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Novelist Gill Paul takes iconic women of the 20th century – from Wallis Simpson to Diana, Princess of Wales, from Jackie O to Maria Callas – and spins a magic story that combines fact with imagination to give readers new insights into famous lives. . . .
Hi there. I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and in this week’s Joys of Binge Reading episode Gill talks about the romance of the Romanovs, and her crazy passion for cutting ice to go swimming.
Win a copy of Gill’s latest book
Gill’s been kind enough to offer listeners a lovely Christmas bonus – a Holiday Reading Royal Romance Giveaway of one paperback copy of each of Gill’s two most recent books – dual time line story The Lost Daughter, featuring the ill-fated Romanovs, and Another Man’s Wife, tracing links between Wallis Simpson and Princess Diana of Wales.
Details for how to enter the draw for this exciting Holiday Reading Royal Romance Giveaway can be found on the Binge Reading Facebook Page or the website, or at the Joys of Binge Reading. Enter today for fantastic holiday reading. We will select two winners who each will receive one of the books. Offer closes December 10, and we will try and ship in time for Christmas (if we’re lucky.)
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
- How joining a small writing group got Gill started
- Why the Romanovs stole her heart
- The two women who married a Prince of Wales
- Cleopatra the movie, Elizabeth Taylor the star
- Why she’s such a ‘swot” in her writing
- Her coming book on the Onassis women
Where to find Gill Paul:
Website: http://gillpaul.com/author
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GillPaulAuthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GillPaulAUTHOR
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
Jenny: Hello there, Gill, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Gill: Jenny. It’s wonderful to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me.
How Gill got started in writing
Jenny: Now I know that you did do other things before you started your writing, so was there a Once Upon a Time moment where you thought, “I’ve just got to write some fiction or my life won’t quite be complete,” and if so, what was the catalyst?
Gill: That’s a great question. In fact, I wanted to write from probably when I started reading, but my parents steered me in a different direction, towards studying medicine at university and then I switched and worked in publishing for a while and all the time I was trying to write novels.
I have to say in my teens and early twenties they were really miserable autobiographical things about lost love affairs and parents not understanding you. They were absolutely dreadful and I’m very glad none of them has ever seen the light of day.
But in my thirties I discovered a little writing group near where I live in North London, run by a woman called Carol Cornish. She called it Writing Space. It was just Friday evenings around her kitchen table, and she really encouraged us to describe things in an original way – to really look at the things we were talking about, to probe deeper and find character. And also have original ideas for plot.
The benefits of a writing group
She was amazing. Three years after I started doing her Writing Space group, I got an agent and my first publishing deal. So really, she was the magic catalyst for me.
Jenny: And what was that first book?
Gill: Oh gosh, that was ages ago, and it’s terrible. It’s called Enticement. It was a training novel, but it did get published by Hodder and Stoughton over here. So I’m quite grateful for that. It was a long time ago, and it’s not in print anymore.
Jenny: In your most recent book, The Lost Daughter, you returned to the Romanov family. (the Russian Imperial family of the Czars.) Now you’ve really made a name for yourself with these novels that are apparently based in fact with interesting people, but also a very lovely story spun around them.
And this is the second time you’ve used the Romanovs as a basis for a story. Another of your best sellers, The Secret Wife also treated an aspect of the Romanovs. Tell us how you became interested in this royal line.
A fascination with the Romanovs
Gill: Oh, that’s a teenage obsession of mine, actually. When I was a teenager, the graves of the Romanovs hadn’t been found, so there was still a possibility that some of them had escaped, that they might be living quietly in exile somewhere. They might still even be in Russia.
There were some very good books along those lines. I was really excited about this missing Royal family. Of course, then the graves turned up, first of all, in 1991 and then the second grave in 2007 and the DNA tests were pretty conclusive early on, so that was a disappointment, but it’s just really gets under your skin. The fact that they felt that they could wipe out an entire Royal family. You can understand them killing Nicholas the Second who’d been a particularly bad ruler. You can understand them wanting to get rid of the heir Alexi so that nobody could come and try and put them back on the throne.
