Show notes
Allison Pataki has made it her specialty to discover the relatively unknown women of history whose lives changed the course of empires, whose names have largely been forgotten.
Women like Désirée Clary, the first love of Napoleon’s life. She might have ended up as Empress if he hadn’t met Josephine, but she went on to found a famous royal house which still exists today.
In The Queen’s Fortune, Allison’s latest book, she tells us the story of this fascinating historical figure.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and in todays Binge Reading episode Allison talks about the qualities needed for living through turbulent times, whether they are contemporary or historical, and the women who survived them.
On a more personal note, in her own intimate memoir, Beauty in the Broken Places, she catalogues her own journey through rough waters.
Support Binge Reading on Patreon for as little as a cup of coffee a month and receive regular exclusive bonus content on featured authors and the making of the podcast.
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Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
Why Allison loves writing about history’s unsung heroines
How she discovered Sisi, the ‘accidental’ Empress
The first love whose legacy outlives Napoleon’s
Dealing with the ‘club of bad things’
The authors she recommends
Orchestrating betrayal – traitor Benjamin Arnold’s wife’s story
Where to find Allison Pataki:
Website: Allisonpataki.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AllisonPatakiPage
Twitter: @AllisonPataki
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/allison-pataki
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7155436.Allison_Pataki
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 Allison.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Allison and welcome to the show. It’s so good to have you with us.
Allison Pataki: Thank you so much for having me, Jenny. I’m thrilled to be here. The wonders of modern technology. We can be crossing winter to summer across the globe.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s absolutely right. You are in the depths of winter. Tell us what you’re experiencing right now.
Allison Pataki: I’m in upstate New York, about an hour outside of Manhattan, and we are in the middle of a historic snowstorm. It started two days ago, and it has not stopped and is not showing signs of stopping.
Allison Pataki – Best-selling New York Times historic fiction
Everybody has been completely housebound. Local leaders have advised everybody to stay off the roads, which is not an issue for us because our car is so buried under snow right now that we can’t get anywhere. So it’s me, my husband, our children, and we’re all on day four of solitary confinement together at home.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve had a taste of that this last 12 months with the pandemic as well.
Allison Pataki: Exactly. This is a new level because we literally can’t go outside our front door. It’s taking it to the extreme in the depths of February wintertime snowy weather.
Jenny Wheeler: You are a New York Times bestselling author who’s made a specialty of finding relatively unknown women – you describe them as previously unexplored women – and turning them into riveting historical fiction. I wonder where that impulse initially came from?
Allison Pataki: Well, thank you. I hope it’s riveting fiction. That certainly would be high praise to hear that. That genre, for me, is my happy place as a reader and as a writer.
Allison’s ‘happy place’ is history
I have always loved history and I’ve always loved reading and literature and diving into a great story. I truly think historical fiction for me is a perfect blending of those passions and those interests. I feel historical fiction is a wonderful way in, because it’s not only educational, but it’s wildly entertaining and transportive.
What I’ve noticed myself gravitating towards is historical fiction that is focused on the female perspective. Take my most recent book as an example, The Queen’s Fortune. Many readers and many people in general are familiar with the name Napoleon and they are most likely at least somewhat familiar with the period of history that covers the French Revolution to the Napoleonic Empire.
What is less known are some of the female perspectives, the female characters and some of the female sagas buried within.
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To me, rather than being less interesting or deserving a place as a footnote, I find those characters and those histories to be the most compelling and juicy and dramatic and interesting of them all. That’s where I’ve gone – towards these moments in history where we might have some familiarity and some touchstones but trying to peel back the layers on a perspective that has not previously been as highlighted and as well-known.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. The Queen’s Fortune is the story of Désirée Clary who was the daughter of a wealthy French merchant. She lived through both the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rise and fall.
She was Napoleon’s first love – well, an important love anyway – and she became Queen of Sweden in the end and yet we have hardly registered that she lived, although she’s left an amazing heritage, which we’ll get onto. Why do you think so little had been written about her?
