Show notes
Alexandra Joel’s latest book The Royal Correspondent is one for fans of The Crown TV series – revisiting as it does swinging London in the 60s, seen through the eyes of a young Australian journalist, coming from the wrong side of the tracks, promoted to covering the British royal family.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and in today’s Binge Reading episode Alexandra talks about the scandalous family story – one from her own family – that got her started in fiction, her father’s rags to riches story, and how, having discovered fiction writing as her third career, she doesn’t plan to change to a fourth any time soon.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
How her father’s amazing life inspired The Royal Correspondent
Her grandmother’s scandalous escape
Grace Wood – a remarkable Australian in Paris
The magic of Mary Quant
Why she loves her third career
The writers she loves – including Rose Tremain and Benjamin Black
Where to find Alexandra Joel:
Website : https://www.alexandrajoel.com/
Facebook: @AlexandraJoelAuthor
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexandrajoelauthor/
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 Alexandra.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Alexandra, and welcome to the show. It’s so good to have you with us.
Alexandra Joel: I am delighted to be talking to you, Jenny.
Alexandra Joel – Australian historic fiction author
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve had a stellar career in journalism, and we’ll talk about that a little later, but you have now very successfully transitioned to writing fiction and your most recent book, The Royal Correspondent, is an entertaining revisiting of 1960s London through the eyes of a young Australian journalist, Blaise Hill. It’s one for fans of The Crown for starters, isn’t it?
As we’ve said, you started as a journalist yourself. How did you make that transition to being a novelist?
Introducing author Alexandra Joel
Alexandra Joel: As a child, I learned to read very young and I was immediately captured by the concept of story. I read and read. I used to tell stories to my classmates, but I was so in awe of novelists, I didn’t think I could ever do it, so I stuck to nonfiction. When I wrote my memoir about my great-grandmother Rosetta, something shifted within me.
To set the scene, Rosetta was a happily married (so we thought) very young woman in Edwardian Melbourne with a husband and a five-year-old child, and she ran away with a half-Chinese fortune teller called Zeno the Magnificent. The pair completely reinvented themselves. He said he was a distinguished doctor from Japan; she said she was American.
Alexandra’s great-grandmother and Zeno together – Picture ABC.
They went over to London and they became the toast of the town. I have letters from royalty and wonderful telegrams saying things like, please come and stay at my villa in Cap Martin because Princess Charlotte will be there, and Empress Eugenie is popping in. But the whole thing was invented. They led an incredible life, but she never saw her child again, and that child was my grandmother.
A scandalous grandmother’s story
When I wrote the book, I used two voices. One was their life, told using the techniques of fiction because after all, whoever knew what they were saying – was it true, was it false? Nobody knew. The other was grounded in fiction because it was the story of me looking for her.
When I finished the book and it had a very good reception, I started thinking, maybe I could channel my great grandmother. She led a life which was filled with glamour and adventure but most of all with invention. I thought maybe I can do that too, except I’m going to do it a little more safely and conservatively through books. And it all started happening.
Rosetta – A Scandalous True Story by Alexandra Joel
Jenny Wheeler: That’s a fantastic story. We were going to get onto Rosetta a little later, but now that you’ve mentioned her, it is an amazingly scandalous story. In some ways, if a novelist tried to produce it, you might be accused of being too fantastical. How much of her did you know before you started, and did it change your view of your family history as you did your research?
Alexandra Joel: I knew nothing other than my grandmother used to say, my mother ran away and left me. She didn’t want me. So it was a family tragedy and a sense of great distress. We didn’t even know her name. My mother referred to her as “that woman”. She used to say “that woman” ruined my mother’s life.
Running away with fortune teller
When my grandmother died, my father, who was an ex-journo, decided he would track down this mysterious woman. He began to find these incredible stories and people who had known her who were able to tell him about her. He was the one who said to me, Al – which is what you get called when you have had three older brothers – Al, you have to write this book.