The grim reality of Czarist history
But these four girls . . . It’s just so cruel and unfair and there was a fairy tale aspect to it, except in fairy tales, the beautiful innocent princesses are supposed to be rescued at the last minute and nobody came to rescue them. So it’s just desperately unfair. And in my two novels, The Secret Wife, first of all, I write about Tatiana, who was the second daughter.
And in the most recent one, The Lost Daughter I write about Maria, the third daughter. And I try to give them a bit of an alternative. A “What if “history. Describing what happened to the family and what they were like as characters, but then a little bit of fantasy of what might have happened if maybe they had escaped.
So that’s my two Romanoff novels. I’m not planning on doing another one at the moment, but you’d never know because they have really got under my skin.
Documented by the executioners
Jenny: Yes. Tatiana, was there any truth in the possibility that she may have not been there? I mean, I know that her body has now been discovered, but. was there any chance that she could have not been there at the time when that awful massacre happened?
Gill: No. I’m afraid in reality the guards who executed them have a left detailed testimonies that have been in Soviet archives all these years. So we know the horrible details of what happened to them.
We know that they were all there. I mean, Tatiana did have a romance that the cavalry officer called, called Dmitri Malama. And that’s what my story is about, but we don’t know what happened to him, particularly after they were captured. Apart from the fact that he was fighting in the Civil War in 1919, fighting the Red Army. I don’t think he did try and rescue her, but I wish he had.
A matter of national shame
Jenny: The murders were also was a little bit of an embarrassment even to the Soviets for quite a long time, weren’t they? It was something they didn’t want to particularly face up to. So I’m interested that those very full accounts are still there in the archives.
Gill: They are. When the graves were first discovered in 1991 Boris Yeltsin said that, it was a matter of great shame for the Russian government, the Soviet government, but his successors have been less fulsome in, in condemning it.
And Putin himself nowadays is quite “Czar-like” in the way he just keeps going on and on as head of head of the Russian state. So, I think he would have to be very careful about criticizing absolute rulers. There’s a very fine line, you know. It wasn’t Czarism versus Bolshevism, that’s not how they want it to be seen., The Russian Orthodox church is still split down the middle on the bodies, particularly in the second grave.
Denied a decent burial
They haven’t yet given their full consent to recognize them. There are two factions in the church, and they haven’t yet agreed that definitely the bodies of Alexi and Maria were in the second grave, so they haven’t yet been able to be buried with their parents, which is so sad. Just because they’re wrangling, even though they’ve been canonized as martyred saints.
The church argument is that they’ve got to be 100% sure that they’re burying the bones of the right people, but it does seem such a shame that it can’t be put to rest.
Jenny: So The Lost Daughter is a dual timeline story that’s spread between the scene of the massacres in 1918 and Sydney 55 years later. I know that you had spent time in Australia, you refer to it in various places, but did you also have the pleasure of going to Russia for your research?
Faberge eggs in St Petersburg
Gill: I did indeed, yes, just to St Petersburg where I was desperate to see the palaces and they’re even more glitzy than you probably imagined them.
There’s gold everywhere. There are precious jewels. And the whole of St Petersburg is like this fantasy playground, beautiful churches around every corner. One of my particular favorites was the Faberge Museum where they have seven or eight of the original Faberge eggs that the Czar of Russia used to give to his mother and his wife at Easter.
And they are exquisite, really, really beautiful. Unfortunately, they had glass covers over them, so I couldn’t pick them up and have a play. There were lots of security guards standing around, because they really are priceless. But I loved going to Russia. I also had a great time in Sydney as well, by the way.
Another Woman’s Husband
I was there for a couple of months and really, really enjoyed the city. It’s a great place to live. Haven’t been to New Zealand yet, Jenny, but I’d love to come sometime.
Jenny: Oh, I’m sure you’d like us.
Gill: Oh yes! I do have New Zealand friends. I just haven’t managed to get over there yet, so I’ll have to come soon.
Jenny: You’ve also tackled quite recently, another Royal romance, the Wallis Simpson saga. And in your recent novel, Another Woman’s Husband, you’ve tackled two of the most famous women of the 20th century, Wallis Simpson and Diana Princess of Wales, in another dual timeline story, which was really, really fun.
The Wallis Simpson side of it was very strongly historically accurate, and the Diana side of the story almost entirely fictional, I believe. Tell us about what drew you to that story?