Center-stage moments
Allison Pataki: That’s exactly right, and that’s the question I asked myself every day while I was researching and writing this story. I consider it my great good fortune that that’s the case, that Désirée Clary’s name is not as well known. I agree that she deserves her moment on center stage, and I was thrilled to write The Queen’s Fortune with her as my heroine and my main subject.
Napoleon’s first love – Desiree Clary – ‘a French woman to every inch.’
You’re exactly right, Désirée Clary was Napoleon’s first love, Napoleon’s first fiancée. She was a naïve young girl and he was an upstart, unknown, penniless Corsican refugee when they had this really torrid love affair during the dark days of the French Revolution. They became engaged and then Napoleon went off to Paris to try to make a name for himself in this new French government.
She occupied a higher rung on society’s ladder at that point, she came from a higher social status, she had more personal wealth, she had better connections.
Napoleon was a virtual unknown at that point, but what happened was Napoleon goes to Paris and finds himself at the center of things as the French Revolution is crumbling. He finds his star on this suddenly very dramatically upward trajectory.
He rises in Parisian society and in Parisian power structures and comes into the path of this beautiful, sophisticated, alluring Parisian socialite named Josephine, who obviously we all know will go on to become Napoleon’s Empress.
So Napoleon breaks Désirée’s heart, breaks it off with her and takes up with Josephine. But the problem there is that Napoleon’s brother and best, best, best friend and advisor and confidant till the end – Joseph – is married at that point already to Désirée’s sister and best, best, best friend and confidant and constant.
So Désirée is in this awkward situation where the love of her life and her ex-fiancé has broken her heart and jilted her and chosen Josephine, yet she’s stuck forever in the inner circle of Napoleon Bonaparte, as he rises and rises and rises ultimately to become emperor of much of Europe.
Getting the last laugh
She’s pulled into this imperial power clique and into these unbelievable geopolitical circumstances, and goes on to live this fascinating life and, ultimately I think, has the last laugh against the man and woman who broke her heart and goes on to found a dynasty of her own that still reigns to this day.
Here was a woman who was situated at the center of history. She not only had a front row seat to some of the most dramatic moments in history but was actively shaping them, and yet so few of us know her name and her history is not as well-known as these others.
Jenny Wheeler: Were there many original sources? Did she ever leave anything like letters or journals?
Allison Pataki: Absolutely, yes, and I quote some of them directly in the book. The letters, before Josephine came into the picture, that Désirée and Napoleon wrote one another – some of those are direct quotes, and then letters she wrote to her husband and then journals.
Desiree’s husband, reigned as Charles XIV John of Sweden . Painting by Fredric Westin – Skoklostersslott, Public Domain,
She was a very fierce defender of her family’s legacy after everybody but she had died, including her husband who was the King of Sweden. She worked very hard to preserve their family memoirs. Napoleon was a prolific letter writer, so there is a ton of verbiage in this book that is directly from his own lips as well, or his own pen.
Jenny Wheeler: You named a French journalist she worked with right at the end of her life. Was that factual?
Allison Pataki: That’s factual, yes. When Napoleon was in exile for the second time on St. Helena, he knew, he had known his whole life, the power of the pen and the power of propaganda and the power of shaping one’s own legacy and mythology. He was compulsively obsessed with shaping his own aura and legend, so he flooded the world with writing from his island exile.
The last word of history
Désirée realized, he’s going to have the last word on all of this – on me, on my husband, on our shared history – so she took that cause up as well. Her husband at that point was deceased, but she worked with a memoirist to put down their side of the story as well, because Napoleon was writing about Désirée and her husband Bernadotte up until his final days. There were a lot of very hard feelings there on both ways.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting because Napoleon almost put Bernadotte up to marrying Désirée didn’t he? It was a political ploy on his own part at the beginning, but it turned into a real love match, and you get the feeling that he might have been a bit jealous about the way Bernadotte and Désirée ended up.
