Spinning Fact into Fiction

I have lived the story behind my novel, The Last Government Girl. My mother Helen Edward Smith, a twenty-year-old college graduate, with a year of teaching high school behind her, boarded the train for Washington in May of 1944. Earlier she had taken the Department of the Army’s clerical test at the bank, had passed, and been offered a job for the summer in Washington, D.C. Knowing my valedictorian mother, she probably received a near perfect score on that test.

Like Eddie in my novel, Mother left home for the first time when she boarded that train. She had been a day student at Emory and Henry College, so although she had accomplished a lot by the time she was twenty, she had not been able to break free. Her father kept tight hold of her. That’s why going to Washington was the greatest adventure of her life. Her memories of that sweltering summer remained clear and undiminished by time and made me long for this time before I was born.

Mother is the reason I read everything about the era. She inspired The Last Government Girl and would have loved that I took her story and turned it into a murder mystery for Mother relished crime, reading and discussing them.

Fictionalizing a story based on true events has been a challenge since I both write and teach creative nonfiction. My character Eddie, short for Edwina, and Mother have a lot in common, but they are not the same person. This was the most important shift in the writing of The Last Government Girl: separating mother from my main character.

Some things about Mother’s life I was not willing to change, even though I was encouraged to do so. My mother was exceptional, as is my Eddie. Mother was the first person in her Appalachian family to graduate from high school much less from university, where she majored in Latin. In all my writing, I have used this unspoken language as a metaphor for our family difficulties to communicate. But Latin didn’t move my story along the way knowledge of German would, so Eddie has a minor in German and is almost fluent.

How I miss my parents. Writing and researching The Last Government Girl brought me close to that young couple who met on a streetcar in June of 1944. Their meeting led to romance, marriage, me and my sister. For us, Washington will always be the city of love.