AWW: You spent a lot of time immersing yourself in research for each book, I imagine you must come across so many fascinating women. How you know which ones to pursue and write stories about?
Natasha: I feel like there’s some little part of your brain that just knows, and it is that gut instinct of that’s going to be the one. I almost think it’s like a magnet back there and when it sees that name and that person, it just attracts it, and you can’t get that person out of your head. There’s not that many people I come across that I think, oh, they might be the subject for a story. So many of the women aren’t on the historical record, so you don’t tend to find that many of them.
The Mademoiselle Alliance is your latest in a long line of books about incredible women from history. Do you have a queue of women in your mind, waiting to have their stories to be told?
Natasha: It’s not like that at all! I’m always conscious that there are so many women left off the historical record that I’ll be able to keep doing this for a long time. But I do worry, what if I can’t find them because they’re not there? I really go digging for them.
I can see why Marie-Madeleine grabbed you because she has an amazing story.
Natasha: I know, the whole time I was writing, I was thinking surely someone else out there is writing a novel about this, I’ve got to get it out as fast as I can! I just feel like now her story is so important with everything that’s going on in the world. Everyone says we’ve just got to hope for a better future, but hope is really passive and if she just sat around hoping for a better future, that future would not have come. What she taught me, and what I’m hoping some people might take away from the book, is that whole idea that we actually have so much more power in agency than we give ourselves credit for. I think particularly now, it’s so easy to think, with Meta and all those other people, ruling the world, that we’re powerless. But she was in a similar situation. It was a very patriarchal government. Women’s rights were being stripped back left, right and centre in the same way they are now. But she didn’t just sit back and go: well there’s not that much I can do. She went I’ll do this bit, and that led to the next bit and the next bit. So, she took action. One woman who decides to take action can actually change the whole world.
I was really surprised to learn what a privileged upbringing she’d had, and that she trained as concert pianist. As you were exploring her and learning about her, did you get a sense of what drove her to stand up and say, ‘I have to do whatever is in my power to try and prevent this horrible thing that’s happening!’
Natasha: It might have been because of her upbringing, because she grew up in Shanghai. Normally if a father had been posted to Shanghai, the wife and children would stay behind in France because Shanghai was perceived to be uncivilised back then. But her mother must have had enough of an adventurous spirit in her to take the three kids to Shanghai in the 1910s. And so, they grew up there. She talked to her biographer about being allowed to roam the streets with their nanny. So long as they had the nanny with them, they could go and explore, they didn’t have to stay in the French concession. She talks about standing on the banks at the harborside and seeing all the small boats weaving in and out of the larger boats and how that was going to then connect to the world. It was this sense of a really global outlook for that time and for a woman of that time particularly.
From Shanghai, she went back to Paris briefly and married her first husband at age 18 and then went to Morocco. It’s the 1920s, she’s a woman in Morocco. She doesn’t just hang out with the French expats in Morocco. She learns Arabic. She goes and volunteers at the local women’s clinic helping local women deliver babies and really immerses herself in their lives. Then, when she goes back to Paris, she is a car rally driver, she learns to fly planes, becomes a journalist, wants to interview women who were on the fringes of society, but important women who the newspapers weren’t necessarily covering.
So, I think she had to protect that freedom and not let Hitler come in, because she wouldn’t have been able to do any of those things under Hitler. She wouldn’t be able to work at a local women’s clinic. Be able to fly planes. She wouldn’t be able to be a car rally driver, because it was all church, family, motherhood. She did have a family but that wasn’t her only life.
I think that passion for preserving this independent, curious, adventurous, global way of life that she’d led was largely what drove her, and wanting her children to have that same opportunity to have that if they chose.
There’s so much to her life. Was there one thing that made you think, I must tell this story?
Natasha: I think it was all of it, but the mailbag was a clincher for me. What normal woman survives a 10-hour journey in a tiny mailbag? Also, there’s a moment where the Gestapo put her two children on their most wanted list and she’s working with the Amitié Chrétienne to get them smuggled across the border of Switzerland. One of her agents who’s helping to organize that says to her, ‘Stand in the window of the apartment on this morning at this time, and just looked down at the street.’ And the agent walks the two children past the window and she’s standing there not knowing when she’s going to ever see them again. She can’t go down to the street because if she does and the Nazis see her with the children, [and] they’re all [be] arrested. She’s risked her children’s lives. She doesn’t know when she’s going to see them again because she doesn’t know when the war’s going to end. It’s 1943. We know Paris is liberated and August 1944, she has no idea. It could be 10 years.