Allison Pataki: Yes, it becomes this very strange, awkward love triangle because Napoleon breaks Désirée’s heart and then as a consolation prize throws her off to one of his top generals to be married, to neutralize the situation. Then Désirée and Bernadotte do have this love match and this marriage that is so drastically different in both its dynamics and its results than what Napoleon and Josephine go on to have.
Bernadotte and Napoleon go from being the closest of friends and battle buddies, comrades in arms, to being archrivals and enemies and foils of one another in many ways. Désirée is constantly in the middle of all these very delicate geopolitical balancing acts. There are all sorts of awkward dynamics between Désirée and Josephine and Napoleon and Bernadotte and her sister and her brother-in-law.
Personal drama, turbulent times
That is of course what makes for really juicy, dramatic fiction, so I loved all of that. I loved all the drama. There was so much drama in this era with these French power players. It was really fun to dive into and explore.
Jenny Wheeler: She certainly was a remarkably strong woman. She was a survivor, but if we played a little bit of ‘what if?’, if they had married, her and Napoleon, do you think she would have had the charisma that Josephine had as Empress?
Allison Pataki: I think she was a totally different sort of personality than Josephine. I think Josephine was very savvy and, you said it correctly, Désirée was a survivor. Absolutely no question. She had this way of identifying the winds of political change and correcting course in order to ride the winds to her family’s safety and to her own safety.
A young Napoleon and Josephine.
Josephine was also a survivor, literally to the point where she was spared the guillotine within a matter of hours and almost died during the French Revolution. Her life was remarkably tumultuous, and she really was a survivor as well. But it manifested itself differently in their two very different personalities.
The importance of legacy
I think Napoleon and Désirée would likely have had a very different sort of marriage than the one he had with Josephine. First of all, I think it would have ended differently because Désirée had a son immediately after she got married and Napoleon – the only reason he had to divorce Josephine ultimately was because she could not bear children and she could not bear him a son.
You can’t underestimate how impactful that was in his relationship with Josephine. He’s trying to found a dynasty and he cannot produce an heir. That was an obsession for him, which I think probably wouldn’t have been an issue with Désirée because Désirée was so young and clearly able to produce a son.
That was a huge issue for Napoleon and Josephine as it is in so many royal love stories that we’ve seen play out over the centuries of history, time and again. I also think that Désirée was perhaps less ambitious and perhaps a little bit less cunning or savvy than Josephine.
Power couple of the Empire
You get the sense when you read Josephine and Napoleon’s letters or you hear them speak about one another, that they were very much a power couple, and that Josephine was on Napoleon’s level in terms of her shrewd ability to seek advantage for herself.
I didn’t ever get the sense that Désirée was quite as power hungry as either of them, and she certainly did not push her husband to seek more and more power and wealth and title and prestige. So perhaps if we do play that out as a hypothetical, she could have had a very different influence than Josephine had.
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But I will say, I think Désirée in the end was ultimately very grateful that life dealt her the hand it did and that she did not end up in Josephine’s role, in spite of the fact that she had been Napoleon’s love and fiancée.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s really interesting to me – how did you end up assessing Napoleon? You must have known him just about as well as these two women. What was your final conclusion about Napoleon as a person and as ruler?
Absolute power corrupts
Allison Pataki: It reminded me of the phrase absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think on his upward climb, he did do some wonderful things for France.
He brought a modernization to the French government and he brought some of the higher ideals of the French Revolution, like a more equal society, enhanced rights for a greater number of the population to voting, ending slavery in the colonies.
The Napoleonic Code had some elements that did move French society forward. Not all positive. He certainly did not empower or enfranchise women with his Code Napoléon.
But ultimately it seems, and this is what the people who were close to him observed, that he had this insatiable appetite always for more and more and more and that was likely his undoing.
