Episode 134: Jane Healey, Bestselling author of Historical Fiction
Step back in time with Jane Healey, the Washington Post and Amazon Charts bestselling author of 'The Secret Stealers.'
In her latest historical novel, 'Goodnight From Paris,' we're transported to Nazi-occupied France. Here, an American film star embraces her most dangerous role, weaving a tale of loyalty and resistance, inspired by the true story of real-life Hollywood actress Drue Leyton.
Jane is also the host of Historical Happy Hour, a monthly webinar and podcast featuring premiere historical fiction authors and their latest books.
Books & Links Mentioned:
Goodnight From Paris by Jane Healey (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
A Bakery in Paris by Aimie K. Runyan (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
The Spectacular by Fiona Davis (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
We Begin at the End by Christopher Whitaker (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
Historical Happy Hour
Full Disclosure: We are part of the Amazon and bookshop.org affiliate programs, which means Lainey or Ashley get a tiny commission if you buy something after clicking through from link on this website.
Connect with the author:
Transcript:
** Transcript created using AI (so please forgive the typos!) **
Ashley Hasty 0:00
In this episode, I chat with Jane Healey, a Washington Post and Amazon Charts best-selling author. We discuss her latest novel Good Night from Paris, which Aimie K. Runyan, author of The School for German Brides and Best of Women’s Fiction Podcast alum, describes it as a portrait of courage not of the men who lifted guns to rid their nations of tyranny. But of the women who fought via the airwaves to get the support of the United States for the cause. This adept rendering of Drue Leyton valiant efforts to report the atrocities of war to the American public deserves a place on the shelf of any lover of World War II fiction not to be missed.
Jane, welcome. I'm so excited to have you on the Best of Women’s Fiction Podcast
Jane Healey 1:02
Thanks so much for having me.
Ashley Hasty 1:04
Actually, I've been a fan of your work since first hearing about you when the Beantown Girls took off and became a Washington Post and Amazon Charts bestseller. Since then your books have become must reads for me. In case we have listeners who haven't yet read your latest novel, will you share your synopsis of Good Night From Paris?
Jane Healey 1:26
Yes, Good Night From Paris is a little bit of a departure for me because it's still World War II. I wasn't really planning on writing another World War II novel, but the protagonist is a real person in history. Her name was Drue Leyton, and she was a Hollywood actress in the 1930s. And she left Hollywood behind to marry the love of her life, Jacques Tartière. And she moved to Paris in 1939. They were living in Paris in 1939, just when the war was heating up in Europe and Jacques went off to war. And she had many opportunities to leave. But she decided to stay and this is about her life and occupied France as an American expatriate and, and the wild things that she got involved in. She was one of the first voices of America, broadcasting to an American audience what was happening in Europe. She was part of the underground network rescuing allied fliers. She was imprisoned in a zoo, which was how I first heard about her. So her story was so wild. I wasn't going to do another World War II. But the more I dug into her story, I'm like, I have to pitch this I have to try.
Ashley Hasty 2:30
As you mentioned, this novel was inspired by a true story, a real woman. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you first heard about her story? What made you think specifically this is the story I want to tell?
Jane Healey 2:42
Yeah, when I was researching my last novel, secret stealers, which also is a World War II novel based on the women of the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, and I came across this story that I had never heard of. And it was after Pearl Harbor, in around September of 42, the Germans went around France, in Paris, in the surrounding towns and villages and rounded up all the American women they could find, and they arrested them, and put them on buses, and imprison them in a zoo, just outside of Paris in the monkey house. And their friends and family had to pay five francs to go in and she yelled at them over the fence. And then most of those women, those who did not have children, or were over 65 Were like, released, but the rest of them were sent to another camp in the mountains of France. And that was the first time I had heard of Drue her name came up. And that story came up with a couple of sources. And I was like, someone has definitely written a novel about this, because it's so wild. And I just couldn't find any fiction about her or about the story of the zoo. And that's what inspired me to write it.
Ashley Hasty 3:48
Fascinating. I can see how imprisoning women in a zoo and monkey house specifically, can intrigue someone to write a story, right.?
Jane Healey 3:57
And they had all these elements of comedy and tragedy because one minute the woman would all be joking about the smell of monkey pee, and then the next minute they'd be crying. And then the next minute they were trying to cheer each other up again and trying to torment the German officers. It was really wild.
