I really love that. Because I thought, yeah, that makes sense to me. Does that, how do you feel about it, Jane?
It totally makes sense. Because you write real people in your books.
[00:35:33] Jane: I do and, but Drew Layton, Good Night From Paris, she was the first main character, protagonist that was a real person in history. So I was very nervous about that. And I also got in touch with her family. She has a granddaughter and her grandson.
And they were very supportive, thank God, and they’re, they liked the book and the way she was portrayed, and I tried to honor her story as much as possible, but at the end of the day, this is fiction, and you have to insert scenes that are made up, and and so that, that’s tricky, especially when it’s a real person in history, like you said, they have, they might have family still but I think what you’re saying is true.
It’s very true. I interviewed Kristen Hannah after she, when the woman came out a couple months ago. And she, oh, so good. And and she was amazing. And one thing she said that stuck, has stuck with me that kind of, I think it gives you freedom as an, as a fiction author. She said, in, in the beginning when I was, she’s written like 20, 30 books.
She said in the beginning, I was very nervous about historical detail and dates and times and getting everything exact. And she said, but now, I realize that it’s more about getting the essence of the story, getting the history and the essence of the story it doesn’t have to be, exact to the time and the date and the person as long as you get the essence of the story right.
I agree. I
[00:36:52] Kate: think people forgive. It never very rarely happens that you get an inaccuracy in terms of dates and times, you’re not writing a history book, you’re writing something people will emotionally connect to. And I felt maybe that’s why we over research and why I went to Jersey five times and interviewed as many different wartime survivors as I could.
Because only actually through layering up those details, you get a much richer, more complex picture. And then you come to the page with the confidence. that you do know what that essence is. And I think it’s easy to fend off criticism if you’ve done a lot of research and you say, look, this is my opinion, this is how I felt based off this kind of research.
Yeah, I think that’s true. Yeah. And it gives you that confidence, doesn’t it? To speak with some, authority, about that area. But I always keep in mind, I’m not a historian, I am a journalist and I, but I’m a historical fiction writer.
[00:37:42] Jane: Yeah. And there’s that creativity and that element of yes, you want to educate, but you also want to entertain and inspire.
It’s yeah. So
[00:37:51] Kate: people come because they want to escape. They read. I know I do. I pick up a book or I press play on an audible because I want to escape my life and enter another life for a short while. And so that’s what we’re supposed to be providing. Not a detailed, chronological breakdown of historical events.
Exactly. Exactly.
[00:38:08] Jane: Yeah. Yeah. We’re on the same page. Definitely.
[00:38:12] Kate: On that subject of, historical fiction versus non fiction, what are you working on next, Jane? What’s your next project? In fact, you have one coming out
[00:38:20] Jane: next year, don’t you? I do. And that is, that will be my next project for the summer, I think.
So it’s, Early Cold War and I’ve been thinking about it since 2018. I read an article in the Smithsonian Magazine about this group of women codebreakers in the late 1940s and 19, 1950s, that they were young, they had moved to Washington, they had been recruited because they were, good at math and good at languages, and and they all became very close friends and they.
They were the ones to break into the Russian telegrams during the war that that identified all of these spot Russian spies that were, many of whom were still in the U. S. and had stolen nuclear secrets from the U. S. and including Thea Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Among others. So it’s about this group.
It’s a friendship story. There’s a love story, but it’s also about this extraordinary group. These women had to keep this a secret for the rest of their lives. They were, it was called the Bonona Project, is what it was known as, and it wasn’t declassified until the 1990s. So the things that, yeah, so the telegrams and the things that they discovered in these messages, these Russian messages, could not be used in court during, when they were trying via Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and others it couldn’t be used because it was that top secret and it wasn’t revealed.
And even when they were older, that, the woman who was being interviewed for the article was in her, I think her 90s, And she still had a hard time talking about it because they’re, they had taken this oath of secrecy and would, could have been executed for revealing these secrets.
So yeah, we have a working title. It’s called the redacted life of Kat Killeen. I think it’s probably going to be changed because they always change my titles. I really like that title though. Yeah. I love a quirky title. Yeah, it’s a little, it’s a little quirky. But I, it, I just handed it in a few weeks ago, so I’ll probably be getting edits back soon.
And I think that, the ba it’s a back and forth process probably from the next few months. Yeah. At the very least. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s bit, yeah, that’s a, that’s it for a while. I, this one because it was a new era of history for me not that. Not that far from World War II, but it starts in 47.
The amount of research was incredible and it was a tight timeline. Yeah tight deadline, and so it really, I was a little burnt out, to be honest. No, I’m really, I
[00:40:45] Kate: decompressing and never wanting to see it again. And knowing
[00:40:49] Jane: that
[00:40:49] Kate: it’s coming back to you at some
[00:40:51] Jane: point. I know, I can’t, and I can’t even think about The next book yet?