Desiree’s amazing legacy
Had he not felt the need to invade Russia perhaps he would have still had an intact army. Strategically, why did he need to invade Russia? Decisions like that I think ultimately crippled him and brought about his undoing.
Jenny Wheeler: We’ve mentioned that Désirée became Queen of Sweden, and also that she’s had an amazing legacy. Tell us a little bit about how the House of Sweden was founded and its legacy today.
Allison Pataki: It was so interesting because at the time that Napoleon was Emperor of France, Sweden found itself in this unique position where they did not have a hereditary heir for their current King.
They knew it was geopolitically advantageous for them to align themselves with France because at that time, with Napoleon at the height of his power, ruling much of Europe, Napoleon was putting his brothers and family members and nephews and sons-in-law on the thrones of Europe like he was giving out gifts. He would give our thrones and crowns.
Benefits of family relationships
Sweden saw the benefit to be aligned with this block of power to the West. They knew Bernadotte was one of Napoleon’s best generals, they had a personal relationship with him from some of the earlier battle campaigns.
He had interacted with high-ranking members of the Swedish government and the army, and they knew that in his marriage to Désirée, Bernadotte was in the same family as the Bonapartes, aligned with Désirée as Napoleon’s sister-in-law. Being a constitutional monarchy, they voted to offer the crown to Bernadotte, Désirée’s French husband at the time.
Désirée wanted no part of this. She was a French woman to the very tips of her fingers, and she did not want to move to Sweden, she did not want to leave her family, she did not want to leave France. But Bernadotte accepted the throne, and they founded the House of Bernadotte.
What is so interesting is they had their son, Oscar, who reigned after Bernadotte, and that line then became firmly established and continues to this day.
The next ruler of Sweden will be a queen. The current king has an eldest daughter, Victoria, and the Swedish Royal family is awesome because they’re very progressive and very modern, and they did away with the principle of male rule even before the English Royals did this, they made it that the eldest is the next ruler, not the eldest boy.
Rivals united in love
She has a brother, but Victoria is still the first in line to the throne. She has two middle names, one is Désirée and one is Josephine. Very intriguing, because these are the two women who were united together, forever entangled in their rivalry, in their love for Napoleon.
I’m not going to explain more than that, I’m not going to give anything away, because I don’t want to be a spoiler for anybody who hasn’t read to the end of the book.
The Accidental Empress by Allison Pataki – Sisi’s untold story
Let’s just say that she’s named after Désirée and Josephine that we know from this story, the same two women, and why Désirée and Josephine are still entangled and still overlapping today in the ruling house of Sweden is a very intriguing, juicy historical fact that you could not make up. It’s too good to be true but their legacies are forever interwoven. I thought that was an incredible plot twist in the historical record when I came to that.
Sisi, The Accidental Empress
Jenny Wheeler: It’s remarkable. Let’s talk a little bit about two of your earlier books, The Accidental Empress and Sisi. They both relate to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th century and an Empress who was drawn from a supporting role and left to rule alone. I understand you’ve got family connections with this part of the world that initially drew you to her story.
Allison Pataki: Yes. Empress Sisi, the last great empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the last great leading lady of the Habsburg family who ruled much of Europe for centuries – she is another one whose name is not as well-known and yet her story and the historical facts of her life are so fascinating and compelling and worthy.
When I came upon her story, I was traveling throughout Hungary because my family is Hungarian American, among other things. Pataki is a Hungarian name. We were back in Hungary for a family visit and I kept seeing these beautiful images of this young lady everywhere we went, and I’m not exaggerating – on bars of soap, on napkins, on plates, on the walls, in every gift shop.
Finally, we’re eating dinner and this portrait of this lady is hanging over our table in a restaurant. I asked the waiter, who is this woman that I see everywhere? She had this very quizzical, intriguing smile and this beautiful thick, brown hair and she certainly looked very regal. He said, that is Sisi. That was our most beloved empress.
