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Jillian Cantor is a USA Today bestselling author whose latest book, Half Life, puts double Nobel Peace Prize winning physicist Marie Curie on a “what if” path of life, tracking two very different options she could have taken, and examining the outcome of both.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in today’s Binge Reading Jillian talks about the movie that inspired Half Life, how Madame Curie’s scientific papers are still held in a lead box because of their high levels of radiation, and how she is re-telling F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, from the point of view of the female characters.
We’ve got three E book copies of Half Life to give away to three lucky readers in our Armchair Traveler Giveaway. Don’t forget to Enter the Draw to win.
But before we get to Jillian, just a reminder. If you enjoy the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. For the cost of a cup of coffee a month, you will receive bonus news of more great books and their authors, as well as having the satisfaction of knowing you’re supporting our creative team in producing new and exciting content.
Check it out at www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading.com
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
- The movie behind Half Life
- Triumph and tragedy in Marie Curie’s life
- The secret life that became front page news.
- The daughter that rejected science as a career
- Why strong women appeal
- The lure of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Where to find Jillian Cantor
Website: https://www.jilliancantor.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jilliancantor/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SarahPennerAuthor/
Twitter: @JillianCantor
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1651861.Jillian_Cantor
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
But now, here’s Jillian.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Jillian, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Jillian Cantor: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Jenny Wheeler: You are a USA Today bestselling author, you have got 11 international books for adults and teens to your credit,and your latest book is Half Life.
It’s based on the story of the Nobel Prize winning scientist, Marie Curie, and it is an Amazon Pick Of The Month, Best Book of the Month in Literature and Fiction for March 2021. You have got yourself in a great position, haven’t you?
Jillian Cantor: Yes, thank you. I was really excited that Amazon chose it.
Jenny Wheeler: It is not the first book you’ve had chosen as an Amazon pick either, so it’s a feather in your cap.
Jillian Cantor: Yes, it’s great. It is always exciting to see someone choose the book and support it and have some love for it. It was very exciting.
Jenny Wheeler: Half Life is a lovely parallel story, giving two versions of the life of the pioneering physicist, Marie Curie. You have said it was partly inspired by the movie Sliding Doors, a Gwyneth Paltrow movie from the late 1990s, where the character is shown having a contrasting and different life, depending on one key event, whether she made a train on time or whether she missed the train. Tell us about how that inspired you.
Temptation of alternate reality
Jillian Cantor: I have always loved that movie, but more than the movie, just the concept itself. I think about it in my own life a lot. I think we all do. We wonder what would have happened if we had made different choices in terms of career and school, and where that might have led us.
That is an idea I’ve always thought about in my own life, but in terms of Half Life I thought, what if this famous scientist had made a different choice. How would not only her life have been different, but the whole world and science as a whole, and thinking about how that could ripple out from there.
Jenny Wheeler: In Marie Curie’s case, the first life is that she marries her first love, and this was actually true to life. She had a relationship where she came very close to getting married. The young man did propose, but it never came to pass, so she goes to Paris to study and work, and we all know what the outcome of that second life was.
The world would be different
This double life approach is also very interesting when it’s somebody as famous as Marie, because, as you say, not only could her own life be changed, but globally science could have been changed. Tell us a bit about how the idea excited you.
Jillian Cantor: I was first drawn to writing about this one choice, which was based on fact, as you said. The real Marie was born and raised in Russian Poland, where women were not allowed to be educated, much less have a career. But she had planned to move to Paris to attend the Sorbonne and study.
She didn’t know what she was going to study at first, and in order to earn money to do that, she worked as a governess. While she was working for this family, she fell in love with the oldest son. They secretly got engaged and she decided she was going to throw away all her plans actually stay in Poland and marry him.
When his mother found out , she basically forbade him marrying her, saying that she was not good enough for her son. He broke up with her and she did move to Paris. I kept thinking. What if he hadn’t broken up with her? And what if he had defied his parents or changed his parents’ minds?
Real life Marie – and fictional one
She could have stayed in Poland and she never would have been educated; she wouldn’t have discovered radium. I still felt strongly that she would have done something in science, and she would have found a way to educate herself, but it would have been completely different than it ended up being.
That was what drew me into exploring the “what if?” angle.
