About ten years ago, I embarked on a journey to write the story of my mother’s wartime experience when she worked as a civilian in the Office of War Information (OWI). I had many letters – maybe 65 or so – she had written home in 1944 and 1945, saved by my grandparents for some reason.
When my grandparents sold their brownstone in Brooklyn way back in the late 1960’s, my mother took all those saved WW2 letters to our house and promptly stored them in our attic for thirty-five years. When we sold our parent’s house thirty years later, I took those loosely tethered letters to my home and finally had a chance to look through them carefully.
As I went through them, I knew there was a story to tell. The challenge was where to start and how to approach these large moments in history: World War Two, Propaganda, living in London during the Buzz Bomb era, moving to Paris and trying to educate the French about America, love interests, family back home and so much more.
On top of all that, my mother had spent a year in France as a junior in college at the Sorbonne. There was another whole set of letters saved from that year as well. During her year in Paris, she had become fluent in French, had adopted a French woman’s sense of style and generally absorbed a deep love of all things Francais. Case in point: my name, Marianne, is the namesake for Liberte, the well-known female embodiment of France.
In 2014, I began attending writing classes to help me sharpen my focus on writing this particular story. My original intent was to write a straight epistolary recap of my mother’s time at OWI. But I craved some latitude as only writing about her war work was not compelling enough for me. Hence, the fictionalization of her OWI experience became my greatest undertaking. It has freed me to expand storylines beyond their actuality and create events and people that make a book come together.
Writing history as if you are living in the moment was a challenge I readily took on, as any style of writing has always appealed to me. I’ve also loved history as well. Even with all that energy, it has taken time to coalesce my writing and research capabilities, a process I have enjoyed immensely. Trips to the Library of Congress to listen to the radio recordings and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland to look at the millions of cubic feet of OWI records that are available (I barely made a dent in all that, but still), were incredibly enlightening.
Travels to London and Paris to retrace my mother’s footsteps enabled me to write about the places she had lived, worked and had fun. It is a journey I have loved, and I look forward to sharing it with all of you.