Wallis Simpson and Princess Diana
Gill: Do you know I’ve always wanted to write about Wallis Simpson because I thought there was something a bit sexist about the way the history books and the biographers portrayed her as this evil scheming woman who had to get the Prince of Wales for herself.
She had to have every man fall in love with her that she met and, and they made up all sorts of things about which there’s no foundation for whatsoever. That she might’ve known some peculiar sexual tricks to make to make men attracted. Actually, she was just a very bright, witty, fun woman, and that’s why people fell under her spell.
But I decided to write about her and I wanted to look to make her more relevant to the present day. And then I found out that Princess Diana had visited her house just hours before she died in Paris in 1997 and that seemed extraordinary because of course, there’s so many parallels between the two women.
Both married the Prince of Wales
They were both married to the Prince of Wales. They were both fashion icons of their day. They were both incredibly thin, with borderline eating disorders on both sides. And they were victimized, they were bullied by the media. There was a lot that they had in common.
And I thought I would try and wind two stories together and show what they had in common. And you know, obviously what was very different about Diana’s case as well, and I had great fun doing it.
Jenny: Yes. It is funny. That visit, of course Mohammed Al Fayed was leasing that house from the city of Paris at the time, wasn’t he? So, I mean, it could be as something as mundane as Dodi just wanted to go out and pick up a pair of trainers, but do we even really know why she did go there?
The House in Bois de Boulogne
Gill: Maybe it was Dodi’s trainers, that’s a really good idea. But after she died, Mohammed Al Fayed said that they had been going to get married and that they were looking at the house to decide whether they wanted to live there after they were married. And that’s quite an extraordinary claim given that the CCTV shows that Diana and Dodi only spent 20 minutes there that day and Diana stayed in the downstairs office the entire time.
So it doesn’t really look as though she was wandering around wondering whether her furniture would fit or measuring curtains or anything like that, it just doesn’t ring true. Also Diana’s friends say she was dating Dodi, she was having fun, but there’s absolutely no way she was engaged to him.
And also that house is completely wrong for her because it’s surrounded by the Bois de Boulogne on all sides and people can see in. It’s very exposed. It really doesn’t make sense that they were going there to look at possibly living there. I don’t believe that for one minute.
Jenny: In your book there’s a suggestion that Wallis was almost forced by the pressure of media and public attention into marrying the Duke. There’s a feeling that the situation really ran away with her, that she was quite the opposite of setting her sights on him. That she was actually rather shocked when she suddenly realized she’d been backed into a corner. Is that how it happened?
Wallis’s unwelcome surprise
Gill: Well, that’s certainly my opinion and that of several biographers. I think she was enormously flattered by the Prince of Wales’ attentions. I think she set out to, you know, get him under her thumb as much as she could and he spent a lot of money on her, huge sums of money.
So much so that his parents got MI5 to put private detectives on her to find out whether she was blackmailing him or not, because he was buying her entire wardrobe at the Paris shows every season and masses of jewelry. But I don’t think she was blackmailing him. She was just really enjoying her influence and enjoying the money he was spending on her because money was enormously important to Wallis.
She’d been poor and reliant on other people all her life. And she didn’t like that. So definitely, the money came into it so. I think as it got more serious, she really was torn. I think Ernest was a very nice, steady, stable influence or her life, Ernest Simpson, that is, the man that she was married to at the time.
A life with little purpose
But you know, on the other hand, there was a possible crown being dangled, and I’m sure she would have enjoyed being Queen. The last thing she expected or wanted would be to become this person in exile the Duchess of Windsor with no role in life. I mean, they were given plenty of money by the British crown, but they just became international partygoers who sailed from continent to continent and didn’t have a particular purpose anymore.
And I’m sure she didn’t enjoy that at all because she’s a woman that enjoyed her wealth and influence. So no, I don’t think it worked out the way she wanted. Really.
Jenny: No. It sounded also as if she rather resented the fact that Ernest settled himself quite happily with her friend. There was a certain jealousy there.
Mary Kirk Simpson – confidante
Gill: Yes, indeed. Mary Kirk has quite an extraordinary character in her own right. She was Wallis’s best friend from when they were teenagers. They met at Summer Camp and they stayed friends all the way up to the abdication crisis and while she was supporting Wallis through her various. crises. I found out about Mary Kirk through a book written by her sister a very strange little book in which she reproduces Mary’s letters to her from London, and then imagines what her reply would have been and fills in all the background to Mary’s life as she knew it,
A very odd book that I tracked down in a library in America and it did help me a lot and kind of capturing Mary’s character and the way she spoke. So what was great.