It’s an amazing story where fact and fiction are very difficult to discern, but what is certainly true are the facts of this incredible life. I can tell you, there is nothing weirder than reading in the pages of the Melbourne newspaper, The Age, about your great-grandmother’s scandalous divorce and her adultery with this fortune teller.
Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely, considering the heights your dad reached, which we’ll talk about as well, but that has been optioned for TV as well, hasn’t it? How is that progressing as far as getting to the TV screens?
Alexandra Joel: I would have to say at this stage, slowly. I have seen a script for a first episode or two. It’s quite an expensive project to mount as all shows which are historical are, and also because of the locations overseas in London and in France, which are not possible to access at the moment.
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It’s mothballed probably for the next couple of years, but that’s fine by me. I have plenty of books to keep writing in the meantime.
Jenny Wheeler: Switching back to The Royal Correspondent, I think you’ve mentioned that this is about to be released in the US as well, isn’t it?
Alexandra Joel: That’s correct. Very exciting.
Jenny Wheeler: The US has such an interest in the royal family as well that it has got a good chance of attracting attention. It’s a rags to riches story of a young Sydney girl from the wrong side of the tracks who ends up in Fleet Street covering the British royal family.
From poverty to Queen’s honours
The way you tell it, it’s perfectly feasible that this could have happened although she did have a very difficult journey to get there, as was typical in those years for women in journalism. But it was very much inspired by your father’s own remarkable life history, wasn’t it? Tell us a bit about him.
Alexandra Joel: My dad’s name was Asher Joel or the Honorable Sir Asher Joel as he became, although nobody would have thought this was possible because he was born to an impoverished family that lived in one of Sydney’s seediest inner-city suburbs.
His father Harry said to him, there are only four ways to climb out of this dump, and that’s by the four P’s. What are the four P’s? my father asked, and his father replied priest, police, pugilist as in pro boxer, or press. For reasons of either religion, physiology or sheer inclination, the first three were ruled out. Dad went for press.
Prince Phillip inspecting naval cadets in Auckland in 1949. Credit: Geoff Roberts et al. 1949. Walsh Memorial Library, The Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT). (Alexandra’s father was a friend of Prince Phillip’s from naval days.)
He left school at the age of 14 and joined a newspaper which is still going today, The Daily Telegraph, and there began his stellar career. He ended up organizing virtually every state event of significance from way back in George V’s coronation celebrations up to royal tours, the visit to Australia of the Pope, of President Johnson, the opening of the Opera House.
He did it while he was in parliament, but he took on all these extra duties without charging anything because he believed in service. Because of that, the Queen knighted him not once but twice. It was a pretty extraordinary trajectory.
Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely. It sounds like he invented another ‘P’ as well, politician.
Alexandra Joel: I guess that’s true, although he always thought of himself as a parliamentarian. Perhaps yet another ‘P’. As I considered my father’s extraordinary, and one could say improbable life, I began thinking, what if he had been born a girl? What obstacles would she have faced? And who might she have become? That was the starting point for The Royal Correspondent.
Challenge of recreating the past
Jenny Wheeler: The street in Sydney that you give Blaise as her home is actually the street where your father grew up, but I’m sure that by the time you were growing up, you were quite some distance from that street. Was it hard to go back and recreate that period and place?
Lieut. Asher Joel – Australian Royal Navy in Second World War – Won a US Bronze star and served in intelligence and liaison officer with General Douglas MacArthur
Alexandra Joel: Surprisingly, it was not. There was a reason for this. Many, many years ago, dad had a small painting commissioned of that very house so that he would never forget it and he made sure, when I was a teenager, that he brought me back there. I have the most vivid memory of walking down the street with him, as he told me the story of the four P’s.
Then quite recently, because I love to walk the walk of all my characters, I went back, I walked the street and re-experienced it as an adult. Then I interviewed lots of people who were around in those days. I did interviews with journalists and research and gradually, layer by layer, it became extraordinarily vivid.
Jenny Wheeler: Was that street much the same or has it been gentrified?
Alexandra Joel: It has been gentrified. It’s certainly not as run down, with its rubbish in the road and the outhouses and the lack of heating and terrible ventilation, although – and I don’t want to be disrespectful to the good people of Fotheringham Street – it’s a long way from the prestige property of Sydney’s leafy North Shore or its harborside suburbs.
