The Mademoiselle Alliance by Natasha Lester

New York Times bestselling author Natasha Lester joins Jane Healey to talk about her latest novel. The Mademoiselle Alliance tells the remarkable true story of Marie-Madeleine Méric, a glamorous Parisian mother who defied convention to become the leader of the largest spy network in Nazi-occupied France. From daring car rallies in Morocco to covert operations across Europe, she risked everything for freedom, resilience, and an unexpected love that bloomed in the shadows of war.

Transcript

Jane: 0:02

Welcome to Historical Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction novels. I'm your host Jane Healey, and in today's episode, I welcome New York Times bestselling author Natasha Lester from Australia. She got a bright and early this morning to join us and to discuss her latest novel. The Zel Alliance, which was, has been called a passionate fiery tribute to a historical woman. So extraordinary. She almost defies belief. Welcome, Natasha. Thank you again.

Natasha: 0:33

Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's so lovely to be here.

Jane: 0:36

I know. And congratulations. This just launched in the US yesterday. We were saying it. Thank you.

Natasha: 0:40

Yeah, that's very exciting. Very

Jane: 0:42

new and in Australia two weeks ago. I'm gonna do a quick bio about you and then we will jump into questions. Natasha Lester is the New York Times bestselling author of the Paris Seamstress, the Paris Orphan, the Paris se, and the Paris Secret, and a former marketing executive for L'Oreal. Her novels have won several awards, been international bestsellers, and are translated into 21 different languages and published around the world when she's not writing. She loves collecting vintage fashion, practicing the art of fashion, illustration, and traveling the world. Lester lives with her husband and three children in Perth Western Australia. Again, welcome. Thank you. So I wanna dive in. This is biographical fiction. I've gotta get it right in front of the camera here. It's a little and it's about the soori. It's based on the true story, inspired by the true story of the remarkable woman, Marie Mendel and Facade, the only female French resistance leader in World War ii. And in your author notes you say that she was a remarkable woman who lived a life of such scope. It took my breath away and you've never come across a more. Astonishing hero, which is high praise.'cause you've done a lot of work books about inspiring women. So talk about how you ultimately decided to, how you discovered her and decided to write a novel about her.

Natasha: 1:58

I really discovered her by accident. I've read a lot of nonfiction books about the second World War period because that's where my novels have largely been set. And I'd come across all of the male resistance leaders who are renowned for the period, people like Jean Mulan, and I think I'd come across Marie Madeleine's name in maybe one book, maybe two, but certainly no more than that, and certainly only once with any. Sort of additional information added to this mention of her name, which was only a sentence or two, and it made, I always say, there's some bit of magic in writing and there's like a part of your brain that is magnetically attracted to things that have potential. And that part of my brain lit up at this one or two very scant mentions of her. And it made me go there's two possible reasons for the her absence from the pages of all these nonfiction books. The first is that she wasn't very important and so she doesn't need to be mentioned in these books. On the second is she's one of these women who actually was totally remarkable, but somehow was left out of the pages of history. So I thought, I'm gonna do a bit of digging and. Cross my fingers and hope it's the latter. So I ordered her memoir that she wrote back in the 1960s and is out of print now. So I had to buy it from a secondhand book dealer in the States. And about two months later, this parcel arrived in the post, this very unpromising looking, tattered, battered xlib copy of this memoir. And I thought, gosh, I hope the contents are a bit more promising than the cover. And I started reading and I honestly could not believe what I was reading. She, the thing she did, I was thinking how has nobody written about her? And also, oh my gosh, I need to write this novel really fast because there's got to be some other historical novelist out there who is about to write this book as well. And I think the reason she was maybe left out of the pages of those nonfiction books is because during the war, Chand de Gaul created this companion ion, which was an honor. He bestowed upon one, the people he believed were the most instrumental in fighting for France's Freedom during the war, and he bestowed that honor. Upon 1038 people, only six of them were women, so he thought only six women. Contributed to finding for France's Freedom during the war, which is outrageous in and of itself, but more outrageous is that Marie Madeline Ard, who led the largest resistance network in France, was not one of those women and three of her male subordinates were on that list. So he believed that three people who reported to her who got their priorities from her were more important than she was. And so I think historians coming afterwards. Thought Shel de Gaul didn't think she was important, then why should we write about her? Yeah, so I'm really glad I found her.