Jenny: Yes, she came over as, as a very sympathetic character. I was sad to see that in real life, her life was cut short. She only lived until 1943. I thought she deserved to have a few years of happiness after the way she supported Wallis.
Gill: Yes. No, I wish she had. That was a real shame. This is the problem. I seem to have slipped into this writing about real people and so I feel a certain responsibility to be true to the facts.
Spoiler alert – jump to miss ending
But, it doesn’t always make it into the right shape for a story. So for example, if I’d been making up that story, of course I wouldn’t have had Mary die. She’s a lovely character, but because she’s a real person, I really felt I had to reflect that in the story. We have given away the ending of this now, Jenny.
Jenny: Sorry, I’ll have to put a spoiler alert! So you’ve written a nonfiction book also about Royal love stories. I wonder, what it is that particularly fascinates us all about Royal love affairs? There is something about them, isn’t there?
Gill: Well, of course, yes. I mean, you know, the person that you love and decide to spend your life with or not is, is one of the most fascinating things about human beings. How they make their relationships work or not work. For Royals is just so much harder than for the rest of us. They’re under all this scrutiny. I mean, nowadays, it’s not like the old days when, actually you might have some counselors in the room checking that the deed was done on the wedding night or people checking the sheets the next morning.
Media attention insufferable
But, the scrutiny that, for example, Meghan and Harry are under at the moment is quite insufferable for her. And really taking a lot of getting used to. I think it’s very hard for both of them. So it’s just harder to have a Royal romance. There are all the protocols. There’s the fact that they have to be approved by the Queen in this country.
You know, Harry couldn’t have married Meghan without the Queen’s permission. His grandmother’s permission. I mean, how odd is that? It throws lots of obstacles in the way of true love. And so it makes it ideal for writing about as a novelist.
Jenny: Yes, yes. You seem to have a real journalist’s nose for a story and there’s one of your books, which it’s not quite so easy to get ahold of, although it sounds fascinating.
And that’s The Affair, the one based on the film set of the making of Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. How did that one came about? It sounds particularly fascinating.
Sexy – and witty – Elizabeth Taylor
Gill: Oh, I love Elizabeth Taylor. I’m such a huge fan of hers. You know? She was beautiful. Sexy, yes. But she was also witty. In conversation, she was really funny. One of my favorite stories is that after she died, she’d arranged to turn up 15 minutes late for her own funeral so that everybody would have a good laugh. Cause that’s what she always did in life. You know, she was late for everything. She’s just a character I wish I had met.
I knew I wanted to write about her. And I’m also fascinated by that period in Rome when the paparazzi were just taking off. And really putting pressure on celebrities and at that time she’s married to somebody else. Richard Burton is married to somebody else. They appear in a film of Cleopatra where she’s Cleopatra and he’s Antony and it happens and it’s explosive and dramatic.
The secrets of the Cleopatra set
And so, yes, it was definitely a story I wanted to write. That was great fun to do. I was very lucky that I found an actor who’d worked on the set because it’s a long time ago. It was 1961 – 62 that it was being made so. I went through IMDB, the film website, trying everybody, looking up everybody I could that worked on the film.
And sending off emails to see if I could ask them about it. I came across an actor called John Gayford, who played a centurion. He was in so many scenes because he was the centurion that stood behind Richard Burton throughout. He was a fantastic source of information. I’ve had long telephone interviews with him, and then he checked the whole manuscript for him and he was like, no, no, no that was around the corner from makeup and you’d have to walk down this way. He made sure I got absolutely every detail right, which is a complete gift for a novelist. It was wonderful.
An extravaganza of elephants
Jenny: And did you learn anything about them that surprised you while you were doing it?
Gill: Cleopatra was the film that nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox because it was just so extravagant. They had hundreds of actors and extras. They kept in Rome for the entire duration of the shoot, which was 16 months. And they’re all on full salary and accommodation and food. And, they hired some elephants and they turned out to be really wild and they kept trampling on things and wouldn’t behave the way they wanted them to behave and they didn’t end up being in the film.