Quant & Profumo – 60s milestones
Jenny Wheeler: Many of the events you cover in the book, like in the TV show The Crown, are milestone events of their time – the rise of Carnaby Street and Mary Quant, the Profumo affair comes into it, Princess Margaret’s marriage to Tony Armstrong-Jones. I imagine that as a journalist you probably had a lot of experience at researching it, but did you find weaving the fiction into it a bit tricky at times?
Alexandra Joel: It’s always a nightmare, because on one hand you have fixed events. You can’t fudge a royal wedding or a landmark event like the Profumo affair, which brought down a government. But then you have your characters’ arc, and they have to mesh seamlessly, so that’s always a juggling act. But I love to do it because I feel it gives the reader such a layered experience and it’s so much richer than it would be otherwise.
Also, I use the period and its events to illuminate the nature of the character, so that you can see the changes that are going on in society mirroring in the character – the way she develops and alters herself and discovers that life is a great deal more complex, but also more exciting than she could possibly have imagined.
Who was Mary Quant and why did the VA do an exhibition of her fashion designs? Picture Credit Mirror newspaper UK
Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting, the aspect where at the very beginning, when Blaise starts in journalism, more or less the only place women can go are the women’s pages, and they are regarded as being not really “proper journalism” by a lot of the men, anyway. I Imagine you probably spoke to a number of women who can still remember those days, even though they would be fairly old now, but who actually lived through that.
Alexandra Joel: I absolutely did, and their memories remained vivid. They had a tough, tough time and some of the stories have found their way into the book, such as the time Blaise is cornered in the dark room by a couple of photographers who pounce on her.
#Me Too in the 1960s working world
She manages to escape, she rushes to the editor in a state of great distress and he says, are you alright? She says, well, yes. And he goes, well, what do you mean? Boys will be boys, go back to your desk, write some news. No matter what happened, it was up to women to fend for themselves. It was actually quite shocking.
But one of the appeals of journalism, if you could battle your way into it, even if you were confined to the women’s pages, was that unlike every other profession in the late fifties and early sixties, women were not forced by law to earn only 75% of a male wage. Journalism was the exception. Maybe they thought there would never be women in journalism, because women became paid exactly the same as men. A big deal to a poor girl.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s right. The book before this one, The Paris Model, also has a very strong kernel of fact at its heart. It’s the story of an Australian model called Grace Woods who was a mannequin for Dior immediately after the Second World War, in the late 1940s. Her story, amazingly, got a bit obscured in the mists of time and it’s re-emerged. How did she come to your attention?
The Paris Model – based on the true life of Australian model Grace Woods in Paris
Alexandra Joel: It’s fascinating the way one book leads into another, and often I think of myself as a story catcher out there with my butterfly net. Sometimes I pounce and sometimes a wonderful butterfly flutters its way into the net.
After Rosetta was published, to my surprise, I began getting letters and emails and messages from people around Australia who wanted to relay their own family story. It was as if I had released the rattling skeleton in my closet and they felt they could do so as well. These were people I didn’t know at all, and I was incredibly touched by the privilege of being allowed into their secrets.
The privilege of knowing secrets
But the interesting thing is, it’s often the person you know best. There will be a corner of their life which remains a mystery. I was sitting with a good friend I’d known for years and years in her beautiful garden, sipping a cup of tea, telling her about this phenomenon and she said, I don’t think I’ve ever told you about my mother.
When I heard the extraordinary circumstances, particularly of Grace’s birth, it was like falling in love. I said immediately, I have to tell your mother’s story. It’s going to be fiction, I’m going to invent lots of it, but I need to capture your mother.
Can I do it? She wasn’t sure about that. She went off and had a family meeting and came back a week later – I was rather on tender hooks – and she said, yes, we all decided Grace would love it. Which was a big relief to me as I was so excited, I had already begun writing.