Ashley Hasty 4:11
Personally, my favorite part of the writing process is research and I love hearing about how authors go about it. You've published four historical novels now. So you have quite a bit of research under your belt. What is your research process? Do you have any favorite sources for good night from parents? Yeah,
Jane Healey 4:30
This one was tricky, because with this story, I had to find those about this woman who was somewhat famous like a C list actress, not super famous. I found her autobiography is actually you can find it anywhere online, but the print version is out of print, and I found I had to pay 100 euros on eBay to get it from a guy in the UK. That was invaluable because that was in her voice. She had a ghostwriter, but it was in her voice. And that really gave me a good roadmap like kind of how to outline the narrative arc. But then I also at the Holocaust Museum in DC, they have a number of her letters from her during the war that aren't digitized and archives. And those were amazing too, because it really gave me a sense of her voice, which is so important and her personality, and what was important to her and what was not important to her. And some of the people. One thing that didn't make it in the book that I was talking to my husband about last night is that some of the people she ran in the same circles with in Paris were fascinating. She was quite close with Wallis Simpson, which I thought was amazing. So just those kinds of tidbits, and then we have to kind of do the step back and think about other sources, what was happening in Paris during occupation, the political context of what was going on all of those things, what it was like for persuasions what it was like for people in the villages, in surrounding towns and that kind of thing. I could still be researching this book, frankly, you have to like to draw the line at some point, or you'll never read the book.
Ashley Hasty 5:57
I'm absolutely the person who would just stay in the research phase forever and never actually write a book. Yeah. I love that you shared the tidbit. That doesn't make it into the book. That's one of my favorite questions to ask a fun little nugget that didn't make it into the book, but that it's still living in your mind a bit.
Jane Healey 6:17
Yeah. And we've grappled with that because Wallis Simpson was actually a character in the novel. And then I had her in a couple of scenes. And the thing about someone who's such a huge historical figure, though, I think it would have thrown readers off course thinking something else was going to happen with her when really there wasn't. So it was kind of like, alright, well, this is gonna go. But she's such a fascinating character in history. Anyway, we were watching the King's speech this week. And I was like, Or shadow Drue’s already fascinating story.
Ashley Hasty 6:42
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Taking a step back for a moment, I'm curious about your journey to becoming an author. With all the others I've interviewed, I found the journey is rarely a direct one. What was yours like?
Jane Healey 6:59
Yeah, definitely not direct, right. I think that I've always wanted to write novels. But you go to high school and you go to college. And I didn't know anyone who liked it, just wrote novels for a living like I didn't know any authors. And I'd seen a couple speak. And that was about it. And I wanted to live, move out of my parents house and pay rent. So I ended up in high tech for a while. And then my daughters were born. And I started doing more freelance work, a lot of freelance writing for tech companies, things like that. And that was when it was kind of like, alright, if you're ever gonna do this fiction thing, you might have to actually write fiction. I always say to young writers, you have to be bad before you can be good. There are certainly some people that are just geniuses and right out of the gate. They're just brilliant at this, but most people, there's a learning curve, right? And you have to learn the craft and take the workshops and get the critique groups and, and do all the things to learn how to do that. I wrote the Saturday when the girls club, I wrote on a very part time basis. That was my first novel. When my girls were little it was based on an article I wrote for Boston Magazine. It was about this woman and in Boston's North End, at the turn of the 20th century. They were Italian and Jewish girls. And when I learned about them, I always said to my husband, I think this is my novel. I think this is my first try. How hard can it be? Famous last words, because it's like a decade. And many, many rejections I stopped counting. First time I tried to get it out at like 63 or something. Like I said, there's a learning curve with all of this. And that finally came out in 2017.
Ashley Hasty 8:29
I love that your first thought was, how hard could this be? I do think it takes a bit of naivety to start writing enough.
Jane Healey 8:38
I know. Yeah, totally. Yeah. He's sort of already touched on this.
Ashley Hasty 8:41
But I want to ask it more directly in case there's anything else you want to add. But drawing from your personal experience in the path that led you to where you are now, what piece of advice do you think is most important for writers?