Jane: 4:51

Yes, I know, me too. And I I love the novel and I'm fascinated with her story. It begins in Morocco where she's a young bride excited about living in exotic country. She's only 18 years old. And what, as I was like started reading about her and her younger years, I was thinking that like she's a character that's almost hard to imagine. She was a real person because she was like, not like brilliant and beautiful, but like talented and a polyglot and she was a race car driver. I was like, what is going on? So talk about not, we'll get into the resistance stuff as well, but talk about this remarkable person, that seems almost too good to be true.

Natasha: 5:30

I know, and I think it's actually really interesting to talk about her pre-war time because it shows you how she was actually able to become this resistance leader, leading men decades, her senior military men, et cetera. So she was actually, she was born in Mae, but she grew up in Shanghai. Because her father worked for a merchant marine service, and he was posted to Shanghai. This is around 19, she was born in 1911. So it was just after that in the early 1910s. And normally in that era, the wife and kids would stay behind in France and just the father would work in Shanghai because Shanghai then was seen to be uncivilized. But Marie Madeline's mother was a bit of an adventurous, I think. And so she took the three kids with her to Shanghai. And they grew up there and she didn't keep them locked away in the French concession of Shanghai, she let them roam the streets of Shanghai. So long as they're with their armor or their nanny, they could explore the city. And so Marie Madeline recounts to her first biographer, the one who was actually able to interview her when she was alive. This experience of just, wandering through Shanghai and standing on the banks of the harbor, looking at these junks and sand pans, weaving their way through the freighters and getting this sense of how connected the world was. And I think that's a really kind of foundational thing for her. But then her father sadly died when she was in her teens. The family went back to France and this whole time she's been playing the piano for eight hours every day training to be a concert pianist. Oh, I forgot

Jane: 7:01

about that. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Another skill. I know exactly.

Natasha: 7:05

So she gets accepted into this music conservatory in Paris. She's playing the piano, but I don't know. I feel like she found Bourgeois Paris a bit boring after Shanghai, and then she. Across a crowded room one night, sees this handsome military officer and falls instantly and impulsively in love with him. I'm sure she was in love with him, but I also feel like she was in love with the fact that he was about to be posted to Morocco and after Shanghai, Morocco seemed like a pretty exciting next phase of her life. So yes, at age 18 she marries him. They moved to Morocco. She starts learning Arabic when she gets there, which for a woman in the 1920s is pretty unusual and pretty extraordinary. She volunteers at a local women's clinic, so she helps the local women deliver their babies. She starts riding out on horseback with her husband because he was a military intelligence officer, so his job was to spy on the locals. But of course, he doesn't speak Arabic and she does, so she's the one who goes out there and helps translate for him, gets a bit of a taste for intelligence. Work there. Their marriage ends up not working out. She's very sociable. She has a lot of friends. She likes to go out and meet people. He likes to stay at home, so she goes back to France with their two kids. So a separated woman in the 1930s, that's scandalous and I feel like she might have almost gone. Okay, you gonna judge me anyway? So I'm gonna go out there and do all these other crazy things to really make you judge me. Absolutely she, so then she takes up rally car driving, which is big in the 1930s. These pan-European kind of car rallies in her little Citron. She gets pretty good at it. She places in a few rallies. She learns to fly airplanes and becomes a pilot. She's a journalist. She's a mother of two kids. She makes me feel like an underachiever, like I need to go and get a few more hobbies. But that's Marie Madeline.

Jane: 8:55

Before the war. And I was like, yeah or learn a few more languages apparently. Like just crazy. Yeah, and that you can tell like her, I think her life inter living internationally, growing up internationally, that it definitely shaped her. Perspective and also her sense of adventure, I think as well, it seems. Absolutely. I wanna talk about as a historical fiction writer, you have to love research and you clearly did extensive research for this novel. Both. I could see it in the writing and also in your notes. Talk about your research process for this novel and whether you came across anything surprising.

