2010 email to my friend Jim Wareck, a screenwriter and movie producer:
My older daughter has been doing a biography report on a WWII spy named Virginia Hall. Incredible story -- has a lot that Hollywood would like. She had to escape from France over the Pyrenees with one wooden leg (hunting accident as a child)… from a rather patrician Maryland family, and had a very elite education. The Gestapo called her the "most dangerous" of US spies. No one has heard of her, really, which is amazing. Her life would make an amazing movie.
In her book
Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert posits a theory about ideas: They are “disembodied, energetic life-forms” driven by a singular impulse: “to be made manifest… Ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners.” If an idea thinks you might be The One, it will try to get your attention, but if you’re too distracted by the busyness of your life, it’ll move on. “But sometimes – rarely, but magnificently – there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something… and then magic can slip through.”
I have an addendum to the theory: Sometimes the idea finds you, but you consciously choose to send it on its way, because you know there's a more worthy host. So it was with the story of Virginia Hall. As I say in the above email, I “discovered” Virginia Hall in 2010, while helping my sixth-grade daughter find a subject for a big biography project. She wanted someone thrilling, but as Amelia Earhart and the other usual suspects were already taken, I said, “what about a spy?”
We googled around until we came across Virginia Hall. I had to do some overparenting in this project, because at the time, the only book about Hall was a rather dry biography, definitely not at the sixth-grade level. (
Daughter, reading about Petain’s government in Southern France: “What’s a Vitchie?”)
Why have I never heard of this woman? I wondered, as I read through the biography.
She needs to be known. I was there when the idea came. I knew the story of this amazing, courageous woman needed to be told. But I also knew I wasn't the right person to tell it, so I let it go.
Well, this "disembodied life-form" was quite determined. In the years since, the idea found its way to half-dozen biographers, including one who wrote a children’s book. I continued to hope it would knock on the door of an experienced novelist, though. In the hands of the right author, historical fiction is a wonderful complement to biography. Novels bring historical figures (especially women)to life in a different way, and can introduce them to different readers.
It happened! The idea made its way to an experienced biographical fiction author (and, like Virginia Hall and myself, a Marylander): Erika Robuck.
The Invisible Woman hits the shelves today!
