(Writing Fiction Based On Your Life: A Chat With Jessica Berg)

In this episode of “Writer’s Digest Presents,” editor Michael Woodson sits down with Robert to discuss his new book American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives (on sale today), how he infuses literary sensibilities to his historical nonfiction, and more.

About the Author

Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist investigating marginalized groups and a scholar excavating forgotten histories. A National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year and recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, his debut book Tinderbox won seven awards, including the Edgar Award, and his reporting has appeared in Slate, Commonweal, and River Teeth, among others. Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and is pursuing a PhD at Tulane University as a Mellon Fellow. He lives with his husband on the gayest street in New Orleans.

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From the Episode

On Choosing What to Write About: “It’s a lot like falling in love, but from a horrific standpoint, because you’re dealing with history. It’s typically something that engages me intellectually while simultaneously taking this side door into my heart in a way where I can’t stop obsessing about it.“

“I have this problem that I’ve had since I was very little where I want to know the story that others don’t want me to know. That’s the juicy stuff! That’s the gay gossip!”

On Incorporating Fiction Craft Practices In Literary Nonfiction: “I love nonfiction that can employ literary and aesthetic sensibilities, where they have respect for the line, for the musicality of language, where they have a respect for and an understanding of mood and atmosphere, which is very difficult to communicate to an academic historian, but I think it matters. I also love plotting, set-up and pay-off, introducing threads and paying them off later. And I like the way that literature allows for revelation—where there’s just moments where you feel like you’re entire body’s lit up.”

Listen To The Episode

The post Writing Literary Nonfiction With Robert Fieseler appeared first on Writer's Digest.

In this interview, Simon discusses the individuals at the heart of his new true crime book, A Deafening Silence: Forgotten British Murders, his advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Simon Farquhar
Book title: A Deafening Silence: Forgotten British Murders
Publisher: The History Press
Release date: June 10, 2025
Genre/category: True Crime/ History/ Social History
Previous titles: A Dangerous Place: The Story of the Railway Murders; A Desperate Business: The Murder of Muriel McKay; Rainbow Kiss: A Play
Elevator pitch: In a decade of researching and writing about crime, Simon Farquhar has met many of those professionally or personally affected by it. They all carry with them stories that the rest of the world has forgotten, but which to them remain unforgettable. Now, five of these stories are told, in full, for the first time.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I’d always had a fascination with crime, but my writing career was mostly in drama until about 10 years ago. My late father was a police officer, a very good one, and after he died, I wrote a book about his last case, which was a famous serial killer hunt of the 1980s. It started from there.

What interests me particularly about crime is the window onto social history that it gives us. I always have been struck over the years by how much of a crime story goes unexplored, specifically the lasting dreadful legacy not only for those directly affected by a tragedy but those indirectly affected—a person’s friends, lovers, family, but also those involved on a professional level. They are human beings too, and they have to endure a lot in the course of their work.

I have met many people involved in crime, police officers, lawyers, and so on. And over the years you gather a lot of stories from them, stories of cases that have left a mark on them. And some of them have in turn have left their mark on me.

So, I decided to do a book collecting five of those stories. None of them had ever been told in any depth before. I wanted to talk to every living soul connected with each case. The criteria for them going into the book was partly an emotional one—they are the stories that have made the deepest impression on me—but also, I had to justify retelling them. It wasn’t just about remembering and commemorating the victims. The stories each tell us something about the world that we live in—how it has changed or how it still needs to change.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

Originally this book was going to be just the first story, A Tragedy in Fairyland, a story that has haunted me for nearly a decade. I had a book commissioned about it back in 2017, and did a huge amount of research, but I had to shelve it for two reasons.

One was that the story would not have filled a whole book, and, as a standalone book it would have needed to generate a good deal of publicity, which would have been distressing for the surviving relatives. But I felt that by featuring it within a book and insisting on no publicity for that specific story, I could finally set it down for history.

Apart from that, the format of the book didn’t really change. The other four stories were selected very easily. I then pitched it to my publisher, and it was green-lit.

But although the idea didn’t change, I didn’t predict how the book would eventually turn out. The last story in the book, Vicious Circle, is an incredible case, set against the backdrop of the music scene of the early 1970s, with connections to David Bowie, bizarrely. I’d carried this story around with me for years, unable to find a home for it until now, but when the research got underway one of my interviewees presented me with a remarkable archive of letters, diaries, photographs, the inside track. It was beyond my wildest dreams and meant that I could get genuine insight into the minds of the family involved and how such a bizarre crime could have occurred. (Honestly, you will be amazed.)

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Working with the History Press is always a very civilized affair, and there were no problems in that regard. The cover photograph was spotted by my commissioning editor, Mark, and I had an idea of what I wanted for the back and was very pleased with how it turned out. I knew I wanted an image of winter.

It’s interesting how such seemingly insignificant things matter so much. When it came to the photographs inside, there was one for one of the victims, and the caption was to be her name and then, in brackets, where the picture was sourced from, and I remember saying, “Can we put them on separate lines?” It seems trivial but it just looked so much more respectful. Similarly, I remember adding the victims’ dates at the top of each chapter, and requesting that it should be the full years, e.g. “1955-1970” rather than “1955-70”, which looked somehow too casual. You wouldn’t present them like that on a gravestone.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

The biggest surprises are when unexpected and sometimes seemingly slight elements become the most powerful moments. Similarly, you can craft some very beautiful prose, but the simplest and least-dressed sentence can be the one that moves you the most.