Natasha: 9:31

So my research process for the book was two pronged. One of those arms was sitting in archives trawling through a lot of French documents related to the war and to the alliance network. And the other one was on the ground research in France. I guess there was surprising things I discovered in both of those arms. So in the sort of dusty archive route. One of the key characters in the book is a man called Leon Fi, who is Marie Madeline's second in command, and he has a point of view perspective in part of the book.'cause I wanted to cover that moment after DJ when everyone's trying to stay alive and I had. Discovered that in the archives in Paris, his niece had written a set of journals about him and they held those journals. And so I was like, wow, that sounds fantastic. His niece knew him well, she's written all about him that's gonna really help me shape his character in the book. So I get to the archives, I've got the, excited research nerd hat on, and they show me these journals and they're. Four kind of dusty notebooks of a hundred pages each. Every single page and every single notebook has been covered with pen. So 400 pages of handwritten French. And I have terrible handwriting I will confess. But this woman's handwriting was the worst handwriting I have ever seen in my entire life. And not only that, she had this habit of like just scratching out. Big chunks of her writing and then squeezing in a little sentence in between the line above and the scratchings, or writing around the margins of the page and pointing with an arrow off to this sentence on the edge. And I was standing there about to cry because this what I thought was gonna be a treasure trove of information. I could barely read. So I had to work. I have a French tutor who I just work with naturally an hour every week just to keep my fluency up. We just talk to each other basically. And I said to her, can you help me decipher the handwriting so I can then translate it into English? So she did, but it was so slow. Like we. Got through maybe 10 pages a week in an hour. So of 400 pages, you can see how long it took me to get through. This was so worthwhile though'cause it really gave me a sense of that patriotism that military men had in that era that when they signed up to the military, they were happy to give their life for their country. I don't think that's a common sort of sentiment in, in contemporary life. So to get that sense of that was really important. So that was the archival surprise. And then in terms of going to France, I went and visited a lot of the places where Alliance had their headquarters, and then I ended up in the Plesser cemetery, which is where Marie Madeline for card is buried. And it's a really famous cemetery. People like Jim Morrison from The Doors are buried there. Edith Pi is buried there, so a lot of tourists go there. It has an information office and they have a map showing where the locations of the graves of the famous people who are buried at the cemetery. Do you think Marie Madeline is considered famous enough to be on this map of famous people? No, she is not. So I knew the kind of division her grave was located in and it was massive. So I walked up and down and eventually found it. It's a family tomb, so you can see the names of her mother and father on the tomb. You can also see the name of her second husband from after the war on the tomb. And then there's this blank space. And if you look really closely on this blank space, you can see that there were once letters engraved on the stone, but time and weather have so erased that engraving. You can no longer read that person's name and that person's name is Marie Madeleine for card. And it's time and weather have so eroded it away and it's like the universe was playing this like trick on me to really. A hammer home, how forgotten she has been by history that you can't even find a trace of her on her grave. So the kind of almost rage, that I felt in that moment. I was like, I've gotta take that home and pour that into the writing of this book.

Jane: 13:42

Wow. Yeah, I have been to that cemetery. I went with my daughter and my husband last fall and for, it's an astounding place. If you ever get a chance to go, it's like there's something you can definitely feel like the spirits in the air and the absolutely family plots are just unbelievable and, and that's shocking. I guess yet it is and yet it isn't because she's been left out of a lot of the history as well. But that's fascinating. I wanna talk about your traveling to France for this book.'cause you went not just to Paris, but to multiple locations. And I think it's, it gives you like this. When you're writing and researching, like the sensory aspect of it is so important. Talk about some of the places you saw and visited and how that shaped the story.

