HOW ONE BOOK CAN LEAD TO ANOTHERFrom Genealogy to MemoirIn 20 But once the novel had moved to the copyediting stage, I began to wonder about the actual child, the one who inspired my story. Hine had listed her as Annie Laird, but when we couldn’t find an entry for a child by that name in the 1900 census, I realized that Hine probably couldn’t hear what she told him over the noise of the spinning frames. So with a bit of imagination, the help of a local genealogist/researcher and some deeper digging, we found Addie Card and her older sister, Annie in that census.
In the end, with the help of her descendants, we pieced together Addie’s story. She married a fellow mill worker, had a child, divorced and ended up living across the border in New York State. She died at the age of 93, never knowing that her face appeared in a Reebok ad decrying child labor or on a 1998 postage stamp.
I made sure that the billboard on the former site of the mill in North Pownal listed her correct name as did the entry in the Library of Congress Hine collection.
A writer coming off a book can get distracted by the marketing and publicity work, but I’ve always maintained that even then, a writer is never not writing. So, when I found myself at the end of the story of Grace, I suddenly realized that I knew more about Addie Card than I did about my own mother. Without knowing where my research would lead me, I turned my attention to my Gibraltar-born mother, her childhood by the Mediterranean and in England, her life in London during the war and her marriage to my father, a Yank who enlisted in the British Army.
Books start long before the writer knows what she’s doing or where she’s going. I thought I was simply filling in the gaps in my mother’s story. She’d always kept her counsel and had seemed content to let my father’s big noisy American family garner all the attention. But as I began to learn more about her, I could feel a book taking shape, this time a memoir that would start with my mother’s peculiar childhood in Gibraltar and my parents’ wartime romance and go on to tell the story of my childhood in cold war Washington, where we were surrounded by famous politicians, diplomats and CIA operatives.
The problem was I’d never written a memoir before, so I had to learn a new way of using the tools of fiction. It took me longer than usual to find my voice in this book, to discover the difference between autobiography and memoir and to find a way to tell my mother’s story without letting hers overshadow mine. In Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies I learned to use a braided narrative, one that moves back and forth from the past to the present. Memoir requires structure but like most projects, including novels, the book teaches the writer what it’s about while she’s writing it. And it’s only in looking back that I realize the exploration of my mother’s story began with a search for a little girl in Vermont whose photograph had become iconic but whose story had been tossed into the dustbin of history. |
Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (www.elizabethwinthropalsop.com) is the author of over 50 works of fiction for adults and children under the pen name Elizabeth Winthrop. These include the award-winning fantasy series, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle as well as the short story, The Golden Darters, read on the nationwide radio program, Selected Shorts, and included in Best American Short Story anthology, and Island Justice and In My Mother’s House, two novels now available as eBooks. She is the daughter of the acclaimed journalist, Stewart Alsop. Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, a family history about her parents’ love affair during World War II and their marriage lived in the spotlight of Washington during the 1950s was published by Regal House, October 25, 2022.
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Fiction writers have been called many things, but magician seems to me the best description. They dip into the black hat of their imagination and produce an endless variety of characters, situations, images, genres, events, and styles. The effect on readers is nothing less than magical, the reader also becoming a magician, assisting in making visible what wasn’t there before. 
My novel Fling, a wildly comic romp on mothers, daughters, art, and travel, was published in July 2015.
From inside my study, one wall book-lined, the other holding a large mirror that makes the room appear bigger, I sit on the loveseat, listening to Strauss and the waterfall powered by a tiny electric pump. When I’m home, I turn it on, the sound of water like a heart beat in this house, a tangible reminder of what usually is invisible, at least to waking life—water for me representing the unconscious and all that lives there. 
Years ago, for several months I was involved with a small Canadian literary agency with one principal, a former practicing contract attorney (I’ll call her Virginia, though that isn’t her real name), and her associate Sandra, a woman who claimed to have years of experience in the New York publishing scene as an agent and editor. Before email became ubiquitous, ours was largely a relationship by mail—post cards, letters, faxes, and, occasionally, phone. 
David received his undergraduate Communication degree from Stanford University. After moving to New York City to pursue a career in documentary film production, he began MA studies in Creative Writing at New York University, which included a course with his first literary hero E. L. Doctorow. He took a leave of absence after a semester to focus on supporting his growing family. That leave lasted thirty-five years and was primarily spent writing and/or directing and/or producing business communications. 
I was having dinner with friends recently. They’d read my novel Fling! and wanted to know how I came up with the main characters’ names—Bubbles and Feather. When I tried to pinpoint the moment when the names tumbled onto the page, I couldn’t. 
As you reflect on and write some of the stories from your life, remember, you are writing the truth as you know it. Someone else who was present at a particular incident you’ve written about can have a different view of “what happened,” but that doesn’t mean that what you remember didn’t happen the way you remember it. 
I’ve been thinking about book festivals I’ve participated in and realize that, while these events are great for focusing on the many book genres available, I probably won’t attend one again. A while back, I signed up for the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, a relatively new venue. Its first session was in 2015, and it claims to be an international event that draws people from all over the world: “More than 50,000 diverse people of all ages, from urban to suburban Bay Area communities and beyond. 
In “Spirit of the Law,” a short story I’ve been working on, I want to explore life after death, and something else—how the dead go on living or not living, if only in our memory, in the physical places where we’ve known them. 
I opened the I Ching at random this morning and came up with #38, K’uei / Opposition. The commentary says it is common for two opposites to exist together, needing to find relationship. I realize an opposition is being set up just in the act of writing my memoir Drop Out: my inner writer will be observing everything I do closely and recording what she finds valuable. I’m reminded of a review of Journey into the Dark: The Tunnel by William Gass that appeared in The New York Times Book Review: 
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for money.” —Molière
Winner of The Writer’s Union of Canada’s Prose Contest in 2016, 
Okay, I’ve been writing for longer than I care to remember, but I still can convince myself (arrogant? yes!) that I don’t need feedback from other writers. This attitude tends to take over when I’ve spent considerable time working on something, as I had with a memoir I’ve written. After all, it’s my story I’m telling. How could someone else help me to improve it? I don’t usually take this approach to fiction I’ve created; I assume it can be made better. But I’d persuaded myself that my memoir was ready to be published. 
Okay, so you’ve accomplished the impossible. An agent has expressed interest in your work and you’ve signed a contract. All those months (maybe years) of sending out your novel have paid off. Not only do you have an agent, but she’s in New York, on Park Avenue. A respectable established firm.
In addition to writing adult fiction and non-fiction, I also create pieces for children. Recently, I tried to start a children’s story of a girl sleeping in an elegant dollhouse based on a dream image that has stayed with me. But after a few sentences, I felt extremely critical of what I’d written. I had to stop. Let it breathe, I said to myself. Let the criticalness soften—fall away. 
A high-school dropout and a single parent at sixteen, my options were severely limited. I had a son to raise on my own, and I received no child support from his father. A quick learner, I parlayed the typing skills I had learned in my high school commercial course (it was assumed then that most women would end up as clerk typists or some version of that role) into a variety of office jobs after starting out as an office girl. Consequently, when I began writing my novel