I’ve been mulling over writing this story for a long time. I had many letters from 1944-1945 my mother had written home, so I knew I could use those as the outline of the story. But some of the material was personal, like her love life, and did I want to splash all that over a book?
In the end, I decided I did because you can’t have a good novel about straight war work, even propaganda war work. There have to be a few problems and additional characters along the way. A few things, including all the names of the characters in the story, except for the people who worked at OWI, were changed.
I then asked myself if I thought my mother would want me to write this story. With her death in 2006, the opportunity to talk with her about the idea of a book was long gone. But, as we were going through their possessions after they had both passed away, we found my mother’s yearly date calendars. I looked through them casually, ready to discard them, until I caught an entry in the 1990 calendar. Continue reading “The Journey of Researching and Writing The French Desk”