Thank you, everyone, for your interest in my writing and novel, A Thousand Kisses!
This week, I’m including an excerpt from the novel. It takes place after Hélène left her young daughter, Lili, in Barisis, in 1909, and travelled to Saint-Pétersbourg to become a governess. On the long train journey, she met two other young women from France who were also seeking governess jobs in Russia. One, Marie, would become a life-long friend and confidante: she and Hélène would eventually live together in Saint-Pétersbourg, in 1917, flee Russia just before the final Russian Revolution, and journey to England together. In the research I did for this part of the novel, I was able to find a 1902 German travel guide to St Petersburg (translated into English) which really helped bring the train experience to life for me (and Hélène!).
Read moreThanks again, everyone, for all your positive comments and support for my novel and blog!
We’re going to take a short break from Hélène and her life this week and talk about biking in Toronto: my short essay appeared in the Globe & Mail this morning! Here is the link: http://globe2go.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx, and I’ve also re-printed it below. This is my first published work, and the Globe will also be publishing a second piece in a few weeks.
Globe & Mail, FIRST PERSON, Jan 12, 2018
Big city biking
Debbie Scoffield clings to the farthest nether-reaches of the road, but sometimes that's still not good enough.
I'm supposed to ride on the street – just like a motorist. But not too far out onto the street, because that's where the cars drive. And not on the sidewalk, because that's for pedestrians.
Read moreHappy New Year, everyone!
Exciting news: a short essay I wrote will be published in the Globe & Mail newspaper on Friday, January 12. It will be near the back of the first section under “First Person” and is about biking in Toronto. I will send the link in my next blog – let me know what you think!
In this blog, I’m going to tell you about some of the research I did for my novel, A Thousand Kisses. Information came from many sources: a trip to Hull, England; the kindness of strangers who responded to my emails with information that I wouldn’t have been able to source without their help; and, of course, the internet.
Read moreThanks again, everyone, for all your positive comments and support for my novel and blog!
I wanted to share another excerpt from A Thousand Kisses with you. This scene occurs in August, 1909, in Barisis, in north-eastern France, when Hélène leaves her daughter, Lili, with the Tellier family before she goes to Russia. How heartbreaking that must have been! Hélène had tried for over a year to bring up Lili on her own in Paris, but, in that era, it was nearly impossible; like Fantine in Les Misérables, prostitution was the fate that met many unwed mothers. In Saint-Pétersbourg, where no one would know she had a child, Hélène could work as a governess and make more than enough money to send to the Tellier family to pay for her daughter’s upkeep, and save for their future. She planned to return to France in a few years and live together with her child; little did she know that WW1 and the Russian Revolution would intervene, and Hélène would never see Lili again.
Read moreOne of the most difficult things for me to write about in A Thousand Kisses was Hélène’s molestation by her step-father. It seems particularly topical to blog about this part of the story this week as we’ve watched the #MeToo movement gain momentum recently and is Time magazine’s person of the year in their December 18 issue.
Read moreThanks again, everyone, for all your positive comments and support for my novel and blog!
I wanted to share another excerpt from A Thousand Kisses with you. This is from October, 1917, when Hélène first arrives in Hull, England from Petrograd, Russia. Initially, she lived with her parents-in-law. Everyone called her Helen, and she was learning English and British customs, so it must have been very disorienting. On top of that, although Hélène had treated soldiers coming from the Eastern Front in the hospital in Petrograd when she was there, she hadn’t experienced war firsthand.
Read moreThanks again, everyone, for your positive comments!
People have been asking me about the process of writing the book. I have to say, initially, writing an entire novel seemed like a daunting task; I didn’t think of myself as an author. Then I remembered all the business writing I had done – marketing plans, proposals, strategic plans, even packaging copy and slogans – and realized how much writing I had done. And how much I enjoyed reading a well laid-out, well-written book.
Read moreI’m so appreciative of everyone’s positive responses and interest in my novel! Thank you!
Last week, when I posted my blog on November 11, it made me think about the 100th anniversary of some of the key battles of WW1 and of the Russian Revolution – two significant events that figured highly in Hélène Aubry’s life.
When the war started in 1914, Hélène had been living in Saint-Pétersbourg (now re-named Petrograd) for 5 years. As soon as Germany began hostilities against France, the Triple Entente brought Russia and the United Kingdom into the conflict. Everyone thought this was going to be a quick affair, but the war dragged on, and by 1917, as many as 2.5 million Russian soldiers had died on the front, and 5 million had been wounded. To contribute to the war effort, Hélène, like Tsarina Alexandra and 25,000 Russian women, trained to be a nurse; they were called the sisters of mercy of the Red Cross. 1917 proved to be a key turning point in Russian history, as starvation and the war casualties led to a series of debilitating strikes, Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication, and, ultimately, the Russian Revolution.
Read moreThanks again, everyone, for all your positive comments and support for my novel and blog!
I wanted to share an excerpt from the beginning of the book with you. I decided to start the story with a diary entry written a few weeks after Hélène first arrived in Saint-Pétersbourg (she spelled it in the French way). After the Prologue, Hélène’s story begins the day she is born in Châlons-sur-Marne in France in 1889.
Read moreWow – thank you so much, everyone, for your positive responses and interest in my novel!
Many people have asked about the main character. Hélène Aubry Scoffield was my paternal grandmother, my father’s mother. I was always fascinated by my grandmother Hélène’s story, even though I and my siblings never knew her (neither, of course, did my Dad, since she died three weeks after he was born). So, about eight years ago, I started translating Hélène’s letters. She wrote in French to her mother, sister, and daughter in France, and, after she was married, in broken English to her husband, Walter. I had a veritable treasure trove of 16 letters, all written between 1909 and 1918, while she lived in Russia and England.
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