Grace Woods was a real person – she has passed away now. Her parents, as I have described them, were real. The fabulous sheep and wheat station she grew up on existed. She was a model, she was beautiful and spirited. I did give her a fictional life in Paris.
Grace Woods – Paris model
She was a model but I used part of my mother’s life, because my mother was a post-war Dior model in Sydney for David Jones. So, again, it was a blending of fact and fiction, but the funny thing was the incredible circumstances, the amazing coincidence, which drives the story forward, which of course, I can’t reveal.
When the manuscript went to my publisher she said, I love this story, but this coincidence you’ve made up, isn’t this a bit farfetched? And I was able to say, Anna, that is the part that is absolutely true, which just goes to show that old maxim – fact is truly stranger than fiction.
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But I was thrilled, and what I aim for is this sense that fiction and fact are blended so seamlessly, and the story is so plausible that it stands on its own.
Jenny Wheeler: In your own career as a journalist, I don’t know if you’d regard it as the peak, but one of the peaks would have been your time as Harper’s Bazaar editor. That would have given you a tremendous amount of background and, as you’ve mentioned, your mum was a mannequin as well, but you would have had a very strong grasp of the fashion aspect of it from your previous work, I would imagine.
Fashion history’s appeal
Alexandra Joel: That is true. What I should mention is that much earlier, I wrote a book before I was editor and another book after that. They were the histories of fashion in Australia but set in a global sense. It’s a sort of history of Australia told through dress.
I am something of a fashion historian. I have been on the board of our Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, which has a very important fashion collection.
Parade: the Story of Fashion in Australia by Alexandra Joel.
I’ve always loved the detail of dress and, as you would have seen in my books, I think it illuminates the period incredibly well, whether it’s a hand buttoned boot in the Edwardian era, whether it’s a fabulous Dior gown in the post forties, or whether it’s the revolutionary miniskirt, which makes its appearance down the Kings Road in The Royal Correspondent.
Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely. I loved the detail of the window displays for Mary Quant too. It was quite obvious that you’d really gone into it and it brought it alive. I was alive at that time, but I never knew about the window displays and that was fantastic.
Matching fact up with fiction
Alexandra Joel: That’s something I discovered only recently because I was fortunate enough, when we could travel, in 2019 to go to a stunning exhibition. It was the very first retrospective of Mary Quant’s work which was on at the V and A in London.
I was able to gain all sorts of details and also to get written information which hadn’t been available before, so I didn’t have to make up those windows. Not one jot. They all existed. The model with the fishing rod ending up in a golf fishbowl with live gold fish swimming around is all completely true as are the other amazing, show stopping windows.
Jenny Wheeler: Aside from your journalism, you have established a practice as a psychotherapist and counselor in more recent years. That seems like quite a change of pace from your previous work. I was curious as to what attracted you to take that path and develop that as an extra sideline.
Alexandra Joel: I was invited onto the board of the Foundation for the Royal Hospital for Women, which was located in a historic site in Sydney. It was moving to be part of the Prince of Wales Campus, and we needed an enormous amount of money in order to do that. I became President of the Foundation and worked extremely closely with the hospital over a period of some five years.
An unusual change of career
Through doing that, I realized there were needs in the community that I felt weren’t being met. Strangely, when I was doing fundraising – which wasn’t events, but it was with major benefactors and corporations – usually the people you talk to are men and those men wanted to speak about their wife’s miscarriages or their mother’s breast cancer. I realized they’d never talked about it before.
That inspired me to think, I want to go back, I want to do further study. I was a therapist for 10 years and I know people say, isn’t that weird, but I say to them, journalists spend their lives in rooms asking questions. So do therapists. I was terribly privileged to do the work. It was tough, but to be able to walk in another’s shoes, to have them trust you with their stories, is a tremendous grace.
Merivel – Rose Tremain’s Restoration novels are an Alexandra Joel favorite
By the end of that 10 years, my life circumstances had changed. I really missed the creativity of writing. I had the benefit of hearing stories for a decade. I learned to suspend judgment and that was my way into writing Rosetta, because I had to put aside all that family animosity and think, why would a woman do this? Why would she run away from her husband?