So, she’s literally standing there looking down, going, I can’t go down there and hold them or hug them or even say goodbye to them. And just that moment of understanding that this wasn’t just a woman leading a resistance network, this was a mother with two children going through the intense agony of missing her kids and having to selflessly, for their own protection, give them up for an unknown period of time. I thought, they’re not the kinds of stories you read. So that’s when I knew I needed to write her book.
Is it a challenge to create a sense of peril when we know all’s well that ends well?
Natasha: Yes, and I think the thing that really helped me with that was my editor reminding me that whilst we know when the war ends, they don’t know. [I had to] manifest that hope that they must have always had that the allied invasion will just be six months away because I don’t think they realised how much work there was to do, and how ignorant the allies really were about the Nazis and the Nazis war machinery.
One of the most gripping scenes is the mailbag scene. You really drive home the horror of that 10 hours, but also that she has her hip dysplasia which makes it so much more painful for her. I understand that you have hip dysplasia too. Did that help you get into her head and bring her to life?
Natasha: It did because my daughter had hip dysplasia like Marie-Madeleine’s daughter had hip dysplasia, and it is a genetic condition. All the doctors asked me when my daughter was diagnosed, ‘Who in your family’s got it? I said, nobody’s got it. They asked, Are you sure? I said no, I don’t have it. I’ve got great hips. My daughter had the same operation that Marie-Madeleine’s daughter had, so when Marie-Madeleine moves the headquarters to the hospital room and spends all that time by her daughter’s bedside, that was exactly what my daughter had. And the cast that Beatrice goes into afterwards [was the] same cast that my daughter was in. So that kind of helped.
But then while I was writing the book I was really struggling to get Marie-Madeleine’s character on the page properly. I had her on a pedestal because she’s such a heroic woman, I couldn’t humanise her.
I was diagnosed in my late 40s with osteoporosis, and they X-ray your spine and so my doctor said your hip dysplasia is looking really bad. And I’m like, I don’t have hip dysplasia. She said, ‘You do.’ And I just thought ‘Oh my God. That’s where my daughter got it from. I’ve had it and I’ve had hip pain for years.’
It really helped me because Marie-Madeleine tries to hide her pain and she limps occasionally and I sometimes get that as well and I’ve always hidden that I’ve never really spoken about. It’s just something you get through every day. I thought okay, I know exactly how she feels in her body and when you can be inside a character’s body that really helps you to get them onto the page.
It also reminded me she was just an ordinary woman, like you or I. She didn’t have military training. She wasn’t trained as a spy. She was a normal civilian who did remarkable things. I can write an ordinary woman like me because I’m an ordinary woman like me.
This book requires you to write a lot about fear and violence and those sides of war that you wouldn’t have experienced yourself. What work do you do to create that reality for the characters?
Tonnes of research. Tonnes of reading things in French, reading her memoir in French, going to the archives in Paris and looking through all the archival documents about the network, which are all in French.
Léon Faye, who was her second in command, his niece had written these four notebooks about her uncle, which they had at the Paris archive. I thought this was a fabulous discovery; there was all this information about him. He’s an important character in the book, and [the notebooks] help me get into his psyche. I got to the archives and I realised that they’re hand-written. Four hundred pages and her handwriting was absolutely shocking. I couldn’t read it! She’s scratched out large chunks on each page and written in tiny letters in between the scratching and the line above, or written around the margin. I was hyperventilating. I need to be able to read this and I can’t! I’ve got a French tutor who I normally meet with an hour every week just to keep up my fluency. I said to her, ‘Can you help me decipher the writing so that I can then translate it into English?’
It took us nearly a year to get through just those notebooks but it was really worth it because she writes about him as a teenager going to military school, high school, and that’s where I got that real sense of that patriotism that people had in that era where as soon as they enrol in the military, they’re willing to give up their life for their country.
They don’t see that as unusual. Let us say that’s part of the job. It really helped me to connect to that part of him as a man, which is a really important part of him. I’m glad I did it, but it was quite painful and slow. That kind of stuff really helps you get into the characters.
This interview has been edited for clarity and space.
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