So that was crazy, the money that they were throwing at it really did nearly bring down 20th Century Fox. They tried to cut back on stupid things like criticizing actors with the number of paper cups they were using in the canteen. So that did make me laugh.
Research paid off
I have to say. I tried very hard to contact everybody who worked on the film and sent a lot of the emails weren’t returned and it was very hard to find people.
But after the book was published, I had an email from Rosemary Mankiewicz who’d worked on the film, and she’d actually met her husband. Joe. – Joe Mankiewicz – who was the director there, and they got together on the set. It was very, you know, all these actors, and film people together for 16 months. There were a lot of romances that went on out there, and not just Elizabeth and Richard, and Rosemary’s was one of them with Joe.
And she came across my book, and so I got an email from her and I, when I saw the name, my heart stopped. I thought, Oh my gosh, I’ve libeled her. But fortunately she really liked it. So that was great.
Jenny: Oh, that’s fantastic. Turning to your wider a career, just moving away from the specific books, you trained as a doctor, and you’ve also written a good number of books dealing with health and medicine, including several co-authored on Pilates and one on diet, Eat And Stay Young.
I wondered if you had any little health check you’d like to give listeners what is the most important thing we can do to live long and stay healthy,
A doctor in the house
Gill: Oh my gosh, I would love to give you a secret potion that I’ve invented myself that can make you live to a hundred and not have any health problems whatsoever. But if there is one, I haven’t discovered it myself. I’m afraid I do take a multivitamin, but you know, it’s the basic eating plan. I get some exercise every day. I swim every day. And what else? Oh, if you suffer from any stress or anxiety or a sleeping troubles, there’s a little potion called avena sativa, and it’s a concentrated source of Vitamin B.
And I use it for when I’m feeling very wound up. Or worried about sales and my novels or something like that. You put five or 10 drops in a glass of water and swallow it, and it works really quickly. There’s my tip for the day. Avena sativa. I hope you can get in New Zealand
The secret of Gill’s success
Jenny: Oh yes, you can get up here. In another life, I had a health company. We actually had a product with Avena sativa in it., I think it was there for stress control. You’re right. But that’s lovely to have it endorsed like that. If there’s one thing you’ve done more than any other in your writing career, that’s the secret of your success, what do you suggest it would be?
Gill: I don’t think I’m a great example. I’m a real hot swot. I spend months and months and months on the research for each novel. I go through so many drafts, I mean, a ridiculous number of drafts. I rewrite every time. It’s really hard work for me. And I have author friends who say, “Oh, we just sit down and, and the story comes out, it’s almost like it’s fully formed already and we just have to get it down on paper.”
I work ridiculously hard. For example, a lot of people just sit down and the story comes, but I actually plan it out in these huge long outlines that are about 35,000 words each. So I’ve written 35,000 words before I even start on the first sentence of the actual novel.
A perfectionist who works hard
It’s not very attractive quality of mind, but I am just a swot, I’m afraid.
Jenny: Oh. I think that’s putting a very negative cast on it. That sounds like that you just really totally are dedicated to getting it right.
Gill: Yes, and I’m quite perfectionist about my words and I even go through a stage where I’ll read the whole book out loud because that’s the only way you can hear whether you’ve got any horribly clunky sentences in there. So yes. I’ve got lots of different stages. I’ll print it out. I’ll work on screen, or work on paper and alternate that because you see different top things each time. Yeah. It’s very time consuming. I’m not fast.
There are some people that do two or three novels a year, and I’m less than one a year at the moment.
Jenny: Yes. Reading it aloud though, as a very good suggestion. If you want to have it into audiobook because you already have the flow, the natural flow, that’s probably an excellent idea.
What Gill likes to read
Gill: But it does help and it’s amazing what you spot when you’re reading them out loud. Just things like, “Oh, hang on, I’ve got another character with the same name.” You know, you suddenly hear it in your head and realize that.
Jenny: Our show is called The Joys of Binge Reading because we do like to hear about people who are writing series books or who that you love to read all of their work. I guess that in the past you might have been a binge reader yourself. And who do you like to binge read today?
Gill: Oh, I binge read so much historical fiction, British, American, from all of the world. Really. One of my favorite authors is Hazel Gaynor.