I think also, I was surprised at which chapter that seemed to get the most reaction. It was “High Windows,” the one I initially had the least information on. When I traced the family of the victim, they were very resistant to the idea of the book at first. But over time they came to trust me, and their contribution was magnificent. They saw a way of remembering their loved one, and their reaction when they read what I had done was a huge relief. I’m very proud of that chapter. When you are telling stories like this, you must respect and honor those people. It is their tragedy, not yours, however much you are affected by it, and they are putting a lot of trust in you. You have to make clear that you are telling the story, not their story, though.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope they will find something different to a lot of other true crime books, in that the stories aren’t just “this happened, the person was caught, they went to jail”. I wanted to know who these victims were as people, not just define them by their deaths. I also wanted to know what happens when the media moves on, after the sentence is passed. How do those left behind rebuild their lives? What happens to a murderer when they get out of jail? Are there any stories of reform? That’s something that did stun me; a couple of the stories of where these people are now.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Tell your story your way. Others will tell it differently, but trust the direction your mind is pointing you in. I always put myself into the story, and say, “This is the journey that I’ve been on.” Often quite literally—I’ll start with me standing at the place where some dreadful event happened. But even if you don’t put yourself within the narrative, it’s your own bias, your own sensitivities and reactions, that lift this from reporting into storytelling. Stories are events presented meaningfully rather than just informatively.

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(6 Research Tips for Writing Nonfiction.)

I learned this recently as I waded through my boxes of notebooks, interviews and research that I have done in the city’s ancient archives and museums over the past decades.

Even since I first stepped off the train in Bologna in 1988, and then descended through its famed medieval porticos like a beguiled flaneur, I knew I would one day write a cultural history of this northern Italian city. In the last two years, I have finally sat down to write that long overdue book.

Bologna is the one city I have always called home over the past three decades, even when I lived elsewhere.

And yet, as my 91-year-old mother recently asked me as I visited her in Cochise County, on the Arizona-Mexico border, in a time of so many crises in our country, how on earth can I be working on a book now about medieval towers or the genius of 17th century Baroque painter Elisabetta Sirani—among other historical gems in a place art critique John Berger called the “improbable city.”  

My mother, a coal miner’s daughter, whose father took part in the bitter coal wars for union recognition and civil rights, is not alone in her question. I receive nonstop emails and texts from other writer friends, historians, archaeologists, and artists, all consumed and their projects derailed by the daily exigencies of dealing with random budget cuts and job losses, attacks on academic freedom, endless wars, and the denial of due process guaranteed in our constitution for all residents in our country. 

Perhaps Bologna is best known for its gastronomic wonders, its UNESCO heritage recognition, or the 1,000-year-old seat of the oldest university in the West—the original alma mater, which shaped Dante, Petrarca, Copernicus, Lavinia Fontana, Mozart, and Umberto Eco, among so many others, including my wife, in its great halls. One of my journalism exemplars, Margaret Fuller, reminded Americans in her correspondence in 1847 of Bologna’s fame as the “paradise of women,” pointing out the city’s tradition of championing women painters, writers, scientists, and thinkers as the “soul of society.”

But John Adams, who I chronicled in one of my past books on his attacks on journalism and his role in persecuting critics with the Alien and Sedition Acts, now dictates my Bologna state of mind. The Aurora newspaper in Philadelphia had accused Adams in 1798 of realigning with “a despotic rather than a republican state,” and serving the financial interests of a small group of wealthy merchants.

Click to continue.

In London, frantically writing A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America in 1787, Adams sought to lay out why Americans were adamant about choosing a three-branch form of government, which ensured the checks and balances missing in European monarchies.

Adams highlighted Bologna for two reasons. First, he admired the city for abolishing slavery in 1256, as proscribed in the cherished document Liber Paradisus (“The Book of Paradise”). Secondly, Adams encouraged all young Americans to learn the Italian language (as he did), in order to master the arts, science, and literature in the country, including its history. In Bologna, specifically, he spent reams of pages detailing the machinations of warring factions in the medieval period, and their persecution of enemies, retribution and vengeance between opposing sides, and the tragedy of “streets that ran with human blood,” despite the city’s extraordinary role as the European center of education and rationalism in the medieval period. 

Adams admonished his readers, and all Americans, to never forget Bologna’s “final catastrophe of all such governments, the establishment of absolute power in a single man.”

Adams’ concerns, of course, echoed his earlier writings, in his Thoughts on Government in 1776. Declaring that the judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, Adams concluded “the dignity and stability of government in all its branches, the morals of the people, and every blessing of society depend so much upon an upright and skillful administration of justice.”

Bologna had not cornered the market on submitting to the authoritarianism of a single man, of course. But the medieval city, among other cities in Italy and Europe, Adams told his readers, was full of “excellent warning for the people of America.”

That perhaps is now the best reason to write a book on Bologna, and heed Adams’ message in defense of the American constitution, and the absolute power of a single man. 

The post History Prompts: How Can I Write a Book on Medieval Bologna When Our Country Is Coming Undone? appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(How Poetry Can Animate Narrative Nonfiction.)

I believe that outlines and over-planning stifle creativity. It hems in a writer and does not allow for spontaneity and discovery, which is essential when researching and writing a narrative nonfiction book. This process allows for a continued questioning of source material, never allowing oneself to become too complacent with an existing dominant narrative. I believe that this methodology also keeps a writer closer to the reader experience. I allowed Rose’s story to unfold before me, just like a reader discovers a story through reading a book.

I did not always work like this. In fact, as an overachieving Taiwanese American with a “Tiger Mom,” trained as a classical cellist at Juilliard, and a graduate of Harvard College, I was accustomed to having my life planned out to the minute detail. It had led to success on paper, so why change it?