Empress Sisi of Austria
I gathered from the initial little digging I did into her life, that she was almost like their Princess Diana, so beloved, the People’s Princess, and I discovered these really delicious morsels about her history, like her family’s connection to World War I, her family’s connection to all of this great art and music like Strauss and Liszt and Gustaf Klimt and the golden age of the Habsburg Court and mad King Ludwig who we in America know it as the Walt Disney castle, but he built Neuschwanstein. He was one of her close supporting characters as well.
A 19th century’People’s Princess’
I discovered these little historical tidbits about her and the more I learned, the more I wanted to dig into her story and learn more. She was another one of these figures. I thought, that is a moment in history and a figure in history whose story deserves to be put on center stage for people to read about and become engrossed in as I was engrossed in it.
Jenny Wheeler: Her marriage was slightly different. It wasn’t a normal sort of romance, was it?
Allison Pataki: Absolutely. These Royals and their arranged marriages. You wonder why things go awry. She was never supposed to be the Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
That’s why the book is titled The Accidental Empress, because what happened was – Emperor Franz Joseph is the most eligible young bachelor in all of Europe. He is the Emperor of Austria.
His kingdom extends across much of Europe and he was engaged and intended to be married to Sisi’s older sister Helene. Sisi travels to the Court to support her elder sister and to play the supporting role in helping her sister meet the Emperor, meet her intended husband.
Sisi arrives at the Emperor’s court and she is this guileless, free spirited tomboy, beautiful young 15-year-old with her thick chestnut hair in these whimsical braids around her face. She arrives and completely unwittingly captures the heart of the Emperor Franz Joseph.
Franz Joseph sees his ‘intended,’ the big sister, and then sees Sisi, the whimsical, free-spirited younger sister, and it was love at first sight. Or it was lust at first sight, however you want to say it.
Choosing between sisters
He said, no, actually I want to marry the younger one, and in making this decision he goes against his most powerful adviser who had arranged the marriage with the big sister. That’s the only time he bucks this advisor, and that advisor happens to be his mother.
As you can imagine, this doesn’t put 15-year-old Sisi off on the best track to enter the Imperial household as the Empress and it’s a role she’s completely unprepared for and completely constitutionally ill-suited for.
As you said, the marriage was not always the smoothest one, and you can imagine the disastrous consequences that could evolve from such a situation. But it certainly makes for a really compelling human saga, and she was a fascinating, larger than life figure.
Jenny Wheeler: Before we leave talking about your books, I do want to go to your very poignant nonfiction memoir, Beauty in the Broken Places. You went through a remarkable journey, a very deep and dark time when your young husband, who was a high performing doctor, suffered a rare and devastating brain injury, didn’t he? Just sitting on an airplane and had a stroke.
Beauty in the Broken Places – a poignant, brave memoir by Allison Pataki
Beauty in the Broken Places
You have turned this into a lovely book, Beauty in the Broken Places, which started out as letters to Dave, so that if and when he ever “woke up”, he would have an idea of what had been happening. Tell us about how that all came together.
Allison Pataki: That’s exactly right. We were 30. We were expecting our first child and we were taking a trip on an airplane, for what we called our baby moon, our last trip before we gave birth to this baby and life changed.
My husband, who was a healthy surgeon, lifelong athlete, never smoked, ate annoyingly healthy food, turned to me on the plane and he said, does my right eye look weird? And his right eye looked incredibly weird. The pupil, the black had taken over his entire eye. It was just the right eye and it was very, very, disconcerting.
A private memoir made public
I threw out the most outlandish thing I could think of, thinking that he, the doctor who sees gunshot wounds, would say, oh no, calm down, you’re overreacting.
I said Dave, are you having a stroke? And he said, I think I might be. Then a few minutes later, he closed his eyes and lost consciousness. At that point, we didn’t know if he would survive. We didn’t know if he would wake up. He was in a coma.