Natasha: 14:28

So another place I spent quite a bit of time in was Mae. And that she had a number of different headquarters in Mae. They moved a lot through that city, and I think there, the thing that was really important to me in writing the book was the contrast. So I don't know how many people watching have been to Mae, but the ocean there is. The most extraordinary blue color. And I'm from Western Australia. We have some of the best beaches in the world, so I have a pretty high bar when it comes to the color of the ocean. But this was phenomenal. And there's a path called the Cornish, which runs along the Mae Coastline, and one of their headquarters was a fruit and vegetable shop. In a little harbor just off the cornes. And so I was standing there with this beautiful kind of holiday blue ocean on one side of me and this kind of rundown, decrepit building on the other, which was once a fruit and vegetable shop behind which they were, had piles of clandestine intelligence material that the Nazis would've quite literally killed for this illegal radio that they weren't supposed to have. They're running the tap to hide the sound of the Morse key tapping, and they're in this very kind of. Secret tense, nervous environment. And then at the end of the day, they walk out and here is this gorgeous ocean right in front of them. And I thought, gosh, what must that have felt like? That contrast between the beauty and this kind of terror that they're embedded in every day of their life. But then I also thought, maybe that was what? Part of what kept them going and motivated them, the beauty of their country that they could see every day when they walked out of their headquarters. So that really helped me in building up a a layering of. How France was at the time, that it wasn't just this war torn country, but it had these very beautiful parts to it. And that's part and parcel of what everyone experienced. And the second was Exxon Provence. I spent a bit of time there too. Again, Marie Madeleine had. Another of her headquarters there, and it was where she was actually captured by the Nazis and put in a military barracks and imprisoned. So I went to visit the building. It still stands where she was imprisoned. And Exxon, Vermont has this beautiful touristic town. It's got gorgeous markets, gorgeous buildings. And then you stand in front of these barracks and you just feel. Something, crawl down your spine, like there is an evil there. And it's still embedded in that building, and I've never had such a visceral sense of that in my life. So again, to go there and feel that you can then layer that into the writing when you come back to sit down at your desk.

Jane: 17:07

Absolutely. And you definitely feel that in the writing. One of the things that I love author's notes. I'm such an author's note nerd and Oh, me too. Yeah. Love them. And yours were really good, really juicy. And so one of the things you mentioned was that mar when in your research, and I have come across this too, it, the facts of her story of her real life are contradictory sometimes. Like you'll read one primary source and then you'll read another one and be like wait a minute, those dates are off, or this and that. And when this, you, this was again, biographical fiction, it wasn't so you didn't change her name, so you had, couldn't take certain liberties. So how did you balance, like figuring out what. Was fact facts and what you needed to kind of nuance for the narrative. Like how did you, how do you strike that balance between historical fact and writing fiction? This was obviously fiction, but very much based in truth.

Natasha: 18:00

Yeah, it's a really hard line and for me, if I'm going to use a character's actual name from life, then I feel an obligation to stick as closely to the facts as I can. In Marie Madeline's own memoir, she uses some incorrect names for places and people. And I thought I could change that. Because I know the correct name of this person. It's been referenced somewhere else. But I tended to use her memoir as my primary source because that was what she wrote. So if she said something, I tended to run with that. The big challenge for me was this resistance network had 3000 people in it. So you can't have 3000 characters in a novel because nobody is gonna be able to keep up with that. They all had real names and code names, so that's 6,000 names alone you're grappling with before you even start writing. So I had this very complex system of index cards to try to keep track of everybody and you have to end up creating a composite character out of about. Three or four different real people, simply because you want the reader to be able to keep in their head the set of characters you're writing about. And you can't if you include everybody. So I hate to raise anybody from the historical narrative because I've seen how often it happens for women. But to create a readable story, you have to do that from time to time. And also, they moved location, moved headquarters so many times over the course of the war. Probably about 60 times and you can't have 60 different headquarters again, the reader's gonna be like, oh, where are we in France Now we've moved again. And the other thing about those agents these 6,000 kind of names is almost every second man's name was Onri or Jacque. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I cannot have, a thousand honorees in my story because are we talking about honor one or two or three or four? So again, I had to change a few names just to m make readers be able to, cope with the scope of the people and places that this network encompassed over the course of the war.

Jane: 20:03

Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. I, yeah I read that and I laughed. Ri or Philippe or Jean, right? There's, oh, and George, I was like, oh gosh. She

Natasha: 20:13

goes to this party at the start and her brother-in-law is George, and that's where she meets George Luau, who becomes the leader of Alliance initially. And there's. Two Georgias right there. And I'm like no. Can you have another name, please? I know. Just

Jane: 20:26

keeping them in your head. Nevermind. Like for the reader. Yeah. So true. Another thing from your authors note I thought was so interesting and I think sometimes like things happen when you're writing a, working on a book that almost feel like serendipitous or meant to be and. You were talking about how you had to get over your hero worship of Marie Madeleine, so you could write about her as a character and as a real person. And then you discovered that you share this personal connection with her and that helped you, her, helped you view her in a different light. And I was like, that is, it was almost like one of those like hairs in the back of your neck, moments. So will you share that?