In my mid-20s, however, I left my first career in the fashion industry where I was a merchandiser for brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, J. Crew, and Calvin Klein. I had believed that my whole educational path up to that point led to my job in fashion, but I was now truly at a loss. I was creatively unsatisfied and stressed out. When I looked around my apartment, I realized it was full of books on art, architecture, and history, and I realized I had strayed far from my passions.

I decided to rethink everything I knew in the hopes of finding my way back. I backpacked around the world without a set itinerary and I went back to school at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). There, I met a professor and mentor who basically threw me into a washing machine and made me question how I had been approaching work and problem solving.

Architectural pedagogy is based on the idea that work is constantly iterative. It is through feedback, repeated revisions, and small evolutions that progress is made. Sometimes, you just need to start putting pen to paper and allow something to reveal itself to you, no matter how unformed. You can’t be too afraid to begin building. It can be during the most challenging moments that an epiphany comes—struggle is part of the creative process. You work, rework, and shift things until your project is ready, with nothing ever fully set in stone. I have now been a professor in the architecture department at Columbia University GSAPP for over 10 years, teaching the same studio class that radically changed how I work.

Of course, it is not possible to go into a project as large as a narrative nonfiction book with no plan whatsoever. You must allow for an organizing principle. For The Art Spy, it was the concept of time. I wrote the first draft of the manuscript chronologically, apart from one chapter which I was inspired to write while visiting a location for research. I let the exact timeframe of the book remain loose, to be determined by the events in Rose’s life and where it felt the story should organically start and end.

Click to continue.

From the beginning, I knew that I wanted the book to take place over the course of WWII—that it would not be a standard biography going chronologically from birth to death. I also wanted to have two concurrent storylines—Rose’s timeline and that of Alexandre Rosenberg, a Free French soldier whose father was the exclusive art dealer to Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Léger. Rose and Alexandre’s stories skirt by each other throughout the war and finally intersect in a fantastic way at the end of the book.

I did not know if there would be enough material to carry both Rose Valland’s and Alexandre Rosenberg’s storylines throughout the whole book. But I began to write as if I did, building their stories page by page. I knew that if I hit a roadblock, I might need to throw out the work I did and I accepted that from the beginning.

I initially imagined the book might stretch in time from 1939 to 1945, which would include the German invasion of France, Rose’s work undercover as a spy in the Jeu de Paume museum—which the Nazis had taken over to loot Jewish-owned art collections en masse—and her time in Germany and Austria as a “Monuments Woman” restituting looted artwork. I knew there were holes in her story that I would have to address but I tabled them until I came to that point in her timeline, while keeping a lookout for missing material.

I found my first smoking gun in an archive in Grenoble. A first-person account of Rose’s escape from Paris, cut from her memoir, had been reproduced in an unpublished book and the manuscript was sitting in a museum archive, uninventoried. This allowed me to begin Rose’s story the summer of 1939, before WWII breaks out.

Rose also claimed to have seen the Nazis burning over 500 paintings in the Tuileries Garden in 1943 but her account had been questioned beginning in the 1960s, protested initially by the very Germans who perpetrated the horror. Since I wanted to write the book from Rose’s point of view without including any additional clarifying commentary in the text, I knew I would have to address this issue if I did not find material to prove she had been correct.

A little over a year into my research, I was trying to organize the nearly 10,000 pages of documents I had photographed from the French Diplomatic Archives, which contained all the papers Rose Valland left behind in her office when she died. One morning, I came across numerous handwritten, notarized documents in the back of one of the boxes. I recognized the names of the signees—they were the guards at the Jeu de Paume during WWII. I glanced at the words, translating the handwriting as best as I could, and immediately showed them to my French husband when he woke up. “Are these what I think they are??” I asked him excitedly.

Indeed, they were the signed, notarized testimonials of the events in the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume over two fateful days in July 1943, when the Nazis burned over 500 modern paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Dali, and others. Four guards had given their account for posterity, but they had been forgotten in the intervening years. 

Writing sans outline is not for every book or for every writer. However, the concept of remaining nimble and adaptable, to allow yourself the opportunity to question existing narratives and to make new discoveries, and to give your project room to breathe to find exactly the right form to tell your story, is applicable for any creative project.

Check out Michelle Young’s The Art Spy here:

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The post How I Wrote My Book Without an Outline: Allowing for Spontaneity and Discovery in Narrative Nonfiction Writing appeared first on Writer's Digest.

In this interview, Dane discusses the process of writing about the fascinating and misunderstood Wild West era of history with his new book, Queen of All Mayhem, the importance of the publishing team behind any given book, and more.

Name: Dane Huckelbridge
Literary agent: Renee Zuckerbrot
Book title: Queen of All Mayhem
Publisher: William Morrow/HarperCollins
Release date: May 13, 2025
Genre/category: History/Biography
Previous titles: Castle of Water, No Beast So Fierce, The United States of Beer, Bourbon: A History of the American Spirit
Elevator pitch: A spirited recounting of the life of Belle Starr, a female outlaw who served as a Civil War spy, befriended infamous gunslingers like Cole Younger and Jesse James, and eventually became the full-fledged leader of a criminal gang while living among the Cherokee.

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What prompted you to write this book?