Jenny Wheeler: She became the only person to win the Nobel Prize twice and the first woman, so she had a world-changing career. But I understand this was a tough book for you to write, that you started on it three times. I wondered, firstly, why the material seemed resistant at the beginning, and secondly, what gave you the drive to persist with it when it wasn’t coming together as you wanted it to?
Jillian Cantor: I was first drawn to Marie because I had read an article about her personal life, which I didn’t know anything about before then. I was drawn into the idea that she had all this deep personal tragedy in her life.
Extreme triumph and tragedy
She had all these amazing professional accomplishments – she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win it twice, but amidst all that there was this personal tragedy going on. I knew I wanted to write a story about her and get all of that in.
Initially when I started, I was going to write a straight biographical novel. I wrote about 50 pages, and I sent it to my agent. She read it and said something to the effect of, this is fine, but it doesn’t feel like a book you would write.
I realized she was right. A lot of my books tend to be drawn to a “what if?” element or have a unique angle to them. I felt like maybe I hadn’t settled on the right way to tell the story, so I started over again.
I decided I was going to write about her younger daughter, Ève, who became a writer, because she also had a fascinating life. I was very drawn to her. I wrote about 50 pages of that version, but I still kept feeling like I wasn’t telling the story I needed to tell.
I kept coming back to one little bit I had read about her and Kazimierz breaking up, and something else I had read that said that after she had passed away, there was a statue erected of her in front of her institute in Warsaw. He used to go there, and he would sit and eat his lunch and stare at the statue.
Former fiancé’s fascination
I kept thinking, I need to get this moment into my book. This is so interesting. Finally, it occurred to me, maybe this moment is my book. That is when it clicked with me that I wanted to tell this “what if?” version of her life, and I started over again.
Jenny Wheeler: Have you ever, in any of your previous books, had that experience of having to start it again?
Jillian Cantor: I have definitely made false starts or haven’t been going in the right direction. I don’t know that I’ve ever started again three times and still stuck with it, because there are some things I’ve given up on. I have started books and then thought, this isn’t the right way to tell the story, or this isn’t the right story I want to tell. Luckily, it doesn’t happen every time, but it does happen.
Jenny Wheeler: With Marie, it is fair to say that she did find true love in the end. I think her marriage with Pierre was one of both companionship and love, but she had quite demanding expectations of her daughters in terms of feeling that work or career should take precedence over private life.
Truly reflecting life as she lived it
Tell us a bit about that. I gather that is very much reflecting what she was like as a person.
I think one interesting thing about Marie is that I felt like she struggled, the way a lot of women do, with this work/motherhood balance. Even though I’m not a scientist, I would never win a Nobel Prize, but as a mother who works I felt I could relate to her in that regard. I found that a fascinating avenue to explore in the book as well.
Jenny Wheeler: Obviously for both Marie and Pierre, their health was very much affected by the closeness they had to the radium. I gather also Irène’s health was affected by her working with x-rays during the First World War. But I think you have said that she didn’t ever blame the science for their illness, and she actually felt that they had observed rules of safety in their labs, even when it was quite clear that their health had suffered. Tell us a bit about that.
Jillian Cantor: In hindsight, we can see that all the health problems they were having were caused by the radiation exposure. But they didn’t know that at the time. She really believed that none of her health problems, or her peers’ health problems, were caused by what they were doing in the lab.
Dangers of exposure not known
People would suggest that to her, and she would get angry and say, well, we get plenty of fresh air. She was always riding her bike, like she does in the book. They would go to the country, or to the beach every summer, so she felt like they were taking precautions.
But I think the science she was pioneering was so new that she really didn’t have a way to fully know what it was doing to her. All of her papers are still stored in lead-lined boxes in Paris, I believe, because they are so radioactive. So, all of her stuff that was in the lab, to this day is still so radioactive that you can’t touch it or see it.
Jenny Wheeler: That is absolutely amazing, isn’t it? It says something about what was going on.
You have written a couple of other historical fiction books as well set in World War II, and they have all been praised for the quality of the historical research you have brought to them. Tell us about how you approach a book when you are doing the research for it.
Jillian Cantor: It is different depending on the book. I feel like whatever I’m writing about I have to be obsessed with the topic on my own. I have to want to learn everything about it in any way I can. For Half Life, there has been a lot written about Marie Curie.