Why would she leave her child behind and never see her again? So it was a bridge. As I explained earlier, Rosetta was a bridge to The Paris Model, and now I have The Royal Correspondent.
Married off, assaulted, and stuck
Jenny Wheeler: I dare say that work helped you also to imagine the sort of turmoil Rosetta herself had gone through leaving her daughter behind. No matter whether she ever looked back or not, she can’t have done it without feelings.
Alexandra Joel: It did help me to understand. It helped me to suspend judgment and also to focus on the context of the times. She was married off as a teenager. In her view, she was assaulted on her wedding night. She knew absolutely nothing. She was stuck. She had no prospects. She was an intelligent, beautiful, spirited woman.
You could just imagine. There you are, with a child on one hip, stirring the soup and you go to a fortune teller who whispers in your ear, run away with me and you can do whatever you want to do. And she did. She had the life of her dreams.
In the divorce papers, which I have in the original copperplate writing, there was no mention of the child because the child was seen as the property of the father. It’s quite likely that she was banned from ever seeing her child again. I don’t know. I can only surmise, but I think it was a far more complex situation than I initially understood it to be.
Portfolio magazine editor
Jenny Wheeler: That brings us nicely to another of your achievements. You were editor of Portfolio magazine which was the first Australian magazine for working women.
It’s obvious that you’ve had a real passion for the course of working women. Both of these books, The Paris Model and The Royal Correspondent, are looking at the issue of the opportunities for women. How do you feel about the progress or otherwise that we’ve made today as far as women and their working lives?
Paris fashion in the 1940s. A different era for women, says Alexandra Joel
Alexandra Joel: Frankly, on one hand it’s astonishing, because going back to The Royal Correspondent, it was thought an enormous improvement that women were given 75% of the basic wage. Up to the advent of post-World War II, they only got 50%, which was absolutely disgraceful.
And of course, if you joined the Public Service and you were married, you were forced to leave. If you flew with an airline and you married, you were forced to leave. You couldn’t join a union. You couldn’t take up a trade. These restraints did not end completely until 1973.
The ways women’s lives changed
Then when I was researching The Paris Model, to my astonishment, there’s a point at which Grace needs to apply for a passport, and it becomes a pivotal point in her life. But when I was researching it I found – I don’t know about New Zealand, they may be far more advanced – but certainly in Australia, a woman needed her husband’s permission to apply for a passport up until 1983.
Dictator – Book 3 in the acclaimed Robert Harris trilogy about Cicero – an Alexandra Joel favorite read.
I just about fell off my chair. Of course, none of this exists today and it’s so exciting to see young women like my daughter forging ahead. Although there are not the structural boundaries, let’s just say there are more subtle obstacles still to overcome.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. There’s one question I always like to ask. Is there one thing you’ve done in writing career more than any other that’s been the secret of your success?
Alexandra Joel: Can I say three things?
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, of course.
Alexandra Joel: The first I think is reading. If you are going to write you should read, and you don’t need to be confined by genre or period. The more you read, the better you write. I truly believe that.
The ‘secrets’ of writing success
The second thing is that I’m curious. That’s something Dad modeled for me. He always said, don’t ever walk past a hole in the ground without thinking, I wonder how that got there. I wonder what’s at the bottom of it. I wonder what might happen next, which is the answer to a great story. You always want to know what happened next.
I think the third thing is work ethic. You can’t wait for the muse to visit you. It would be a bit like saying, I don’t feel like being a surgeon today, or I don’t feel like being a hairdresser or whatever you are, because I don’t have the muse. You have to approach it professionally, sit yourself down and do it. Whether it’s beautiful prose or not, it’s the time you put into it that counts.
Jenny Wheeler: You can always go back and rewrite, can’t you?
Alexandra Joel: That is so true, and that is the beauty of cut and paste.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s great you mentioned reading because we’ll move on to this question of reading now. This is The Joys of Binge Reading and I always like to ask people, do they like to binge read and if so, what do they like to binge read? What would they like to recommend for other readers?