When I was growing up, there was a piece of old family lore that we were somehow related to Belle Starr. Because of that, she was always a person of interest for me, although I confess, I didn’t know that much about her until I began digging and doing the research. And as it turned out, she had an even more action-packed and scandalous life than I imagined! I’ve always been drawn to stories of historical underdogs and social outsiders, especially those who defied the norms of their place and time to forge their own paths, and Belle Starr proved to be exactly that kind of character. I had an inkling of this before, but the full extent of her rebellious spirit became apparent with the research and writing.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

In total, it took about three years—two to write the book and one more year for the editing. As far as changes to my original idea, I would say that the book became far more expansive than I initially imagined, especially as it pertained to American history. I realized quite quickly that I wasn’t just telling the story of a female outlaw from the Old West, but also the story of the immigrant experience, Western expansion, the forced removal of Indigenous peoples, the Civil War in the Border States, and the birth of Wild West culture. Belle’s life was lived amid some of the most sweeping and powerful currents in our country’s history, and it became clear that her biography, while incredibly entertaining and insightful in its own right, also provided a fascinating vantage point for better understanding our own origins as a nation.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

It’s perhaps not a surprise, per se, but with each book, it’s always a fresh reminder: This truly is a team effort. Your agent, your editor, your cover designer, the publicity, marketing and sales teams—everyone has a critical role to play, and everyone pitches in and does their part. I don’t think I was as aware of this before publishing my first book, but now I’m on my fifth, and I’m very grateful for the help of so many talented and committed people. And it’s a long process, too, much longer than I realized when I was just starting out. Far from being the work of a lone individual over several months, as it is so often depicted in popular culture, the creation of an actual, tangible book is a joint project that involves the collaboration of dozens of people, over the course of several years.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

One thing that surprised me was just how much fun it was writing about the Wild West. It’s such a fascinating era in American history, and so misunderstood, too. At times, it felt more like writing the script to a Spaghetti Western, everything just moved so fast. Trying to capture the thrill of stolen gold, the thundering of hooves, the gleam of gunmetal—it was a new experience for me, and I must say, I enjoyed it. Back when I was studying the history of the American West in college, it always came across as dry and uninteresting, which is unfortunate, because in reality it is anything but. Being able to write about this historical moment in our nation’s past and give it the full flare and bravado it deserves, proved to be a pleasure that I did not initially anticipate.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope they will see that, while certainly not a role model, Belle Starr was a trailblazer, rising to a position of public power and influence at a time when women in America were generally denied both. She refused to conform to the rules and expectations that society imposed upon her, essentially forging her own destiny despite her detractors—a characteristic that so many important figures in American history share. In the last half-century, her life has been largely overshadowed by Western personalities like Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane; I’d like to show readers that unlike those figures, Belle Starr actually was feared and respected as a Wild West outlaw, and that her life story deserves to be told and remembered.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Never give up! There are rare individuals who do get lucky and hit the ground running, but for most of us, it takes years—and lots of rejection before getting a break. And even then, it’s hard; you never really “make it,” you just keep on working and seeing what sticks. If you’re passionate about writing, and feel strongly that you have something to say, then keep going. It might take years, it might take decades, but there’s only one way to make it happen, and that’s to keep working at it. Be prepared for ups and downs, and learn to celebrate every personal triumph, no matter how big or small. Take it from me: You never know when some story you used to hear around the dinner table might turn into an idea, that idea into a proposal, and that proposal into a book deal. Anything can happen so long as you stick with it.

The post Dane Huckelbridge: Learn To Celebrate Every Personal Triumph appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(6 Types of Personal Essays for Writers to Try.)

So it’s no real surprise, I suppose, that I was immediately captivated, some years ago, when I came upon the story of Etta Shiber in a magazine article. Shiber, I discovered, was a deeply shy, sheltered housewife from New York City who had moved to Paris in 1937 after her husband died, to live with a close friend, an Englishwoman named Kate Bonnefous who had recently separated from her husband. In June of 1940, like thousands of other Parisians, the two women had taken to the road in the face of the oncoming Nazi armies.

That evening, stopping at a café in Orléans, they encountered a fleeing RAF pilot by the name of William Gray; impulsively, the women decided to hide Gray in the trunk of their car and transport him back to their apartment, where they might figure out a way to deliver him across the line of demarcation into unoccupied France. Thus began Kate and Etta’s escape line, purely improvisatory at first but ultimately successful beyond their wildest dreams: In the course of just a few months, until they were arrested by the Gestapo, the two women were said to have transported more than 150 Allied servicemen to safety.

At the time, I was searching for a subject for my next book—for me, always the most grueling and anxiety-producing part of the nonfiction writing process—and I was drawn to the idea of these two older women (Etta was 62 at the time, and Kate 58, but contemporaneous accounts routinely referred to them as “elderly”), living rather conventional lives, who unexpectedly found themselves plunged into the whirlwind of history. Not only was the story intrinsically dramatic, full of suspenseful cat-and-mouse incidents between the women and their Nazi pursuers, but it seemed to offer an opportunity to explore how individuals choose to respond when faced with growing authoritarianism and deepening social injustice—an issue, unhappily enough, that holds particular meaning for our own historical moment.

My interest in Etta Shiber’s story only increased when I read her 1943 memoir Paris-Underground. That book, I learned, had spent 18 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, ultimately selling nearly half a million copies. The reviews had been rapturous: On the front page of The New York Times Book Review, the British author Hilary St. George Saunders called it “poignant,” “remarkable,” and “moving and wonderful,” while noting that it had “all the ingredients of the most exciting thriller.” Paris-Underground, said Newsweek, was “so exciting and brave that it is painful”; “as patriotic and stirring a book as anyone would want to read,” said the Boston Globe; “a remarkable story,” said The New Yorker. No less an intellectual luminary than Diana Trilling wrote in Harper’s, “A book like Etta Shiber’s Paris-Underground … holds our interest with an intensity that few modern novels can equal.”