There are a lot of biographies published, so I have read them all. My favorite was the one written by her daughter, Ève, because I felt it was such a close, personal look, but also written from the perspective of a writer, not from the perspective of a scientist, which I loved.
The value of good research
It was also very fascinating to see what she included as well as what she left out. She left out everything about her mother’s affair with Paul, just skipped over it like it never happened. I did catch all that in the other biographies. Most of my research was biographies. There is also a lot online about her, the Marie Curie Institute has a great website.
For my other books, it’s varied. The Lost Letter is about a stamp engraver and a stamp collector, so I had to learn about stamps, which I didn’t know anything about going in. I went to a big stamp library and museum and spoke with the librarians there. I also went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum to research the Resistance.
A wartime novel of hope
It is really about what is interesting me and my own selfish need to learn more about this topic, and then I have the fun of getting to write a book about it too.
Jenny Wheeler: The Lost Letter looked at a mysterious love letter and the way it connected generations of Jewish families. That was set in Austria and looked at the Resistance in Austria during World War II. Tell us about the other historical – In Another Time.
Jillian Cantor: In Another Time is about a violinist and a bookshop owner in Germany. It takes place both in the five or six years before World War II and the five or six years after World War II, and it alternates their stories.
A WWII novel of love and hope
You get to see the bookshop owner’s point of view before World War II, and then the violinist’s after, when she doesn’t have any memory of what happened to her and has to try to figure out what happened to the bookshop owner, who she fell in love with before the War.
It does take place around World War II, but it’s not exactly during World War II. It’s more about the rise of fascism in Germany leading up to the war, and then about the recovery in Europe after the war, so it is a little bit different.
Jenny Wheeler: I have seen a lot of praise for the picture you give of Berlin in those years before the war. It was a fairly controversial time, wasn’t it? They were living a very fast life in Berlin before the war began.
Jillian Cantor: Yes, it was. I was writing that book in early 2017. Living in America, it was starting to be a bit of a crazy time here, and it was crazy to see all the parallels between what was happening in the early 1930s Berlin and what was happening in the 2017-2018 United States.
Jenny Wheeler: Slight rise of right-wing hysteria, fake news as well.
The book before Half Life, I think it might have been one of your teen books, a book called The Code for Love and Heartbreak, featured a college girl, a Maths genius who sets up a matchmaking app and finds that love is rather more complicated than she might have imagined.
This is quite a definite change of pace from the books we have been talking about up to now. Tell us a little about how you got to write The Code for Love and Heartbreak.
The Code For Love and Heartbreak
Jillian Cantor: The Code for Love and Heartbreak is a young adult novel. It’s a re-imagining of Jane Austen’s Emma, but it’s set in modern day high school. It is a contemporary novel, it’s not a historical novel. My main character is a teenage girl, not an adult woman, but in a lot of ways I feel like it’s similar to my other books.
I am always drawn to strong female characters and strong female stories. The Code for Love and Heartbreak definitely fits that vein, but it’s a little lighter and a little more fun too. It was fun to write.
Jenny Wheeler: The stereotype for women is that they are very empathetic, great connectors, the communicators in families and that kind of picture. Emma is not really like that.
You say at one point that she’s a genius at Math but not so great with people, and there was a little bit of a similarity there with Marie and the way that she was very business-like in her relationships in the lab. It was work first and socializing very much came second in her life.
Do you think that sometimes women have to bear the cost of focusing on their work if they want to get ahead, and can’t afford to be that social creature society expects?
Laboratory a place to call home
Jillian Cantor: Yes, definitely. I think that’s true today as much as it was during Marie Curie’s time. Emma experiences that in my modern-day high school, as well as Marie did in the early 1900s in Paris. They are sort of similar. Emma says throughout the book that Math is better than people because Math makes sense and people don’t. I think Marie probably felt that way about science in a lot of ways, too.
Jenny Wheeler: She could understand and anticipate what science might do, whereas with people it was rather more unpredictable.
Jillian Cantor: I think with Marie too, she had so much tragedy in her life from a young age. Her mother died when she was pretty young; one of her sisters also died when she was young. Not to give spoilers for the book, but she had a lot of tragedy befall her, and so the lab is the place where she can always find her home, and it makes sense, whereas these other tragedies don’t always make sense.
