When Elise returns to Paris after the war and desperately tries to find Ruth’s children, she works with a suburban orphanage that really was part of an Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants network to reunite Jewish children with their families. And when she takes the children to the H?tel Lutetia to search for their mother, she is walking in the footsteps of real people eighty years ago who visited the grand hotel, which had been converted temporarily into a center for returning refugees.
Later, Elise sails to America aboard the SS United States, which was in transatlantic service from 1952 through 1969. According to a 2008 article in Popular Mechanics, the ship was four city blocks long and seventeen stories high—and it could speed through the water at forty-four knots, or more than fifty miles per hour. On its maiden voyage in 1952, it crossed the Atlantic in just three days, twelve hours, and twelve minutes, a record that has never been broken.
Sadly, the plane crash that occurs late in the book is also very much based on reality. In fact, the quotes from the cockpit in the novel are pulled directly from the U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board’s Aircraft Accident Report, released on June 18, 1962, roughly eighteen months after the tragic midair crash. At 10:33 a.m. on December 16, 1960, TWA Flight 266 from Columbus, Ohio, and United Flight 826 from Chicago collided in the air over Staten Island, New York. The TWA plane, a Lockheed Super Constellation, fell on Miller Army Field, near where the planes had struck each other. The United plane, a Douglas DC-8, flew for several minutes over the city, badly damaged, until it finally slammed into the corner of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Only one passenger—an eleven-year-old Boy Scout named Stephen Baltz—survived the initial crash, but he was badly burned and died from his injuries the following day, after staying conscious long enough to see his parents, who hadn’t been on the flight with him. All 128 people aboard the two planes were killed, as were six people on the ground, two of whom were selling Christmas trees, as Lucie and her boyfriend are in the book. I still burst into tears (I’m crying now as I write this!) thinking of little Stephen—a sixth-grader who played Little League Baseball and sang in the church choir, and whose sweet face looks out at readers from a photograph on the front page of the December 17, 1960, issue of the New York Times.
In writing The Paris Daughter, I also went way down the rabbit hole of wood-carving research, reading such books as Carving Award-Winning Songbirds (Lori Corbett), Carving Faces Workbook (Harold Enlow), and Chris Pye’s Woodcarving Course & Reference Manual: A Beginner’s Guide to Traditional Techniques. I particularly loved The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making, a beautiful memoir of wood carving by David Esterly, a renowned master carver who died in 2019. Esterly wrote with passion about the carver being shaped by the wood; I found his words very inspiring and illuminating. If you’re interested in learning more about the art of wood carving, I would absolutely recommend his book. I’d also suggest checking out MaryMayCarving.com, the website of wood-carver Mary May, who quite generously spent time answering my questions about wood carving and helping me make sure that the wood-carving scenes in the book were accurate. If you’re interested in learning how to carve wood, I highly recommend Mary May’s classes, some of which are free. You can learn more about her and those classes on her site.
As always, any errors are my own.
A few other historical notes: Elise meets Olivier at an Artists Union meeting in New York; these weekly meetings really did happen between the early 1930s and 1942, and the group was instrumental in advocating for federally funded work for artists during the Great Depression. In Paris, Olivier allies himself with French communists, who had a complicated path during World War II. The encounters with Pablo Picasso and his circle of artists are based on reality—I found the book Life with Picasso, by French artist Fran?oise Gilot, fascinating and illuminating. Gilot and Picasso, who met when she was twenty-one and he was sixty-one, had two children together over the course of a relationship that spanned nearly ten years. As a side note, Gilot, an accomplished painter, later married Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine! What an interesting life she has led, and in this memoir, she speaks very frankly of what it was like to be by Picasso’s side during and after World War II. The book Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City 1952–1965 (Melissa Rachleff) helped me to create the gallery Jack Fitzgerald runs in New York (though the majority of these galleries were located downtown).
Now I’d like to emerge from these ruminations on the past and share a more personal note with you.
I never lose sight of how tremendously lucky I am to get to write novels for a living. It’s a remarkable privilege to be welcomed into your life for a brief time to tell you a story, and I appreciate the trust you place in me to do just that. I take my job very seriously, and I research historical events to the best of my ability, not just because I care about accuracy, but because the idea of turning real history into fiction fascinates me.
People often ask why I’m so drawn to writing about the past. My reasons are numerous, but perhaps the most important one is that if we don’t learn from history, we run the risk of repeating it. Too often in recent years, those of us who read frequently about World War II have seen shadows of that long-ago war in current events, and it’s difficult seeing versions of past horrors happening again. When I write my novels, I’m not explicitly trying to teach you a lesson. Rather, I’m hoping that you’re reminded of our place in the grand scheme of things—both in the events that have come before us, and in the events that are yet to come. I think that when we know more about the past, we are better prepared to face the future, whatever comes our way.
I also hope that when you read my books, you’re reminded of our incredible human capacity for love, resilience, and survival, even in the midst of terrible times. We all go through dark periods in our lives. We all know anguish, just as we all know joy. But I hope that in reading books like mine, you’re reminded that managing to pick ourselves up and put one foot in front of the other is always a victory—and that there is always light in the darkness, even if that spark is sometimes hard to see.
Finally, I am not only a writer, but also (like many of you) a passionate reader. That’s one of the reasons I’m so honored to be a host of Friends & Fiction, an online community for readers that I cofounded and run with fellow New York Times bestselling authors Patti Callahan Henry, Kristy Woodson Harvey, and Mary Kay Andrews. Each week, we interview authors on a live Wednesdaynight show, which has been such a joy. We talk about the authors’ books, but also about the world behind their writing: the obstacles they’ve faced, their fears, their joys, their lives. And on the Facebook page we run, tens of thousands of readers engage with each other and with us every day, talking about the books and authors they’re interested in. If you love to read, I hope you’ll join us; we’re on Facebook and YouTube, and you can learn more at FriendsandFiction.com. Friends & Fiction is, in my opinion, one of the friendliest corners of the internet, and we’d love to welcome you. I hope to see you there, and in the meantime, thanks so much for reading The Paris Daughter, and for trusting me to tell you a story that I hope moved you and made you think just a bit differently about the past—and about the world outside our doors.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The acknowledgments are always the last piece of a book I write, probably because they’re the hardest—harder than writing the novel itself! There are so, so, so many people who do so much to bring my books into the world, and every year I am paralyzed with fear that I’ll forget someone. So deep breath—here it goes!
As always, I am forever indebted to my agent extraordinaire, Holly Root; my incredible editor, Abby Zidle; and my superstar publicist, Kristin Dwyer of Leo PR. Heather Baror-Shapiro continues to be a miracle worker of foreign rights, and Dana Spector at CAA has been my wonderful longtime partner in the film/TV world. I’m so excited to have added two new rock stars to my team this year, too: Jessica Roth, my in-house publicist at Gallery Books and world-class connoisseur of delicious pies; and Jonathan Baruch of Rain Management, my film manager, who has an incredible ability to make me feel capable of things I wouldn’t have dreamed of earlier. And, of course, Jennifer Bergstrom remains not only the best publisher in the United States, but also inarguably the best person to drink champagne with. To all of you: I can never thank you enough for your friendship or your faith in me.