What Alexandra is reading now
Alexandra Joel: I love reading, surprise, surprise, historical fiction. It may be literary, and it may be popular. I love the works and I really recommend the backlist of Rose Tremain, especially the books set in the British Restoration under King Charles.
Restoration by Rose Tremain – shortlisted for the Booker Prize
The books of Hilary Mantel. Who doesn’t love Wolf Hall? Stunning research and stunning storytelling. I also love the work of Robert Harris. He roams across different genres, but he did a fantastic trilogy based on the life of Cicero which doesn’t sound exciting but it was, told through the eyes of Cicero’s slave. He did a fantastic book on the Dreyfus affair called An Officer and a Spy.
I do love crime and I love the plotting in crime. My more recent discovery was Dervla McTiernan. She lives in Perth, but she comes from Ireland, and she has a wonderful character that’s set in Galway.
And Benjamin Black, who is in fact the Booker Prize-winning John Banville, does a fabulous series about a pathologist with the unlikely name of Quirk, which is set in the fifties, so I get my historical fiction fix as well. Also in Ireland. Strangely enough, Celtic countries like Ireland and Scotland seem to be great settings for crime.
Doing it all over again.. and change
Jenny Wheeler: Circling round and looking back down the tunnel of time, at this stage of your career, if you were doing it all over again, what would you change, if anything?
Alexandra Joel: That is such a good question. I have thought a lot about that of late and what I have thought is, why didn’t I start writing novels earlier? Why is this my third career, and especially as my dad always said to me, you should write books. Like all children who are convinced their parents know absolutely nothing about them and certainly not what is in their best interest, I ignored him.
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However, I now believe I needed that range of experience. If I hadn’t worked in journalism, if I hadn’t had my exposure to fashion, if I hadn’t had that decade of delving into and walking beside my therapy clients’ lives, if I hadn’t learned to suspend judgment, all those lessons. If I hadn’t read that number of books that have gone into creating these novels.
What Alexandra is working on now
But I have to say this will be my last career. Now that I’m onto my fourth book in a row, I have no intention of stopping.
Jenny Wheeler: That brings us beautifully to the penultimate question. What are the prospects for the next year for Alexandra the writer? What are you working on now, and what projects have you got under development?
Alexandra Joel: I dearly wish I could travel because it’s very exciting having various releases around the world. I’ve always dreamt of seeing my book in Barnes & Noble and when they made it Book of the Month I practically wept because I couldn’t be there to see it. It will be released in Germany and various other countries, even Romania who are also doing a translation. So that’s coming up.
The Royal Correspondent will be released in America, but I’m now working on a new book, speaking of America. This one is set in the eighties. In The Paris Model, Grace came from a great sheep station in New South Wales; in The Royal Correspondent she grows up in the tough inner city.
Where to find Alexandra online
In my next book, my heroine comes from a hippie commune by the coast. She goes to New York in the ‘greed is good’ eighties, and this book is set in the high stakes international art world.
Jenny Wheeler: Sounds great. How far advanced with that are you?
Alexandra Joel: Not as far advanced as I would like to be, but I expect that it will come out next year.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Do you enjoy communicating with your readers, and where can they find you online?
Alexandra Joel: I love it because writing is such a solitary profession. You don’t do it like a musician or an actor or a dancer in front of an audience, and yet the readers are the people you are writing for.
I love hearing from them and having feedback and I love corresponding with them. You can find me via my webpage, which is terribly simple, it’s www.alexandrajoel.com, or you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook at Alexandra Joel author.
Jenny Wheeler: Alexandra, thank you so much. We will wind that up, but we’ve had a marvelous talk. I’ve learnt lots of new things and I’m really looking forward to that next book. It sounds wonderful.
Alexandra Joel: Thank you, Jenny. It’s been a treat.
If you enjoyed Alexandra Joel and The Royal Correspondent you may also enjoy Stephanie Barron’s Controversial History – the story of That Churchill woman – Jennie Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s mother, an American socialite in London.
That Churchill Woman by Stephanie Barron
LISTEN TO STEPHANIE BARRON
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