One of her latest books is called The Lighthouse Keepers Daughter. It’s about Grace Darling, who was the daughter of the keeper of a lighthouse off the north east of England when there was a huge storm. This is way back in the Victorian era, and she helped to rescue some people from the boat and she became a local heroine and it took over her life.
Stormy island stories
It’s a wonderful story, but Hazel will go in and take this woman about whom not much is known and really make you love her. She makes the character come to life. You understand everything about her. So definitely I would say, look up Hazel Gaynor if you haven’t read her already. And there’s another book, if I can slip it in that I’ve just read this week by a woman called Elisabeth Gifford, and this is not coming out until next March. It’s called The Lost Lights of St Kilda.
For those who don’t know, St Kilda is an Island about a hundred miles off the Western Isles of Scotland right in the middle of the Atlantic, and people lived there until 1931 when they had to be evacuated because life had just become too hard and all their young people were leaving and the old people couldn’t do the manual work that was needed to stay there. They were cut off every winter because ships just couldn’t get into the harbor because of the high seas.
I can give you loads of recommendations, because, I read all the time.
I’ve always got at least one book on the go and at least one research book as well. One for pleasure fiction novel by another historical fiction writer.
So yes, reading is still my hobby.
The wonders of ‘Post It’ notes
Jenny: That’s wonderful that you can do it at the same time as you are. writing, because you do a lot of research.
Gill: I suppose in the daytime I’ll be doing the research and I’ve got a massive ‘Post it’ note habit, so I can carry the book anywhere with me and I don’t need to take notes as I go along.
I just stick little bits of Post It notes on each page. So the books end up looking like these bizarre kind of yellow hedgehogey type things and then I have to go back and try and remember why. I put that Post It note there when I’m making up my notes. But yeah, it works. It means that it’s portable.
I don’t have to be sitting at my desk and writing notes the whole time.
Jenny: But for your personal reading, do you still like to use paper or do you use digital readers?
Gill: I do use paper for personal reading for fun, but digital readers I’ll use as well for research. Especially if a book is cheaper, but it’s digital.
I always have a book in my handbag wherever I’m traveling, cause I get public transport round London, and you never know when you’re going to get stuck on a bus for half an hour, so you need to have a book with you. But there are some authors who I would just always buy as soon as it comes out.
People like Barbara Kingsolver for example., I’m the one that’s queuing up to get her new book the day it comes out.
What Gill would change – if anything
Jenny: We’re starting to come to the end of our time together. Circling around, looking back down the aisle of the years, at this stage in your career, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you would change?
Gill: It’s a very good question. And I don’t really think there is. I mean, I have some author friends, for example, who won big prizes with their first novel and then it’s quite hard to live up to that afterwards, whereas I feel that I’ve kind of gradually built my ship.
I really hope that I’m getting a little bit better with each novel because otherwise there’s no point in continuing unless you can keep improving in some way. That’s what I strive for. I would probably just do it the way. I did it all over again and I definitely would because I love this life.
It’s just so privileged to get paid to make things up in your head that other people then want to read. It’s the most extraordinary career, it’s just so wonderful to be read and, and have other people come back to you and comment on what they’ve read, what they think about your ideas and about your writing.
What’s next for Gill the writer
Jenny: Yes. What is next for Gill, the writer? What projects do you have that you’re looking to spend time on in, say, in the next 12 months?
Gill: Well, I have another novel coming out next summer, which is called Jackie and Maria, and people might be able to guess what that’s about. It’s the story of Jackie Kennedy, Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis, and that’s coming out in August, 2020.
So I’ll be broadcasting that. I haven’t really announced it yet. This is an exclusive for you! We haven’t got the cover ready yet. So I’ll probably announce it on social media once the cover is there. But yeah, that’s what I’ve been working on this year.
Jenny: You certainly like to focus on iconic figures. I mean both of those women are still fascinating. So perhaps the difficulty with that will be how much room was there for fiction?
Gill: Well, that was, it’s actually been the hardest book that I’ve written so far because I felt I had to stick to the facts, and I’ve told the stories, I’ve told each of their stories from their point of view.