The Great Gatsby from another POV
Jenny Wheeler: You have got a book coming out in a few months’ time, or maybe it’s early next year. It is another historical, and once again it examines the role of women in famous situations that have already been explored in other ways. It’s a re-imagining of The Great Gatsby from the point of view of three of the key women characters.
Tell us how you came to do this, which, once again, is a bit of a change of pace from what you’ve been doing with the other books.
Jillian Cantor: The Great Gatsby has always been one of my favorite novels. It is one I come back to and reread every few years or so, and I always find something different to admire about it. But I’ve always wondered about the women and what the women were thinking, and what they were doing when they were off the page.
Stories of overlooked women
Fitzgerald doesn’t focus on them very much. The book is narrated by Nick who was a man and also an outsider, but it’s also very focused on Jay Gatsby. My novel explores Daisy and Jordan and Myrtle and her sister Catherine. It takes place in the five years leading up to the summer of The Great Gatsby and extends a little bit afterwards.
I keep saying that it’s like Big Little Lies meets The Great Gatsby, because there is also a mystery with J Gatsby’s murder, and you get to see how all the women were involved with him. It was a really fun book to write, and it is different than Half Life in a lot of ways, but again, all of my work tends to focus on the women’s perspective and strong women’s roles. Beautiful Little Fools definitely does that too.
Jenny Wheeler: Is it the only book you’ve had with a murder in it, so far?
Jillian Cantor: Oh, my goodness, you’re stumping me. I’m not sure. No, it’s definitely not. My novel, The Hours Count, which is told from the point of view of a neighbor of the Rosenbergs, begins with someone running over someone with a car. So it’s not my only murder. I had to think for a minute though.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. I know many writers, when they get to the level where you’ve written 11 books, find it quite hard to remember back to the very early ones.
Life before Jillian began writing
Jillian Cantor: It is. I get very focused on what I’m doing at the moment, and I put all my mental energy into it. Even in previous books, sometimes I can’t remember the names of the minor characters. If I am Skyping with a book club or something, it’s very embarrassing sometimes.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning to look at your wider career, away from the focus on the specific books, tell us a bit about your life and career before you started writing fiction. Did you have a life outside of your home before you started writing full-time?
Jillian Cantor: I taught college for about 10 years. I went to college, I went to graduate school, and then I taught for about 10 years, but I was writing at the same time. So the answer to that is yes and no. I did have a job outside of my house that wasn’t writing, but I was also writing at the same time.
Jenny Wheeler: That was teaching English and literature?
On the road to publication
Jillian Cantor: Yes.
Jenny Wheeler: How did you make that switch to fiction writing? Was it something you always wanted to do?
Jillian Cantor: Not always, but when I started writing, I knew that I was going to write fiction. I majored in English when I was in college, and for a few months I thought I was going to go into journalism. Then I had an internship with the paper and absolutely hated journalism. I was very bored, so I realized the type of writing I like is fiction.
It was pretty early when I started writing that I knew I was going to write fiction, and when I was teaching, I was working on my novel at the same time, trying to sell my novels. They went hand in hand.
Jenny Wheeler: What was the very first one you published?
Beginning at the beginning
Jillian Cantor: It was called The September Sisters, and it was a young adult novel. It came out in 2009, and it was about a teenage girl whose older sister disappeared, and what happens to her life in the aftermath.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s interesting. It also parallels with Big Little Lies again I think. Wasn’t that the one where somebody disappears?
Jillian Cantor: Yes but published before Big Little Lies.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I’m sure.
When you look back and consider your pathway as a writer, is there one decision, or one quality or talent or skill you have brought to your work, that has helped you with your breakthrough as a creative person?
Jillian Cantor: I think perseverance in general. Writing on its own is hard. Half Life was my tenth novel, but I started over three times, as I said. Writing, and getting it right, and revising, is hard. But then publishing is also hard on top of that.
Learning to handle rejection
There is a lot of rejection and if you give up after you hear “No”, you can’t get very far in publishing, because you will hear “No” a lot. I think persevering, pushing through, keeping on writing through all of that.
Jenny Wheeler: Is there anything you would change now with the benefit of hindsight?
Jillian Cantor: I feel every book I wrote, whether it ultimately was published or not, did help me grow as a writer. I don’t know that I would change anything, because I feel like if I did, it wouldn’t have gotten me to where I am today.
Jenny Wheeler: Are there any unpublished manuscripts in the bottom drawer?