One of my earlier books, Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World, had likewise featured two protagonists; as it happens, Bly and Bisland had each written a memoir of her circumnavigation, and I had found those books particularly useful, in that they provided me a kind of map not just of the external landscape of the race, but the internal landscape as well—a vivid sense of what each of the travelers had been thinking and feeling as she made her way around the world. Now, setting out on this new writing project, I had every confidence that Etta Shiber’s memoir could serve much the same purpose. (If anything, I worried that I would come to depend too heavily on the memoir, and that my own book would prove to be little more than a gloss on the original.)  

Other than Shiber herself, Paris-Underground gave pseudonyms to all of the major characters—so as not to compromise their safety as World War II still raged—and so my first task as a historian was to learn their real-life identities. A major break came when a researcher in the military archives in Caen, France, unearthed a folder containing the original German-language judgment for Kate and Etta’s Nazi military tribunal; it included the names and professions of all eight defendants in the case. As I delved deeper into the story, I managed to ascertain the identities of most of the fleeing British servicemen who had passed through the women’s apartment on rue Balny-d’Avricourt – with one significant exception. I simply could not find any information about “William Gray” (that name, too, was a pseudonym), the RAF pilot said to have been rescued by Kate and Etta during their exodus from Paris. I searched newspaper accounts, escaped-prisoner testimonies, military histories such as Oliver Clutton-Brock’s magisterial RAF Evaders: still all my efforts came up empty.

Over time, William Gray, this sturdy, genial figure in blue-gray pilot’s uniform and leather jacket, became a kind of ghostly presence haunting my story. How, I wondered, could I write a historical account of Etta and Kate’s escape line when I knew nothing about the man whose very existence had brought it into being?

Click to continue.

As the months passed, I found myself wondering if I wasn’t pursuing a kind of fool’s errand—if, in fact, this ghost had never existed as a man. My doubts crystallized after one of Etta’s family members passed on to me a packet of letters that Etta had written back home to her brother and sister-in-law in the months immediately before and after the German occupation of Paris. Etta was a diligent and faithful letter writer, and these letters (which included a detailed account of the two women’s flight from Paris in the face of the Nazi occupation) made it clear that the encounter with William Gray in the Orléans café could not have taken place—indeed, had not taken place. Which meant that the ensuing scene, in which Etta quick-thinkingly saves William Gray from a Gestapo search by dressing him up as her late brother Irving, had not taken place either. Nor could the women have placed a classified ad in a Paris newspaper using William Gray’s name to reach out to other British servicemen in hiding; that explained why my search of the major Paris newspapers of the time had not turned up any such advertisement. And if there was no advertisement, then the women could not have received a letter of response from a priest in the northern village of Conchy-sur-Canche. And so on.

I knew, of course, that the general outlines of the story were true: Every historical source confirmed that Etta Shiber and Kate Bonnefous had sheltered escaped Allied servicemen, had been arrested by the Gestapo, had spent much of the war in Nazi prisons. Yet the precipitating event of the narrative, the most suspenseful incident in Shiber’s book—the one that had been mentioned in every review, had been excerpted in Reader’s Digest, and which I myself had highlighted in my own book proposal—was now off limits to me, as was, apparently, much else of Paris-Underground. Where once I had worried about depending too much on Etta’s memoir, now I faced a situation in which I couldn’t depend on it at all.

One day I was discussing the problem with a writer friend of mine, who mentioned that in graduate school she had taken a course taught by none other than E. L. Doctorow; during one of the workshop sessions, Doctorow had advised his students that if they ever found a hole in their narrative—a plot gap that they found themselves unable to bridge—they shouldn’t try to hide it from their readers. “Don’t run away from the hole,” he told them. “Point to it.”

Now, Doctorow was speaking specifically about fiction writing, but as a narrative historian I try to approach my books much as a novelist does, always keeping in mind issues such as character development, narrative structure, authorial voice, and so forth. Although at first I didn’t grasp exactly what he had been getting at, I was intrigued by the counter-intuitive nature of the observation (why should a writer alert a reader to what is seemingly a problem in the story?), and I began to contemplate how I might apply it to my own stalled writing project.

Eventually it occurred to me that the question of what was true and untrue in Etta’s account—and more to the point, why so much of it had been fictionalized—was actually a significant part of the story. Indeed, there could be no understanding the full import of Etta and Kate’s courageous work together without coming to grips with what had happened afterward, with the publication of Etta’s bestselling memoir in 1943, even as Kate continued to languish in a Nazi prison, and the terrible fallout of the decision to publish it.

With that, the structure of my book fell into place: three linked sections, each with its own distinct narrative voice, each relating a different part of Kate and Etta’s story, including how and why Paris-Underground had come to be written. I had initially set out to write a kind of adventure story—and fortunately, there was plenty of adventure to be found in the women’s real-life activities, even without the Hitchcockian escapades featuring the fictional William Gray—but in the end, the story that emerged was larger, more complicated, and I think much more interesting: a story of daring and courage, to be sure, but also one of friendship, and betrayal, and divided loyalties, and the damage of unintended consequences. I didn’t anticipate—couldn’t have, really—any of that when I first set to work; as has been true of all my books, the manuscript that I finally turned in was markedly different from the one that I started out to write.