Ultimately what happened is when he did wake up, he woke up in a state of complete amnesia and he couldn’t remember anything, and he certainly couldn’t make memories from day to day. Dave wasn’t there. Dave woke up, but that wasn’t the Dave who had gone to sleep. That wasn’t my husband, that wasn’t the father of this baby that was coming.
As a way to process and try to make sense, and also in the hopes that maybe someday Dave would be with it enough to ask about everything that we were going through, I wrote him daily letters.
I never intended for it to turn into anything. At that point I was writing fiction and writing was my happy place. My career was in historical fiction and it gave me joy and nothing about these letters to Dave were associated with joy or my career.
About a year after the fact, when we had gone through this excruciating but also inspiring day by day battle to regain Dave’s mind and his health, and to regain our family and to welcome the birth of our daughter and all these monumental things that we had gone through together – some of which Dave remembered, some of which Dave did not – I had this year’s worth of writing.
Dave’s Book of Fan Mail
I realized that had been how I had been processing for a year. Concurrent with that, we had received all of this writing and all of this language from people who had flooded us with cards and prayers and notes and letters and memories of Dave.
I had put all that together in this book, in this one big document that I called Dave’s Book of Fan Mail, and I thought, wouldn’t it be so great if someday Dave could read all of this and process this and understand who he was and what he meant to all of these people, almost like attending your own funeral and hearing hundreds of different eulogies but then being able to live with that information and move forward with it, incorporating that into how you approach your daily life.
So it turned into this project I never really expected to do and never really wanted to do, but ultimately ended up being probably more meaningful and significant than anything I’ve worked on and the way it has allowed me to continue to connect with others.
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Because what I really needed when I was going through the darkest moments of our own crisis was to know that I was not alone and to know that I was not the only person who was going through what I was going through.
My hope was that this book could potentially be an offering to others who feel that same way, to know they’re not walking that road alone. It really has allowed me to connect with readers in a whole different way. That means a lot to both Dave and to me.
Walking the road with others
Jenny Wheeler: I’m sure the feedback you’ve got has told you that is very much the case.
Allison Pataki: And that was the only reason I agreed to do it, because I said, if this can mean to one person what I needed in my darkest moments, then it will have been worth it. It allows for connection with readers and with others in a way that is different than fiction. Very powerful.
Jenny Wheeler: You quote from a priest towards the very end of the book. You say you have come to an understanding of this statement “Choose to be in your life, to be in your marriage, every single day.”
The assumption is there, whatever that day might bring, that you choose to be in it. That’s a very big ask for some people, and it’s a huge wise lesson to have learned at a very young age, isn’t it?
Allison Pataki: It is. Everything about that day when you get married, when you take your vows and you say for better for worse, in sickness and health – you say it and you mean it, but it’s very theoretical. Then to have learned what it meant and to realize, okay, now it’s being called in and now I’m being expected to live out these words on the near side of 30, it’s not something you necessarily would expect.
But it is true because, and I have to remind myself of this every single day, all of us at some point will enter the club of the bad thing, where something we didn’t wish for or ask for or expect is dropped on us.
The ‘club of the bad thing’
Some of us enter it sooner than others, and some of us enter it probably in a way that’s more jarring or painful than others, but inevitably every single one of us will have that moment.
Once you have joined that club, you realize what is truly precious, and the flip side, what is not worth feeling – the heartache or the frustration that maybe previously you would have allowed yourself to engage in. I think it’s a big time of taking measure and taking stock.
I think it’s probably something that everyone in the world has experienced in the past year, living through a global pandemic, where life has simplified to what you can see day by day.
It’s everything from not carrying grudges to telling people how you really feel about them, cherishing the time you have with loved ones, knowing that every day there is a possibility that everything could change forever. That possibility is always there.
The Traitor’s Wife by Allison Pataki, the story of Peggy Shippen Arnold, the cunning wife of Benedict Arnold and mastermind behind America’s most infamous act of treason…
It’s easier said than done and some days it’s easier to do than others, but I think it’s the sort of thing that once you learn it, even potentially and probably a traumatic way, you can’t un-know it.
