San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Wartime lifesavers
In time for Women’s History Month, Lauren Willig’s new novel shines a light on the little-known Smith College Relief Unit
With a nod to Women’s History Month, bestselling author Lauren Willig’s new novel “Band of Sisters” shines a light on the little-known Smith College Relief Unit. These women risked their lives by going to France during World War I to relieve and aid civilians.
“‘Band of Sisters’ is the story of ordinary women doing extraordinary things. And when I say extraordinary things, I don’t mean breaking Nazi codes or parachuting into occupied Paris,” said the author of 21 previous books. “I’m talking about women who voluntarily left comfortable lives to sail overseas to a war zone and live in a freezing barrack surrounded by mud, with shells dropping overhead, so they could bring milk and medical care to undernourished babies and teach children traumatized by war how to play and sing again.
“So why is this book a great read for Women’s History Month — or any time? It’s my love song to female friendships and the power of women working together — to finding hope in times of darkness, and it restores to the historical narrative a group of everyday American heroines who deserve better than to have been forgotten.”
Willig’s books include the award-winning “Pink Carnation” series, “The Summer Country,” and three novels with co-authors Beatrix Williams and Karen White. She lives in New York City with her husband, two children and a much-used Nespresso machine. Warwick’s is hosting an online ticketed conversation with Willig at 5 p.m. Monday.
Q: How did you discover the Smith College Relief Unit?
A: I stumbled on the Smith College Relief Unit while I was researching Christmas in Picardy during World War I for another book. Up popped a memoir by a Smith alumna named Ruth Gaines, recounting her experience throwing Christmas parties for villagers right behind the front lines in 1917.
Of course, I did what any good procrastinating author would do and dropped everything to read the rest of Ruth Gaines’ memoir and discovered that in April of 1917, a charismatic and eccentric Smith alumna, Harriet Boyd Hawes, gave a stirring speech at the Smith Club in Boston announcing that there was a dire humanitarian crisis in France. The Germans had just been pushed back out of the territory they’d occupied since 1914, but before going they wreaked maximum havoc. They destroyed houses, poisoned wells, broke plows, sent the able-bodied off to work camps in Germany, and then ushered the old, the infirm and the very young back to their devastated villages, without the means of shelter or sustenance. Something needed to be done, and, according to Hawes, the people to do it were Smithies.
By July, the newly formed allfemale Smith College Relief Unit was on its way to France. Their mission to rebuild the lives of villagers in the Somme by providing shelter, food, education and medical care. There were two female doctors, several social workers and elementary school teachers, and an agricultural expert. They were to live in one of their assigned villages, the village of Grecourt, on the grounds of a ruined castle, while using their three trucks to drive across the war-ravaged landscape from village to village bringing milk for the children, building materials, furniture, fine-toothed combs, warm clothes, medical care and whatever else might be needed.
There was every reason to believe their mission should have been a disaster: The conditions they found were unimaginable, there was dissension within the group culminating in the expulsion of their director, their trucks broke down on a daily basis, the Germans kept shelling, and the British army wanted the women out of their war zone. What’s amazing to me about their story is that they somehow managed to rise above all of those things to not only succeed, but shine.
Q: How far did you deviate from the truth in your novel?
A: Usually, when I write my books, I’m triangulating from scant sources. In this book, I had quite the opposite problem: I was drowning in sources! The letters written home by the women of the Smith College Relief Unit were so detailed that I could tell you what they had for lunch on any given Tuesday in 1917. If something happened in the book, it almost certainly happened to the real-life women, as recounted in their letters, journals and memoirs.
My big deviation was inserting my own fictional characters in place of the real women — although some characters are more fictional than others. I wanted to be able to have free rein to create the emotional life of my central characters in a way I couldn’t with real people. My two heroines, Kate Moran and Emmie Van Alden, are almost entirely the product of my own imagination, although, of course, the events they experience and the things they accomplish are stolen directly from the lives of the real unit members.
Q: Please describe the letters at the beginning of each chapter and their inspiration.
A: “Band of Sisters” owes its existence to the librarians of Smith College Special Collections who digitized thousands of pages of letters by the real women of the Smith College Relief Unit. I have never, ever had a source of material like this before. Those letters … they were witty. They were heartfelt. They were alternately snarky and earnest. They detailed everything from the unit’s struggles with livestock to the shock of seeing the gravely wounded for the first time to the feuds among the unit members to the triumph of remembering how to make a “smudge” to drive off bugs.
Q: Will there be a book club guide for this book?
A: Yes! There will absolutely be a book club guide for this book, which will be available for download as a free PDF on my website. It will contain questions for book clubs as well as a great deal of background material. It will include maps of the region, pictures of the real Smith College Relief Unit in action, a lexicon of French phrases they used, recipes they cooked, links to their actual letters, and recommendations for further reading.
Q: How are you coping without Starbucks — where you usually write?
A: Oh, Starbucks. I’ve been there once in the past year, and my favorite barista told me they’d been worried about me, which was very sweet of them, and also says something about just how much time I used to spend there. I miss my favorite table, my favorite baristas, my caramel macchiatos, and my wonderful, quiet writing time like Napoleon on St. Helena missed being emperor. My current kingdom is the old roll-top desk I’ve had since grad school, which is shoved in the far corner of the bedroom, littered with everything from blank bookplates to bits torn from the back of envelopes so I’ll remember peoples’ addresses for Christmas cards, to scribbled sticky notes with plot ideas for books I wrote five years ago. It’s the desk I usually use only for programming my website, answering email, and other non-writing things once I get back from my daily writing stint at Starbucks, so it’s very odd to use it for actual, well, writing.
As any working mom knows, working with the children at home has been … challenging. When New York went into lockdown last March, my two pandemic panic purchases, in order of importance, were (a) a Nespresso machine, and (b) a lock for the bedroom door. My 2-year-old did not understand the concept of “Mommy needs to work now.” My 6-year-old did understand it, but generally chose to disregard it in favor of such necessities as “let me show you this cool new gymnastics move I’ve invented — right now.” So every day, at 11 a.m., I’d hand off the kids to my husband, brew a double shot of coffee, flee to the bedroom, and lock myself in for my two hours of writing time. Sometimes the toddler would pound on the door for a while. Occasionally there’d be hysterics. My 6-year-old, more ingenious, tried to pick the lock. It was not ideal. But fueled by Nespresso and adrenaline I managed to write the bulk of “Band of Sisters” in those two hours a day.
Now I just need to muster the energy to do that again with the next book and hope my first-grader hasn’t found any helpful videos on Youtube on lock-picking.
“If something happened in the book, it almost certainly happened to the real-life women, as recounted in their letters, journals and memoirs.”
Lauren Willig