Jillian Cantor: Yes, definitely. There are several.
Jenny Wheeler: I do think that for people who want to be writers, that’s very encouraging to hear, because sometimes we are left with the impression that for people like you, who obviously have had a successful career, it was plain sailing. It is quite nice to hear that sometimes you do have to overcome knockbacks.
‘Plain sailing’ not the rule . . !
Jillian Cantor: It is usually not clear sailing, just lot of challenges in writing and publishing. But I love to write, and I don’t think I could do anything else even if I wanted to, so you have to keep at it.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Jillian as reader, because we are The Joys of Binge Reading and people who listen to this podcast are often looking for new books they want to read and new authors they want to follow. Tell us a bit about your reading tastes. Are you a binge reader or just a very committed reader, and what recommendations would you have for our listeners?
Binge reader when not writing
Jillian Cantor: I am definitely a binge reader. I tend to read in a big chunk when I’m not working on a book. A lot of times, when I’m working on a book, I don’t read at all. I will read research and nonfiction, but I don’t read any fiction, so when I finish a book, I have to catch up.
It’s not that I stop buying books. I continue to buy books constantly. They pile up in my office, and when I am in between writing, I binge read all of them. So definitely binge reading, and I read a wide variety. I read historical fiction, of course, but definitely don’t read historical fiction while I’m writing historical fiction. I read YA, I read romance, I read mysteries and thrillers. I read a wide variety of stuff.
What Jillian is reading now
Two days ago, I finished The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, which was really interesting. It is about a writer, which I loved, and I just ordered the new Reese Witherspoon pick, Seven Days in June by Tia Williams. I think I’m going to read that next, it looks really good.
Jenny Wheeler: We are coming to the end of our time together, so circling around, looking back down the tunnel of time and looking forward again, what’s next for Jillian the writer? We have mentioned the Gatsby one that is coming out next, but what are you working on now, and have you got any new projects?
Jillian Cantor: I just finished the copy edits for Beautiful Little Fools, which comes out January 4th in the US. It has been about three weeks since that has been completely done, so I haven’t really started anything new. I have a little idea I’m not going to talk about that I’ve been playing around with it. We’ll see where it goes. I am definitely at my binge reading stage right now.
Jenny Wheeler: It is always interesting to me – some writers have a little notebook where they have got all these masses of new ideas, and they almost know immediately what their next book is going to be. But it sounds like you are someone who likes to take stock and give yourself a little space before you decide what’s next.
Jillian Cantor: I don’t have a notebook because I’m not that organized, but I do always write down ideas on the notes app in my phone, so I have a lot of random notes on my phone, and I do have an idea of what I’m going to do next, but I need to take a little time to figure out how I’m going to write it and what exactly I want to be saying. I haven’t started yet.
Where to find Jillian online
Jenny Wheeler: I’m sure you like to make contact with your readers, and with this year of pandemic it has been harder to have face-to-face contact, so how do your readers find you online and where do you most prefer to communicate?
Jillian Cantor: www.jilliancantor.com is my website, and there is a form on there, on the contact page, if you want to email me directly. It also has my social media – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. I see messages on there, so any of that.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Has the pandemic affected you too much?
Jillian Cantor: It has affected all of us, especially in the US. In terms of my writing, I was still able to write, which was great, but it has affected us in a lot of ways.
Jenny Wheeler: Probably with a launch of a book. Did you have something that came out last year that was affected?
Living with the pandemic
Jillian Cantor: It came out in March, before everyone was vaccinated, so that was definitely a different sort of launch, without being able to go somewhere. I have not been in a bookstore and seen it in person yet. I’m vaccinated now, I should go to a bookstore. I missed that joy of the first week of walking into a bookstore and seeing my book somewhere. I haven’t done that yet.
Jenny Wheeler: Hopefully with Beautiful Little Fools, you will be able to do that.
Jillian Cantor: I really hope so.
Jenny Wheeler: We will have the links for all of your social media and your books on the show notes for this episode, which will be posted online so people can easily find them and follow up if they want to.
Thanks so much, Jillian, for being with us today. It’s been great talking.
Jillian Cantor: Thank you for having me.
If you enjoyed hearing about Jillian Cantor’s Marie Curie book you may also enjoy Allison Pataki’s World Changing Women Binge Reading episode
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