You can’t unsee that perspective. It informs then the way you live your life and the way you see your relationships and the way you prioritize your health and your moments and your choices and your energy and your priorities.
Jenny Wheeler: Now you’ve very much moved on from that. You’ve added to your family and I think you are about to do that again. Tell us a little bit about life today.
Allison Pataki: A few months after Dave’s stroke, we gave birth to our daughter, Lily, who was a joy for both of us in that time and I think was the light that pulled us forward.
There were many days when I didn’t know if Lily would ever know her father and if he would ever be there to see her grow and he has, and it feels miraculous and wonderful.
Sharing tears of joy together
I never thought we’d be able to expand our family beyond that, but then we were able to have a second child. We welcomed another daughter and we named her Grace because it was truly an act of grace. So we have our two daughters and Dave is healthy and he prioritizes getting exercise and we all are just trying to stay healthy.
We are really grateful, and we still do sometimes just sit and take stock and cry tears of joy that we are here together, living this life together, because we know how easily it could have gone in the other direction.
Jenny Wheeler: Moving onto talking about your wider career as a writer – there is one question I always do like to ask and that is, is there one thing you have done more than any other that’s helped to make you a successful historical fiction writer?
Allison Pataki: Honestly, I think it’s the choice of who you enter into relationships with as you are building your career, because I can write the book, but I am not an editor. I’m not a literary agent, I am not a publisher.
Unity in work so important
I think the single best thing I’ve done, that I’m grateful for in the trajectory of my career, is having been able to sync up with my literary agent and being able to sync up with my editor. I love them both. They are strong women. They believe in these female characters I’m working on. They support me.
When you’re choosing your literary agent and then choosing your editor, an analogy I can’t help but make is, it really is a marriage in the sense of you are partnering to bring this book to fruition.
If you’re not on the same page, pun intended, it could be very, very, difficult, and so I think the single best thing that I give credit to in my career is being paired with my literary agent and my editor. That means so much to me. Nothing I do would turn into anything without the two of them.
Jenny Wheeler: We are coming to the end of our time together but before we part, I do want to ask you about your reading tastes, because this is The Joys of Binge Reading. I
think you probably have been a passionate reader your whole life, I would pick that. What do you like to read and what would you recommend to others, not so much in literary fiction, but in fiction that’s entertaining or gives light relief.
What Allison is reading now
Allison Pataki: I love to read every genre and I love variety. As I said, my true love and my natural propensity is towards historical fiction, so right now I’m reading Hamnet. I just started. By Maggie O’Farrell, about Shakespeare’s son who passed away a few years before he wrote Hamlet. That one’s been fascinating.
Kathleen Rooney – an Allison Pataki favorite author
I love Kathleen Rooney. She has written two books that I really loved – Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. I’ve loved both her books, I thought they were both delightful excursions into fiction.
I just finished The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, which I really enjoyed. I love memoir. I love Dani Shapiro in writing memoir. Then I love everything across fiction from Philippa Gregory to Hilary Mantel to Christina Baker Kline. She just wrote a beautiful book, The Exiles, which takes place in Australia. I love her writing. I love Martha Hall Kelly. She wrote Lilac Girls.
Classics and children’s stories
I could go on and on. I love the classics. I was an English major truly because my first love started with some of the classics like Jane Austen, and I loved having the opportunity in school to study all of the histories and tragedies and comedies and romances of Shakespeare. I love some of the biography too, like I love anything by David McCullough.
Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly – recommended by Allison Pataki
Then with my five-year-old and my two-year-old I’m steeped all day every day in the world of children’s books. I love Sandra Boynton, I love Margaret Wise Brown, I love Eric Litwin. I love Kenneth Grahame. I’m a little bit of everything. Eclectic.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. Looking back over the years, if you were doing it all over again in terms of your writing career, is there anything you would change, and if so, what would it be?