For the narrative historian, of course, the essential tools of the trade lie not in one’s own imaginative powers but in the external materials loosely (sometimes even misleadingly) grouped together under the label of fact: books, testimonies, photos, maps, letters, newspaper articles, archival records, and the like. Still, as with any creative process, there is always an element of imagination at work: Much like a fiction writer, the historian must follow where the story leads, rather than clinging to inadequate ideas or some preconceived structure that might not prove to be the most revelatory one. Sometimes, as often happens in writing a novel, a seemingly minor character may thrust herself out of the crowd, demanding that greater attention be paid; sometimes the authorial voice needs to be altered, perhaps through a shift of tense or an alternate point of view; and sometimes, as here, the writer has to stop trying to hide a hole in the narrative and instead point to it. 

Check out Matthew Goodman’s Paris Undercover here:

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In this interview, Hallie discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic completely upended her writing plans for her new historical true crime book, Story of a Murder, her advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Hallie Rubenhold
Literary agent: Eleanor Jackson (U.S.), Sarah Ballard (U.K.)
Book title: Story of a Murder
Publisher: Dutton (PRH)
Release date: March 26, 2025
Genre/category: History / True Crime
Previous titles: Nonfiction: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper; Lady Worlsey’s Whim (published as The Lady in Red in the U.S.), The Covent Garden Ladies; fiction: Mistress of My Fate; The French Lesson
Elevator pitch: Story of a Murder is one of the most sensational and infamous American true crime stories you’ve never heard of!

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What prompted you to write this book?

After writing The Five I became aware of how historic true crime stories were being told, and how these tales had been entirely owned as crime “legend.” The result of this is that the original narratives formulated in the periods in which the murders occurred were never questioned, but rather repeated for their sensational value. Many historians have traditionally written off true crime as “junk history”—unsavory cultural legends, hyped and doctored by the press in order to sell papers, but this is simply untrue. A historical true crime provides a detailed snapshot of an era and allows us to dig deep and understand our past through this very focused and dramatic event. The danger of leaving these stories to the realm of legend is that they are simply repeated as they appeared in the writing and journalism of the time. They are presented with the prejudices of the era fully intact. Stories like these are simply recirculated in podcasts, in TV and film, online and in books, and they shouldn’t be. They should be probed and questioned like any other event in history. I thought it was high time that someone apply this approach to the murder of Belle Elmore.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The biggest obstacle to writing this book was the pandemic. I had written the proposal and had it accepted just before we went into lockdown. Of course, I never saw this coming, nor did I anticipate having to wait a full two years to be able to complete all of my research due to archive and library closures in the U.K., Ireland, and in the U.S. I was also tied up with a successful podcast, Bad Women (Pushkin) and when the archives began to open up again, I could only work on Story of a Murder in stages. It was quite frustrating at times.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Other than the fact that the entire rule book was thrown out the window during the pandemic—no! We all had to make up strategies as we went along. I hope it’s not something we have to face again. A lot of nonfiction authors found the situation particularly stressful. We rely on access to libraries and archives, and without these resources, it’s impossible to write true stories as fluently or as fully as we would like. Never take libraries for granted!

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Having to rethink how I was going to write and research this book, almost from the outset. I had a research plan—I was going to come to New York in April 2020, in fact I had my ticket booked. I was going to spend three weeks in the U.S. going to various archives. Instead, I had to start writing this book without having done any of the primary research. The result was when I was able to get into the archives, I then had to rewrite everything! It was too difficult to sit on my hands and do nothing—I had to start somewhere.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I really hope that American readers will be introduced to this incredible story, which is truly a Transatlantic tale of a world which was becoming increasingly smaller and more modern at the turn of the last century. Belle’s murder occurred two years before the Titanic set sail and it’s very much of its era—a time of tremendous cultural and technological change and upheaval, especially for women who were really finding their voices. I’m also hoping readers will come to understand true crime in a different light—these stories are not gory legends, these events happened to real people and their families, and this needs to be recognized with compassion. The murder of Belle Elmore sent shockwaves around the world. It was literally front-page news for months in 1910.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Whatever nonfiction project you take on, make sure you love it, that the subject fascinates you deeply, because it will become your entire life, not only for the time you are researching and writing it, but for years afterwards. Books are like babies, they are brought into the world with a lot of labor and (sometimes) pain, but they become a part of who you are, even after you have set them free into the world.

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Name: Clay Risen
Book title: Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America
Publisher: Scribner
Release date: March 18, 2025
Genre/category: History
Previous titles: The Crowded Hour, A Nation on Fire and The Bill of the Century
Elevator pitch: My book is a comprehensive history of the Red Scare, the decade of anti-Communist hysteria following World War II. I look at both the famous names – Joe McCarthy, the Rosenbergs, Richard Nixon – and the countless everyday Americans who defined the era, as well as the ways in which the Red Scare permanently altered America’s political landscape, with echoes reverberating even today.

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What prompted you to write this book?

One of the nice things about being a non-academic historian is that I don’t have to keep myself tied to a specific subject area, but instead can range widely, exploring whatever interests me. I’ve been fascinated by the Red Scare ever since I was a teenager, when learned that my very conservative, all-boys high school changed its mascot, the Big Red, to the Big Maroon in the 1950s to avoid being accused of communist sympathies. If even my school was afraid of red-baiting, then clearly the Red Scare left a deep imprint, one whose legacy we still don’t quite understand. Given the way our national politics has been headed for a while now, I thought it was a good idea to explore that legacy further.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