Natasha: 21:05

Please. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it was really uncanny. And again, I do believe there is this kind of magic in writing and things come to you when then they need to come to you to help you in your writing. Marie Madeline Folkard had a hip dysplasia, which I don't know, used to be called Clicky hips many years ago. Some people might not by that name. So it's a genetic condition where you are. Femur isn't located properly into your hip socket and it's very loose and causes you a lot of pain and difficulty walking from time to time. And her daughter was also born with the same condition'cause it's genetic. So my own daughter was born with hip dysplasia too. And when she was born with it, every doctor said to me, who in your family's got it? Because it's a genetic condition. I said, oh, nobody's got it. But I've got perfect hips. Like I don't know where it came from. She's obviously an anomaly. And so my daughter spent. Years in these sort of full body casts that went from her chest down to the ends of her toes, trying to get her hips to sit in the right place and not be dislocated so she could walk. And she had a lot of operations and Marie Madeline's daughter was in that similar full body cast and had the exact same operation that my daughter had. And so with this kind of hero worship that I had of Marie Madeline in this first draft. She was just too perfect and too much of a hero. And you need to be able to relate to her in all facets of her as a woman, not just as this heroic person. And so one of the ways I tried to get in was through her daughter and this connection that we shared because at one point. Her daughter's in a hospital having this operation is in this cast is immobile for three months and Marie Madeline moves her headquarters so she can be by her daughter's bedside through that really traumatic and difficult recovery experience. And but I've been, Marie Madeline, I've sat by my daughter's bed while she's had this operation and been in this cast, so maybe I can get into her that way. And it worked to a point, but still I felt that part of her character was missing. And then at the same time, I was writing the book in my late forties, I was diagnosed very surprisingly with osteoporosis. And as part of that diagnosis, they X-ray your whole spine and your hips because you can carry these fractures that you dunno about and they wanna make sure you don't have those. So I went along to see my endocrinologist after those x-rays were taken. She said to me, oh, good news. You don't have any of those fractures, but the bad news is your hip dysplasia is looking really bad. And I said, what? And she said, your hip dysplasias looking really bad. And I said, I don't have hip dysplasia. She said, yes, you do, and it's really bad. Surely you must be in pain. And I was like, oh yes, I've been in. Bad hip pain. I walk with a limp. I've had trouble with my hips for years, and I just would go to the physio every two to four weeks to get my muscles worked on. Had a bit of an adjustment that would get me through for another couple of weeks, and then I'd be back there, and so it all made sense. But more than that, suddenly I could get inside Marie Madeline's body because the pain she felt. Regularly throughout the war when she was trying to do everything was the same pain that I had felt that limp she was trying to hide was the same one I'd been trying to hide for years so I could write her from the inside out. So suddenly I had no trouble at all accessing her and getting her personality and the kind of woman she was onto the page. Very bizarre circumstance of timing, but immensely helpful to me as a writer in the end.

Jane: 24:28

Yeah, it almost gives me chills. What are the odds of that? Really, I know. It's unbelievable. So thank you for sharing that. Another thing I was reading when I was reading the book is it has all the elements of this kind of sweeping Hollywood movie and has there been any interest.

Natasha: 24:46

Not yet. I feel like this is the most filmable of all of my books because I've tended to write dual narratives in the past, and those are really hard to film, movie makers and streaming. Providers don't love those dual contemporary historical narratives, whereas this is pretty much one straight story. Taking a story from Morocco to the war. She's absolutely a heroine for our times. The thing that she taught me when I was writing this book was that. So often in difficult times, like we're all in right now, particularly for you guys in North America, we're told to hope for a better future. But imagine Marie Madeline had have just sat around and hoped for a better future, nothing would've changed and the war would've dragged on for years longer. She took action for the better future that she wanted, and she was just an ordinary woman. She had no training in military intelligence, no training in espionage. She was just like you and I and look at what a difference she made. So like I feel like that is the perfect message for a movie right now. How much difference one ordinary woman can make in the world if she decides to take action for that better future that she wants to achieve.