I’m like completely I don’t even, yeah, I just need it. I
[00:40:57] Kate: really admire people that can press or write the end and then the next day start the next book. I’m not that person. I need a compression time just to collapse and rock in a corner. It’s so intense. Yeah, it really is. I, but all power to you.
That sounds amazing. What, when is it out in February, in 2025? What month? I think they
[00:41:17] Jane: haven’t given me an exact date, but my guess is May. May, June. Yeah. Yeah. How about you?
[00:41:24] Kate: What’s your next thing? Oh mine’s a bit different, actually. And it’s funny how many parallels there are between us as we’re talking, because I have literally just handed in the first draft of my next book.
I’m feeling a little somewhat burnt out from it. So this time I’m actually writing a nonfiction this time, but it’s not, it’s, so basically it’s in collaboration with one of Britain’s oldest Auschwitz Birkenau survivors, an amazing lady that I met called Rene Salt, who is 95 now or nearly 95.
And she and her mother survived really from, the day one of the invasion of Poland to the liberation of Bergen Belsen in April 1945, lived through atrocity after atrocity, lost her, pretty much her whole family, were murdered in the Holocaust. And it’s just, she is a remarkable woman. She is a survivor.
Remain, has remained so full of hope and love. And she didn’t talk about her experiences for 50 years. Funnily enough, she ended up marrying the man one of the British liberating soldiers at Bergen Belsen. She met him in Paris and they found a common bond and they got married and they were deeply in love and had a family for many years.
And it’s really only after his death that she began to speak the unimaginable. And now. Finally, at the end of her life, she’s I want to write a book, but she felt that she couldn’t. So when she said this to me, what can I say? I just was like, I’ll help you. I’ll help you. So now it’s the first draft is done.
It’s coming out in England and the States and Canada, I think in February, 2025, because next year is the 80th anniversary. of the liberation of the camps. And she was in Auschwitz and she was liberated from Bergen Belsen. So this book is her way of honoring the memory of her family and finally setting a story down on the page.
So it’s been harrowing and I’ve traveled to Poland and I’ve traveled to Germany and I’ve attempted to follow in her footsteps to, understand her story and her suffering. I really, one thing I realized is I might have traveled to the sites of her persecution, but only she stared into the face of the abyss.
And I’m, it’s been my most challenging project that I’ve ever done.
[00:43:31] Jane: I can’t imagine.
[00:43:32] Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Really. And truly like I, yeah, I think I’m quite looking forward to going back to historical fiction after that. Cause it’s, I adore this woman. I’ve got a very good relationship with her and we’ve got a real bond now, but it’s been like, it’s been like nothing I’ve ever worked on.
So I’m. I’m very nervous to see how it will be received and whether I did a good enough job,
[00:43:54] Jane: I’m sure you did, but it sounds incredibly intense. That’s a very emotional, like heavy. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:44:01] Kate: It’s been incredibly emotional. And I can’t even, I haven’t even got the language to describe how I feel about it yet.
Yeah. It’s still evolving. If I’m honest, I do feel like I’m still slightly traumatized by, no, that’s not the right, no, not traumatized. I can’t be traumatized by it, but it’s been incredibly tough, and I we spent many hours and it’s, I’ve struggled with whether it’s the right thing to do in terms of sitting with this woman and all of her pain, asking her and, it’s very rare to survive the Holocaust, rarest still at the age of 95 to trawl through your memory for every last little thing that can be remembered and she’s done it.
So I’m full of admiration for this woman. So it’s going to be called do not cry when I die in America. And it’s, which was her mother’s last words to her and a mother’s promise in the UK. So we’ll have to so maybe next year when our respective books come out, we can meet again. I was just thinking that we should absolutely.
We should be able to
[00:45:00] Jane: survive
[00:45:00] Kate: the process. That would be
[00:45:01] Jane: wonderful. We’ll do another crossover. There will be no daughters texting and no dogs. Yeah. I look forward to it. I’ll be more seamless next time. Exactly. So Kate, real quick tell people how they can keep in touch with you. Your podcast and your contact stuff.
[00:45:18] Kate: Oh any, which way you, you feel happy to really. So I’m on Instagram. If you’re happy to share in the show notes, my social media handles and I’ll share yours, but I check Instagram and Facebook. You can put my email on there as well. Or if you just put from the library with love it’s available from wherever you get your podcasts and you just put it into Google, it should give you a link to it.
And of course I will put the link up to the show on mine. And then obviously it’ll be an identical one to the one that’s on yours, but thank you so much. It hasn’t felt like a, it’s just felt like a chat and it’s been really enjoyed. I’ve loved it actually. So thank you.
Let’s definitely, let’s check back in next year.
[00:45:55] Jane: All right, sounds good. Thank you.