I first pitched it to my agent in mid-2018, so it took almost seven years to come to print. Some of the long gestation had to do with the pandemic, which cut off access to archives for a year or more. But I also had a lot of material to absorb—not just archives but whole libraries of secondary sources. Even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to touch on every single facet of the Red Scare, I wanted to make sure I was at least aware of the whole story. I have a hard time writing if I don’t read everything I can on a subject; the even harder part is then deciding what to leave out.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Up until now, all my books have been focused on specific, relatively brief episodes in American history: the Spanish-American War, the fight over the Civil Rights Act. It was an immense and at times almost overwhelming challenge to fit the entirety of the Red Scare into a relatively manageable number of pages, and to tell the story in an engaging way. Learning how to do that was the greatest challenge of my career. My first draft was a mess—too long, too many rabbit holes, too many darlings that needed to be killed. Fortunately, I have a great editor, Kathy Belden, who patiently showed me how to wield the blade.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

This was the first time I took a leave from my day job to write a book. I’m a newspaper journalist, so I’m used to writing on a tight deadline. And it turned out that the extra time didn’t help—I wasted a lot of it, and ended up with a flabby, boring draft. I needed the time pressure to write efficiently. Not surprisingly, when I had to revise the book, in the evenings and on weekends after returning to work, things went much better.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope that people concerned with the present state of the country will see that on the one hand, we’ve been through similar trials before. But also, on the other hand, I hope they will see that there are certain themes in American history, like demagoguery and the abuse of power and political fear, that recur again and again, and that we have to remain vigilant against them.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

When you’re writing your first draft, never let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or even the good enough. Just write, even if it’s ugly. If you’re diligent with your edits, almost everything in that first draft will change anyway. It’s like dumping puzzle pieces onto the table: You need to get ideas on the page before you can shape them into a clear picture.

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In this interview, Edna discusses how forced labor, confinement, and austerity play a huge role in the spread of infectious diseases throughout history with her new book, A History of the World in Six Plagues, her advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Edna Bonhomme
Literary agent: Janklow & Nesbit,
Book title: A History of the World in Six Plagues
Publisher: One Signal/Simon & Schuster
Release date: March 11, 2025
Genre/category: History of Science; Literary Criticism; Epidemics
Previous titles: After Sex
Elevator pitch: Starting from the 19th century, this book is about how people worldwide cope with epidemics even when they feel captive.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I wanted to understand the history of modern epidemics and how societies have fueled their spread through forced labor, confinement, and austerity. The book is a set of case studies that, to an extent, reveal punitive mechanisms that produce “repressive” effects and individual and collective forms of struggle to resist captivity. This book is both critical and philosophical. I try to consider the conditions of possibility for epidemics and how illness is made—not just at the physiological level but how it is socialized and experienced in the body. At the same time, I also want to highlight how the threat of infectious diseases and the efforts to overcome that threat have played and will continue to play an essential role in shaping the modern world.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

I began writing this book in 2020, during the initial stages of the COVID-19 lockdown Early on during the pandemic, language was significant in how people tried to understand outbreaks, whether or not people knew the meaning of terminology. Herd immunity, inoculation, and vaccination all became part of our vocabulary, which, on the one hand, was exciting, but, on the other hand, coincided with scientific skepticism. Part of my project as a writer is not merely to document what is happening but to go deeper into the discourse that took place. To an extent, I consider how Michel Foucault urges scholars to focus on the spatialization and verbalization of pathology. As such, confinement became the modality that I began to write about because it felt so alive and present in our lives. As I continued thinking and writing about what we went through, literary luminaries, philosophers, the incarcerated, and the formerly enslaved could also offer insight into the history of epidemics.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

There is a healthy body of historical and journalistic texts that discuss epidemics and disease, and within a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, several manuscripts were published. Many of them interview essential workers, medical professionals, and activists. While writing the book, I knew that I didn’t want the text to be strictly a COVID-19 book or a historical text. I tried to oscillate between the past and present, to engage people with childhood memories, the meaning behind statues, and satire. For me, publishing was more than a descriptive process but a creative one, where I wanted to provide more context than the initial headlines.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

For me, the writing process involved reading extensively and digging into the archives to connect with the evolution of disease fully. Although my book focuses on epidemics from the 19th century until now, reacquainting myself with ancient diseases was helpful. For example, I was fascinated by the fact that there are diseases that have not circulated in the world for millions of years, and in some cases since before humans were around to encounter them, illnesses that evolve. At the same time, science has afforded us with the tools for some infectious diseases to decline, which shows the brilliance that is possible with human innovation. That is to say, vaccines and antibiotics drove half of the declines in death rates in developing countries through the late 1970s. At the same time, diseases such as cholera have re-emerged in disaster zones such as Yemen and Haiti. And this is primarily due to broader sociopolitical conflict. My book goes to show how social segregation, war, and confinement can be harmful to one’s health. As such, I had to figure out how to write for a broad audience and connect my readers to institutions and people they were familiar with.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I want writers to be curious about disease, illness, and medicine. At the same time, I want people to consider how the lack of investment in primary, preventative, and chronic health care in lower-income nations has exposed many of their citizens to emerging infectious diseases. To be more humane, we must be imaginative about organizing our societies and think deeply about redistributing resources on a global scale.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Deborah Levy wrote in Things I Don’t Want to Know: “It’s exhausting to learn how to become a subject; it’s hard enough learning how to become a writer.” Throughout the process of writing this book, I was committed to embodying the identity of a writer as if it were foreign and external to myself. However, as I came to read and reread archival material and fiction, I found that I could be a writer, fully and without apology.

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In this interview, Richard discusses everything he learned in the process of researching and writing his new historical nonfiction book, The Crossing, the collaborative process of publishing a book like this, and more.