Jane: 25:56

I, yeah, I totally agree. And one thing when I read these World War II books that I you always have to remind yourself is they didn't know if this was gonna end well. Nobody knew, and they were risking their lives literally every day, and nobody knew what was gonna happen or if it was if the end of the story was gonna be a good one. So it's, the. The bravery and the risk and sacrifice is just, it's astonishing. I wanna ask, I have some writing questions that I ask all authors who come on and and then I will take some questions from the audience. You can leave them in the chat or the q and a if you have questions from Natasha. I see a couple there. What is your writing process like, your overall writing process? I always ask, are you a plotter? Do you write by the seat of your pants? Is it somewhere in between? I'm always fascinated because everyone's different.

Natasha: 26:45

Yeah, I am not a plotter, which really annoys me because I'm a very organized person in every area of my life. I love a list. So when I began writing, I thought, oh I'm gonna plan my whole book up front. I'm gonna have a chapter by chapter outline. I'm gonna know what I'm doing. And I thought that was how you wrote a book. I thought that was what writers did, and I just could not make that happen. So for me, it's all about diving into. A moment that I feel really connected to be able to write about. So for example, on this one, one of the first scenes I actually wrote was Marie Madeline Smuggles herself from France to Spain in a mailbag. And just very quickly so her headquarters get raided, the Nazis take her radios and her money. And without her radio, she can't get in touch with MI six and pass on her information. So she needs to somehow get in touch with MI six to say, send me more radios and more money. And she can't just pick up the phone and call'em because she's in occupied France. So she comes up with this elaborate plan to get herself smuggled in a diplomatic mail bag that one of her agents has the job of curing between the. French Embassy in Spain and the Vichy French government headquarters in France. The mal bag's four feet by two feet. She's five foot seven, and she can't get herself in the bag, and her agent remembers seeing a. Contortionist at a circus when he was a kid, fold himself into a mailbag of a similar size. And obviously Marie Madeline is not a contortionist, but she and she's got this like hip dysplasia, like really sore hip. So she somehow manages to mimic this position and gets herself into the bag, but it won't seal. They've got a half an inch of space. And so she says I'm just gonna have to take off my clothes. So she's naked in this. Bag like completely doubled over in absolute agony from her hip. And she thinks she's gonna have to be in the bag for two hours because it's winter. You can't drive over the Pyrenees from France to Spain. The car's got to go onto the flatbed of a train, and that's a two hour train journey through the tunnel. So she's okay, 120 minutes, I can do that. Anyway, they get to the train station. She's on the backseat of the car in the mailbag. The agent pulls in the station, master greets him and says, oh, bad news. The train came early today. It's already gone. You've gotta wait for the next train. And the agent's got his heart in his mouth as he asks. When is the next train coming and the station master says not for eight hours. And it's not like Marie Madeline can just leap out of the bag and say, oh, I just need to stretch my legs. Because the station master is going to tell the Nazis that a woman is trying to smuggle herself across the border. So she's gotta stay in the bag for the eight hours in the car, waiting for the train, and then the two hour train journey, 10 hours in a mailbag. No food, no water, freezing cold. It's winter. She somehow manages to come out of that alive, which is a testament to the kind of woman she is. But that was one of the first scenes I wrote because that scene felt fictional to me. It's like, how could anyone do that? So it's okay, I can write that because it feels fictional and I'm a fiction writer, so I can dive into the drama and the, spence and the will she make it kind of energy of that scene. And that doesn't happen until 1941 and obviously there's a fair bit of the book that happens before that, but I need to start where the energy is. And so I'll write scenes out of order in that way, following the energy until I have enough of those that I feel like I can now. Connect those scenes and write the narrative from start to finish. So it's a bit unorthodox, but it seems to work

Jane: 30:31

so interesting. There's an, that scene, that whole episode is unbelievable. And also there's you write a prologue scene where there's a prison break that's also like stranger than fiction. She was yeah, she was a force.

Natasha: 30:44

Absolutely. And I always say to everybody when I'm doing these events. All the parts that you think I've made up, I can guarantee I have not made up. She did all of those completely unbelievable things.

Jane: 30:57

Amazing. You've written several historical fiction novels. What is the best advice you can give to aspiring writers? About writing and about getting published. So it's a two part question.