Jane Healey 8:55
I think that publishing is persistence. I think that's one thing that is very true with authors that I really admire and look up to in terms of their careers kept going, right. They kept knocking on doors, they kept pushing, and they kept producing. I think that persistence is what separates unpublished authors from published authors. It's the ones that if you stop knocking at the doors, you won't have the opportunities, but it's a brutal industry. It's very, very hard. It's getting harder all the time. I think that we're in kind of a weird time. There's some really interesting things happening with indie authors, which I think is awesome. I think they're the gatekeepers, and the whole model of publishing is changing a little bit. And I think that's not a bad thing. But in any way you persist in writing and publishing and always learn, I never feel like oh, I know exactly what I'm doing now. I feel the opposite. Like I'm always reading books on crafts, or watching webinars or listening to podcasts about how other writers do it, like constantly trying to learn I love Donald Mass has some great books for authors, Tiffany Martin. There's just some great resources out there. Jane Freedman obviously is a great resource.
Ashley Hasty 10:00
I am always fascinated to hear especially from authors who've published multiple books that they still don't feel like doing.
Jane Healey 10:10
A book for right, this was the hardest to write by far, like it was so hard. I thought it was supposed to get easier.
Ashley Hasty 10:21
Our listeners are voracious readers and are always looking for new books, as are we to add to their TBR pile. So I'd love to hear about your reading world. What are you reading right now? And what would you recommend?
Jane Healey 10:33
Oh, I'm just digging into Aimie K. Runyan's A Bakery in Paris. She's an amazing person. She's an amazing author. I have a Historical Happy Hour podcast where I interview historical fiction authors. I'm not sure when this is airing, but she's coming on stream 25th. So that was great. And then Fiona Davis is coming on next month. I'm going to read The Spectacular. I'm looking forward to it. I love her work. I just recently read because I heard about it on a podcast. And it's been out for a couple of years now. It's called We Begin At The End by Christopher Whittaker. And it was an astonishing novel. It's like a mystery crime story, part family story. It was some of the best writing I've read in a really long time. So I highly recommend that too.
Ashley Hasty 11:14
Fiona is another author that told me that writing books never gets easier at some point in her next novel that she's like, I can't do this. I'm not a writer. I can't do this. Of course, I want to share how people can find you. What is your website? Where do you hang out on social media?
Jane Healey 11:32
That's a good question. So my website is janehealey.com. That's very easy. You can sign up for my mailing list, you'll get invitations to podcasts, because either has a live webinar that people can watch. And then I post it as a podcast, and I'm on Instagram, and I just stepped my foot into the TikTok world, which is a little scary. We'll see how this goes. But like I said, it's a weird time. And the more I read about tick tock and YouTube and the way people are finding bugs, I might as well try. It takes effort, of course, but I'm pretty much wherever people are on social media. I have some sort of presence with Facebook. I have a presence there. But I've really pulled away. That's probably the one that like I'm least on. .
Ashley Hasty 12:13
Yeah, everything I read two cents. TikTok is where people are finding their new books. And I dabbled in it for a few months and just kind of let it fizzle out. I need to get back on there. Wow.
Jane Healey 12:24
Ashley, I'm like, am I gonna be doing this for like two months? And then just be like, forget it. Like, it might be me to give it a whirl? Yeah.
Ashley Hasty 12:33
Can you tell us anything about your next project?
Jane Healey 12:36
No, because I'm really superstitious about this. And I'm like, barely talked to my husband about it yet. Yeah, but I do have a proposal, the way my stuff works with my publisher, I have to send them like 30 pages in a synopsis. And that is pretty much done. I hate to say done, because it still needs some editing. And I'm hoping to send that to my agent by the end of next week. So we'll see.
Ashley Hasty 12:58
Before we wrap up, is there anything else you wanted to talk about that we haven't yet covered?
Jane Healey 13:03
No, I think that's it. Thank you for doing this and for supporting women writers. It's so great. I really appreciate you having me on.
Ashley Hasty 13:10
Oh my gosh, of course it is completely My pleasure. Thank you for taking the time to join us on this podcast and sharing your experience. As a writer with our listeners. It was a pleasure chatting with you. Likewise.
Jane Healey 13:22
Thank you Ashley.
Ashley Hasty 13:23
For links to the books mentioned in this episode, the author's social media and more visit bestofwomensfiction.com. You can also see the video version of this same episode. I'd love it if you'd follow me on Instagram at Ashleigh hasty, you can also subscribe to the podcast right here. And if you enjoy it, please share with your friends.