Name: Richard Parker
Literary agent: Jane von Mehren, Aevitas Creative Management
Book title: The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story
Publisher: Mariner Books (HarperCollins Publishers) Nonfiction, History
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Genre/category: Nonfiction, History
Previous titles: Lone Star Nation (Pegasus Books, 2014); Disunion (Contributing Author only, The New York Times and Oxford University Press, 2016)
Elevator pitch for the book: The Crossing is a radical work of history that recenters the American story around El Paso, Texas, gateway between north and south, center of indigenous power and resistance, locus of European colonization of North America, centuries-long hub of immigration, and underappreciated modern blueprint for a changing United States. American history is almost always told from East to West and yet a closer look at the past reveals the country’s start began not in the East, but in the West—at a Texas city situated on a natural, shallow crossing of the Rio Grande River: El Paso.

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What prompted you to write this book?

On the scorching afternoon of August 3, 2019, a young man from just north of Dallas got out of his car. Unlike the hundreds of shoppers crowding Walmart for back-to-school sales, Patrick Crucius, age just 19, wasn’t here to buy anything. He was here to take it. He raised an AK-47 style rifle across the parking lot and toward the front door, lifting it once to kill an elderly woman as she walked out. To his left, a knot of school-age girls sold candy to raise funds for their soccer team; they bolted and ran, their black ponytails flying behind them.

After an editor at The New York Times stirred me from a much-needed nap—I had just arrived in my hometown from Los Angeles to visit my mother—I raced toward the scene in the car, following the radio reports and the circling helicopters to the scene to a middle school converted to a gathering point for nervous families. In the end, 23 people would lay dead with nearly an equal number wounded in the largest act of domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City bombing nearly a quarter century earlier.

I pieced together the scene as the dead, wounded, and missing were identified to the hysterical, grieving, shocked, nervous, and relieved families inside. A pastor showed me pictures of a baby who survived but whose parents did not; cradled by his mother, she turned her body to shield the child and was instantly killed by Crucius. In that moment, I didn’t just witness the aftermath of another mass killing, but the raging violence of a nation convulsed by a rising majority that was not, strictly speaking, white, the intersection with the cruelty of the Trump administration toward immigrants and the belief that this city, now bigger than Boston, was somehow a dusty desert outpost of no consequence.

As a result, I bore witness to new facts: My hometown, for which I had held little regard, was the very root of American history—the first humans in the Western hemisphere, complex native cultures, European contact, a passage of settlers who long predated Jamestown or Plymouth; ensuing violence between Europeans, Americans, and Native Americans on a globally historic scale over survival, land, Manifest Destiny, and revolution. It was all followed by 100 years of sacrifice for the country, firsts in the struggle for equal and civil rights, and the rise of peaceful society astride three nations and all or parts of five states that is a model of integration and diversity unmarred by the original American sin of chattel slavery.

These were all things that I didn’t know and that hardly anyone from even El Paso understood. I came to believe that this story wasn’t just history, but narrative history, replete with characters, drama, suspense, and tragedy. I think this story doesn’t just tell us as Americans from where we really came—most Americans now live west of the Mississippi River—but where we can go if we vanquish our demons and fears, of others and the unknown.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication?

It took about four and a half years. I kept Peter Hubbard apprised as I researched and wrote, certainly, and he provided some excellent guidance that helped me avert some blind alleys and underscored what was important in a sprawling story that stretches over some 14 millennia

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I was pleased at how gifted people it takes to publish a work like this. I know that at least a half-dozen people pushed this manuscript over the finish line, and I got the chance to thank them in the acknowledgments. Sort of like raising a kid, it takes a village to publish a big book like this.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

For me they came more in the research and reporting of the book. I was pleased at how certain nuggets of fact became “aha” moments.

For example, the first evidence of human beings in the Americas was found two decades ago by just two sites: near El Paso and in Peru, carbon dated to 14,000 years ago, nearly three times older than that of the people who came from Asia across the Bering Strait ice bridge. Or that the population of El Paso (the city) now exceeds that of Boston or Detroit and just barely trails Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. Or that the population of the Southwest now rivals the Northeast. Or that the binational metropolitan area contains nearly 4 million people—far bigger than metro Denver and about the same as Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Or that the first Thanksgiving was not held at Plymouth, Massachusetts, by the Pilgrims, but on the banks of the Rio Grande by a huge expedition along with native people. The list is long. But to be fair, I didn’t know these facts either, till I started down the trail of this book.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I suppose there are really three things. Everything they are taught about American history is so incomplete as to be factually wrong. Despite the legend and the lore, we are not a people simply rooted on the colonial East Coast; instead, we are a nation of westerners with all the good, bad, dangerous, and tragic that entails.

But as importantly, as a nation of westerners we can fashion an alternate national future in which people of a range of races, ethnicities, countries, languages, and religions can indeed live side by side. El Paso had its share of oppression, sure, but it is probably one of the few large American cities that never endured a race riot.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Think about what the nonfiction story is about in a larger sense, from individual emotion to global precedence and all that’s in between, and then weave that through your narrative to see if it binds the story together and tells an even bigger one. There is that and the importance of a great agent. My agent, Jane Von Mehren, was tireless and I benefited from her skills as a former book editor. There simply are no shortcuts around these two, no matter the rise of self-publishing and now AI. Just like the team at Mariner, it takes a village.

Lastly, I do get asked for advice by students who want to write and say they plan a major or graduate degree in journalism. I have two degrees, been a journalist in one sense or another, all of the last 40 years or so. I have been privileged to teach journalism at the university level twice and benefited vastly from journalism fellowships.

But the number of journalism classes I took. Zero. Instead of learning process, learn subjects you care about. Think critically. 

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