The story of the Onassis women
I treat them turn about, Jackie first and then Maria, and then Jackie and then showing how their lives began to overlap as they came into the orbit of the same man. It was a very tricky one to write because I wanted to balance the stories. I wanted you to feel sympathy for both of them.
One of them clearly you feel massive sympathy for because her husband got shot dead, sitting beside her in a car. But bad things happened to Maria as well, and I wanted to keep them very level and balanced in the way that I wrote about them. I hope that’s worked.
You’ll find out next summer. I’ll send you one.
Jenny: What is the challenge for you of choosing these people who are already so well known. I mean, obviously there’s something that really draws you to these iconic women
The unanswered questions
Gill: That I think there are lots of questions in both of their lives. With Jackie. the big question is, why did she marry Onassis? Okay. He’s the richest man in the world, but she had plenty of rich men around her. What happened? Another thing that I bring up in the novel is that her sister Lee had been having an affair with Onassis just before she started, and that’s a really odd thing to do.
And Maria was still with them at the time. I just tried to explain the action. I mean, everybody knows what these women did and what happened to them, but I tried to explain what was going on in their heads and why they did what they did. That’s the benefit that you can have writing fiction rather than nonfiction.
You can presume to know their thoughts. So that’s what I’ve done. I’ve tried to imagine what they were thinking.
Where to find Gill online
Jenny: That’ll be fascinating, and I certainly would be very keen to see that one when it comes out. You’ve mentioned the pleasure you get from people commenting on your work.
How do you interact with your readers and where can they find you online?
Gill: I am so easy to find. I’ve got a website, Gillpaul.com that I’ll answer any message that you send me through the website, I’m on Twitter. I’m @Gill Paul author. I’m on Facebook @GillPaulAuthor, I’m an Instagram, @GillPaul.1 So yes, all over the place. I think I’ve got a blog site somewhere, but I have to confess, I haven’t blogged for a while. But I love hearing from readers and I always reply to them as well. It’s just fascinating. Having some communication, you know?
Otherwise you’re just sending your book out there into the world and not knowing what’s happening to it. I love it when people come back to me and tell me what they thought. And I love talking to book clubs by Skype or Facetime, and it’s so great to do this podcast, too Jenny. You’ve such great questions and it’s been really, really lovely.
Wrapping it up
Look it’s been really such fun. For someone like me who’s been a journalist, I do love books that combined fact and fiction. There’s something special about knowing that there is a basic historical accuracy about them. So yes, it’s really, really fun. It’s the best of both worlds.
Gill: Thank you very much. I do love doing it. So that, that was great to hear. Thank you.
Jenny: Now this just before we go, this business of swimming every day. Do I understand that you swim every day in an outdoor pool in England?
Midwinter swims. Hear the ice sing
Gill: Yes. It’s a natural pond on Hampstead Heath and it’s women only, which is really nice. And it’s got ducks and heron and a Kingfisher and moor hens and fish, and we just get in the water.
It’s becoming quite popular, it’s got better known. There have been a couple of films about it, and in the summer it’s quite busy now, but in winter . . . . And at the moment, the temperatures right down to 11 C, which is about 52F, so the numbers are thinning out under 12C.
You have your warnings that there is a risk of Sudden Immersion Syndrome, (SID) ) which can be fatal if you’re not a climatized It’s just the biggest buzz when you get into water and when you know when, when the pond is iced over, we will melt a strip, so we can still swim up and down in it and a not for very long, I’d say five minutes max at that time of year, but it’s a real buzz.
It’s a real serotonin high and a great thing to do in the middle of the day and the dark cold month of January when you’re not getting much sunlight to zip up there and, and have a swim in the ice.
Your head is down at the level of the ice and you can hear it singing. So the most beautiful sound, It’s great – and it’s very social.
Jenny: Wow. Perfectly amazing. Amazing.
Gill: It’s quite an eccentric bunch of us that do the all year swimming. But they’re all interesting women in different ways. So that’s part of the fun.
Jenny: Look, that’s lovely. I must just do it sometime to hear the ice singing. Again. thanks so much, Gill. It’s been such fun.
Gill: Thank you. Bye Bye.
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If you enjoyed hearing about Gill’s work you might also be interested in Chanel Cleeton’s Cuban histories or Renee Rosen’s historical fiction recreating America in the 50s and 60s.
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