Natasha: 31:08

Yep. Look, I, and that's pretty boring writing advice, I think, but it's just to read widely. I feel as if often, particularly these days, people aren't reading books as much and even if that's listening to an audio book that is still reading, but just accessing lots of different kinds of stories and lots of different voices from lots of different backgrounds. Because if you. Don't read. Part of writing is this facility with language and an inherent, innate understanding of how story works, and you can only get those two things from reading lots of stories and having this bank of stories inside you. That you unconsciously draw on in your own writing. So for me it's not just writing historical fiction. It's, memoir and it's nonfiction and it's dystopias and romance and everything because all of those elements are in every book that I write, even though you would never say it's a romance novel or a dystopia, but actually. Elements of those kinds of books are in every single book. So you've gotta read widely to be able to do that. And in terms of the other part of your question, it's this idea of just endurability and you just have to keep going. Every writer has moments in their career where things aren't going swimmingly and really well. You have to stick the course. If you truly love writing, you don't truly love writing, then of course, you know that's a different story. But if you truly love it, you've gotta be there for the ups and the downs. You can't walk away from it in the downs because then you never know when the luck is just around the corner. And if you walk away, you might miss that moment that was meant to be yours. So to just remember that every writer has struggled. It's a part of writing. Celebrate the amazing moments as much as you can because when they come they're worth celebrating because of all the moments that led up to that.

Jane: 33:00

Oh, all excellent advice. I completely agree. Are you ready to share what you're working on next, or is that still under wraps? No, I can

Natasha: 33:07

share. So I have just recently submitted, in fact a book to my publisher which is called The Chateau on Sunset, and it's a re-imagining of Jane Air Set at Los Angeles, infamous Chateau Marmont in the 1950s and 1960s.

Jane: 33:24

Oh, that's very cool. I think I saw that on your Instagram or something like that recently or somewhere. Yeah. That's exciting. Yeah,

Natasha: 33:31

it is. It was lots of fun to write. I loved it. Yeah.

Jane: 33:33

Yeah. And a total departure from this, which is kind different thing. Yeah, A little break. Yeah.

Natasha: 33:38

Yeah. I needed that. This was a very intense emotional story. So I needed something very different. Yeah,

Jane: 33:44

absolutely. And how can I'm gonna one more question from me and then I'm gonna take some questions from the audience, I see a few. How can readers best stay in touch with you? What's the best way for them to stay in touch? I.

Natasha: 33:55

Best way to stay in touch is I'm, I love hanging out on Instagram. So Natasha Lester, author on Instagram. I also have a substack called Bou, B-I-J-O-U-X, and I write weekly newsletter for subscribers. So that's the best way to stay in touch because you all will always get that in your inbox. Whereas obviously Instagram, the algorithm can be a little bit temperamental from time to time. So come and subscribe to my newsletter and join in a really fun community of book lovers There.

Jane: 34:21

Oh, excellent. Okay. Questions from the audience. What do you enjoy writing more? Julie Brinkley asks Dialogue or setting slash background.

Natasha: 34:30

I love both. I always say that I love a good simile or a good metaphor, or a really luscious piece of prose. I'm not a spare paired back kind of writer. So setting background is where you can really let fly with all of that kind of writing, and I love to write like that. Building up a picture of, Masay when Marie Madeline returns there for the first time during the war. And all these kind of memories come back to her. I love writing that kind of scene. But then I love a bit of boundary kind of dialogue as well. You can do so much there with character development. So I don't know that I could choose one out of the two of those. I think I, I. Have a lot of fun writing both of them. I think maybe just generally, loving writing, you love all parts of it. The only part of writing I don't love is the first draft. I hate writing the first draft. Yeah.

Jane: 35:21

Oh, preach. Exactly. Yeah. Other questions? Let's see. And some lovely comments here too. After writing so many dual timelines, this is from Jaza Wade. Hey Jacoba so many dual timelines, which are brilliant. Did you struggle at all with the Lin, with this li more linear structure? And did you learn anything specific that will influence your writing process going forward? Excellent question. I.

Natasha: 35:44

Yeah, that is a good question. Yeah, so I was a probably a little bit too cocky going into this book, and I thought it was going to be easy because Marie Madeline's life already existed and I was writing a novel about her life, so I didn't have to invent a plot. The plot was already there for me, so I thought, oh, how hard can this be? But of course it's the scope of this that made it so incredibly challenging. Just simply keeping track of all those different code names in and of itself was exceptionally difficult. It was much harder for me than writing a dual timeline actually, which, and I was surprised by that because I thought it would be easier, and maybe it's you do start every book thinking, oh, I've picked a. An easier idea this time. That's how you delude yourself into writing another book in, in a way. But no, it wasn't easy. And a part of that was, there was so much I could have put into the book. It could have been 200,000 words and that's far too long. So despite it being linear, it was working out okay, what are the most important parts of her life to include that the reader will be most interested in. So I learned to. My brilliant editor at Valentine, Hilary Chapman really taught me how to pair back, and that's a really essential skill, I think.