Allison Pataki: Oh man. Some of my first manuscripts that are sitting in drawers unpublished are just horrible. I would have to apologize to my early readers before I palmed them off on them. Maybe not putting so much pressure. I always come back to the quote, you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Ban on ‘being perfect’
My agent once had to give me a talking to, you know, you’re never, ever going to write the perfect book. You’re going to read your finished book five years after it’s published, when it’s way too late to make any changes, and you are going to find a hundred things you wish you could take a red pencil to.
I think it’s in a lot of us, it’s in our nature to be perennially editing and finding fault. I would say – I guess it would be more advice – remember to keep the joy in the writing. Remember to come back to what it all started as, which is the joy of storytelling and the joy of imagination and creating. It’s a gift if you are able to do that every day and call it a job.
Always remember that. And as a reader, what you want is a great story. You want to be transported. Remember as the writer that you’re doing it for the reader, and you’re doing it for the story, so keep the joy alive.
Marjorie Merriweather Post
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. Looking over your next 12 months, projecting out, what do you have on your plate or on your desk that you’re working on?
Allison Pataki: I am on copy edits, which is one of the final stages in the editorial process for my next book, which is another fascinating, juicy, lush, historical saga based upon a woman. Likely her name is not as well-known as some of the male counterparts of her era, but her name was Marjorie Merriweather Post.
If you don’t know her name, I love that. I love starting from that place. It’s going to be a historical novel centered around this woman who changed the world. Truly, I’m not being hyperbolic and exaggerating. She impacted all of our lives, Marjorie Merriweather Post, and the book is loosely titled The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post.
It will come out a year from now in February 2022, and I cannot wait to tell her story. It will be coming back to America for this one, I’ve been in France for my last book. This is an American heiress and American power player in history. It’s a really juicy, dramatic story, her life.
Queen of Mar-a-Lago
Jenny Wheeler: The name rings a bell and I associate it with press and media. Am I on the right track?
Allison Pataki: Well, she certainly spent a lot of time splashed across all of the press and media. She herself was not a reporter. You could know her name for any number of reasons. She built Mar-a-Lago, which is now Donald Trump’s winter White House, or it was Donald Trump’s winter White House, but before the Trumps ever occupied it, that was one of her many fabulous homes.
Many of the antiques in Mar-A-Lago date from Majorie Merriweather Post’s original decor. – Pic credit House Beautiful.
She also changed the way we all eat, all of our food, the way we all live. Post is a very famous company, with its name on a lot of boxes and brands. She had her hand in a lot of things, and she’s an inspiring, fascinating, strong, romantic woman, with a really great long-life story.
Jenny Wheeler: Sounds wonderful. Do you enjoy hearing from your readers and if so, where can they find you online?
Where to find Allison online
Allison Pataki: Absolutely. I love hearing from readers, that’s the best part of the job. I’m on all social media. My name Allison Pataki. I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook, I’m on Twitter. My website is again my name, allisonpataki.com. There are ways to connect there and for people to submit notes and messages, and where I share all my latest news and my newsletters.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful, and in the show notes which we publish with this as a transcript of the chat, we will include links to all of those sites as well. Thank you so much for your time today. We have run over a little bit because you are so fascinating and I have lots of other things that it would have been fun to talk about, but …
Allison Pataki: Next time.
Jenny Wheeler: All the very best with your future and thank you so much for being with us today.
Allison Pataki: Thank you Jenny. Next time I want to come to New Zealand so we can do it in person.
Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely.
Allison Pataki: Thank you, Jenny and thank you everyone. Enjoy your reading.
Jenny Wheeler: Thanks so much. Bye.
If you enjoyed Allison’s World Changing Women you may also enjoy Stephanie Parkyn’s Love and Obsession in Napoleonic France
LISTEN TO STEPHANIE
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