How do you know someone who has made a career of being unknowable–even if that “someone” is your mother or father? In her rich and transparent memoir Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop explores her relationship with her parents, who were a part of the “Georgetown set” in the years after World War Two. With poignant and at times heart-wrenching honesty, Elizabeth recounts what it was like to love detached parents who were used to keeping secrets.
Her father, a war hero who became a famous columnist in the ’50s, and her British mother, who transcribed and interpreted enemy code for MI5, rubbed shoulders with the Washington elite. This moving memoir especially considers her mother, who married a dashing soldier at 18 and then went on to deal with a life of loneliness that she often supplemented with alcohol. And as in the best memoirs, Elizabeth is both honest and compassionate in her portrayal of an often distant and cool mother.
I’ve always thought the challenge of writing a memoir would be enormous. How do you balance the truth–which, let’s face it, can be ugly and next to impossible for someone outside your family to understand–with grace? Another challenge I would face would be the interest factor. I’m not trying to be modest when I say my life just hasn’t been fascinating enough to warrant a book. But I can confidently say Elizabeth’s life story does rate high on the interest scale. Spies. Politics. Secrets. I mean, come on!
I’m not the only one who thinks the book is outstanding. Daughter of Spies was longlisted for the 2022 Memoir Magazine Book Awards; is the 2022 Bronze Medal Winner, Memoir Category, Living Now Awards, and was Runner Up, Memoir, New England Book Festival.
I asked Elizabeth a few questions about what compelled her to write Daughter of Spies.
The “Why” Behind the Book
Q. Why did you write this book?
A. It was a book I had to write. Once I realized that my famous journalist father, Stewart Alsop, had gotten so much of the spotlight, I started interviewing my mother about her experiences as a child growing up in Gibraltar and as an MI5 decoding agent during the war. I learned to my surprise that her life had been as exciting as his in different ways. But then I had to confront the losses I felt as a child growing up with parents who got in the habit of keeping secrets from one another when they first met, while serving as WW II operatives.
The Challenges
Q. What was the most rewarding aspect of writing it?
A. The research became absolutely necessary when I realized how little I knew about my mother’s childhood in Gibraltar and her life during the war in London. I returned from Gibraltar with a photo book filled with pictures familiar to her from her childhood. In the days when she couldn’t remember who had come for lunch an hour before, she picked up that book two or three times a day and travelled back in time to her own past. A few years later, I made a pilgrimage to all the places where she had lived in England from her convent school north of London to the baronial castle in Yorkshire where she met my father. I kept a journal of that tour which you can see here as a flip book on my website. Although I always enjoy the writing and the revisions, in this case, the travel was the most rewarding aspect as it opened up doors to my mother’s life in ways that research on the internet or in a library could never have done.
Q. How difficult was it to be transparent and honest about yourself and about your family (especially your mother)?
A. It took a number of revisions to peel away the layers of the onion and get down to the core of what it was like to grow up in a family that appeared privileged on the outside but was in many ways, haunted by the secrets our parents kept not only from each other but from themselves. And in the end, I really focused on Tobias Wolff’s advice to a memoir writer. “Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity.”
Lots of Changes
Q. Did anything change drastically from your first draft to the final version?
A. Yes. In the first draft, I tried to tell the story of my parents’ meeting and love affair in England during the war, but the telling felt flat on the page because I wasn’t there. I was simply reporting what I’d heard or what I’d read in letters or books. I knew I needed to bring myself on to the page from the beginning. That’s when I decided to tell the story as a braided narrative, moving from the 1940s to present day where I struggled with the challenges of caring for a parent with dementia.
However, when it came to my childhood in Part II of the book, I stayed very firmly in that time and in the point of view of a witnessing child. To be honest, it wasn’t until later that I realized I didn’t want to the reader to empathize with my mother while I was telling the stories of my own childhood. I wanted to have the spotlight stay on me because as a child, I had felt so overshadowed and diminished by my mother’s alcoholism and my father’s distance.
In Part III, I return not only to the braided narrative but to a comforting sense of closure with my mother as she leaves me.
Lessons for All
Q. What do you hope is the take-away for readers?
A. I hope a reader sees in the end, that despite what we children suffered because of my mother’s penchant for secrecy and her dependence on alcohol throughout our childhood, she was a courageous woman who had, in fact, lived an examined life. With the arrogance of a child, I had made assumptions about her on both counts that proved to be wrong. It took the entire process of writing a memoir to get to the core of who she was and how deeply, in her own quiet way, she loved me.
Elizabeth is the author of over sixty works of fiction for all ages, including the novels Island Justice and In My Mother’s House. Robert Stone selected her short story, “The Golden Darters,” for Best American Short Stories. Her fantasy novels for children, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle, are considered classics of the genre. Daughter of Spies is her first memoir. You can purchase it here, here, and here.
Leslie Watkins
How interesting. Thanks for sharing this one, Tracey.
Tracey D. Buchanan
A fascinating family!
Nancy
This makes me want to read her book!
Tracey Buchanan
You should! It’s interesting