Jane: 37:02

Oh, absolutely. There's a couple questions about her family and one one from Jan and Kora says, for, so had five children. I read in an article two with her husband, one with Leon and one with her second husband. Is that all correct?

Natasha: 37:16

Yeah. So she had two prior to the war, one during the war, and two after the war.

Jane: 37:20

Okay. And then, oh, Audrey Teman asked, were you able to locate her daughter? Were you able to talk to any relatives? A couple people have had that question.

Natasha: 37:29

So I've actually recently been in contact with her godson, which has been a really wonderful experience. So he reached out to me. And during the war, Marie Madeline's MI six commander liaison was a man called Kenneth Cohen. And obviously they became quite close during the war because you are going through these really. Difficult heartbreaking experiences together. So after the war, he had a son and he named Marie Madeline as his son's godmother. So obviously his, so his name's Colin and he's now I think late seventies. And he obviously knew Marie Madeline and met her. So I was nervous when he reached out to email me, I was thinking, oh gosh, what if he judges me for the way I've written her? But he was so lovely and and I spoke to him about her grave and he asked when he sent him the photographs of her grave and he wondered whether Penelope, her surviving daughter, knew about the state of her grave. So I think he was gonna pass those photos on and see whether. Anything could be done about that, which was really a lovely kind of exchange to have. So yeah, so that's been really great. I've, it's been wonderful to speak to him and, hear a little bit from him about her and her time during the war.

Jane: 38:37

So interesting. So Great. Oh, one more question Denise on Tato. Hello Denise. What are you reading right now and do you re and or do you recommend a book you've read recently?

Natasha: 38:49

So I'm actually reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams, which is her memoir of her time spent at Meta or Facebook. Oh and oh it is. Eye opening beyond belief? No. I've never been a big fan of the kind of person that maybe Mark Zuckerberg is, but if you read this book, you will be horrified beyond belief. So I recommend reading it. I find it very morally difficult to go back and use Meta Facebook, Instagram after reading it. I'm only about three quarters of the way through, so I've just got to the point where Facebook really, it gets Trump elected for the first time back in 2016. So I've still got quite a few years to go and I'm wondering, wow how much worse can things get when things are already so bad? Up to this point, it's really, I would absolutely recommend it to anyone, even if you have no real interest in social media to understand what kind of people are so influential in the world today and how influential they are. It's a very important read.

Jane: 39:48

I just downloaded that on Audible. And I'm actually reading, speaking of Australia, I'm on, I'm also listening on Audible here One Moment by Leon Mar Maria. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good audio book. It's like totally different than what I usually read, but it's it's a quick one. It's good for like my walks with the dog and stuff like that.

Natasha: 40:06

Yeah. She's one of Australia's most famous literary exports. We,

Jane: 40:11

what's the title? What's the title of the, of the Facebook book again, is it hairless people? Hairless people. That's right. Okay. This was lovely Natasha. Thank you so much for coming on. That's a wrap for tonight. I wish you all the best. We're gonna hold up the cover again'cause it's a super cool cover. This is my arc, so it's not quite the exact cover, but mad Mazel Alliance just came out in the US yesterday. I wish you so much success with it. Next up is Lauren Willig on April 22nd for historical happy hour. The registration is up on the website and and yes, best of luck. Thank you everyone for coming on tonight. This has been terrific. Don't forget to follow me on on my podcast or subscribe to the YouTube channel to get all the updates or my mail mailing list. You'll get all the invitations. So thank you again, Natasha. Have a great day. Actually, I keep forgetting you're in the, it's in the morning over there. Morning coffee. Thanks for getting up.

Natasha: 41:03

Oh, thank you so much, Jane. It's so lovely and thank you so much to everyone for coming along and listening to us chat for the last 40 minutes or so. It's been so much fun.

Jane: 41:12

So much fun. Thanks again. Take care and good luck with everything. Bye.