The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.

Hope and rage: these two things are at the core of every book I write. Above all else, a Kate Quinn heroine dares to hope when all hope is lost, and dares to be angry when the world tells her to shut up and smile. In “The Alice Network,” Charlie's hope that her cousin is alive and Eve's rage at the death of her friend move mountains. In “The Huntress,” Jordan's hope for a career over marriage changes her entire family's future, and Nina's rage honed by an ugly childhood literally propels her into the sky. In “The Rose Code,” three young codebreakers fling their minds against a wall of unbreakable code and hope to find a crack, and their rage at seeing that work betrayed will help save a nation.

Eve had beaten her stutter into submission with sheer savage will, reading poetry out loud line by faltering line in her bedroom, hammering on the consonants that stuck until they unspooled and came free.

My husband has had a stutter all his life, and everything I wrote into Eve's speech impediment comes from him: his input and critiques, as well as my own observations in decades of watching him interact with the world. So often in books and movies, characters with speech impediments are portrayed as mentally disabled, as deranged psychopaths, or as the comic relief. I wanted to write a stutterer who was a capital-H Hero.

Eve wondered how much it was possible to change in two weeks. Or was it not change, but becoming what she already was?

The “wallflower to belle-of-the-ball” arc is a classic trope for women in fiction. The twist I love to put on it? My women transform from duckling to swan not because of a prince, but because of a job—because they find something they are spectacularly good at, and it makes them flower into their full power and confidence.

Boys got to do whatever they wanted, and girls got to sit around looking pretty.

Charlie makes this bitter observation as a forties-era college girl whose family wants her to get a husband, not a career. How much do you think things have changed for young women today? (In my opinion, not as much as we'd like! Appearance is still a much bigger factor for women than it is for men, who continue to be valued more for what they do than how they look.)

“That doesn’t mean you were boring, ma p’tite. Just bored. Most women are bored, because being female is boring. We only get married because it’s something to do, and then we have children and find out babies are the only thing more boring than other women.”

One reason I keep writing about women in war-time is that wars give women opportunities. Whether it's landing a job that might otherwise go to a man, or quite literally getting the chance to join the fight as Lili & Eve do, war opens doors for women to leave the home, the kitchen, the nursery, and find something new. For many women gnashing their teeth in frustration at their lack of options in peacetime, these opportunities were a godsend—but can such women hang onto these opportunities when the war is over, or do those doors swing shut in their faces again?

Life ought to be more like a play; the entrances and exits would be a lot cleaner.

This is something my historical fiction author friends and I moan about ALL the time—how history refuses to confine itself tidily to a nice neat three-act structure so a novelist can make a nice neat three-act story out of it! Real life is chaotic, random, full of coincidences and meaningless side-bars and all the other things that bog down a good story, so the task of hammering messy historical facts into coherently-shaped fiction is one of the toughest things about writing histfic.

“Lethe is the river of forgetfulness that runs through the underworld, so the classics tell us, and there is nothing more potent than forgetfulness.

My tip of the hat to Greek mythology—one of my very first loves as a child. Also forshadowing Eve's life after the Alice network is destroyed: she spends decades trying to forget what happened, trying to bury her guilt, and it doesn't work no matter how much she drinks. Forgetting her past won't help her to heal—only facing it will do that.

What did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done?

Something I believe in very, very strongly. Real courage isn't the lack of fear; it's being scared out of your wits and still moving forward anyway. Eve repeats this mantra to herself more than once in “The Alice Network” when she is faced with something that terrifies her. I've been known to use it myself in tough situations!

“There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women,” Eve said. “The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions . . . even in evil. Lili was the latter. Which are you?”

This was where I could tie up all my various themes into one lovely little package: my variously flower-named characters, Baudelaire's “Flowers of Evil”, and the steady flowering that tough women manage to do under immense pressure. Eve thrived in evil because it was thrive or die, but Charlie must make a more deliberate choice: what kind of woman does she want to be? This is one of the first moments that Eve—who has steadfastly (and profanely!) refused to act as a mentor to this girl who has barged into her life—finally offers Charlie some words of guidance to help her make that choice.

Excerpt from La Guerre des Femmes, memoir of Louise de Bettignies’s war work by Antoine Redier, as told to him by his wife Léonie van Houtte, code name Violette Lameron: She finished as she had lived, a soldier.

I burst out crying when I read these translated words in “La Guerre des Femmes.” These simple words, relayed by her best friend and right-hand woman, made such a fitting epitaph for gallant, brave, brilliant Louise that I knew they had to be included.

“You don’t have to die.” Charlie pressed a wad of linen around Eve’s shoulder, stanching the blood. “Eve, you don’t have to.” Have to? Eve wanted to.

Fun fact: my original plan was to kill Eve off in the final confrontation—she would take down her enemy, but die herself in doing so. But around the time I hit the 85% mark in writing my rough draft, that ending started to feel all wrong. Eve was still telling me she wanted to die, but it's a novelist's job NOT to give our characters what they want—instead, we give them what is good for them! So I took a deep breath, changed up my entire third act, and had Eve survive the shoot-out in Grasse to start rebuilding her shattered life.

Such women were fleurs du mal indeed—with steel, with endurance, and with flair, they thrived in evil and inspired others in doing so.

Thanks so much to all of my readers—I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the curtain into the world of “The Alice Network.” As a Marvel fan I love Easter egg cameos, so you may see some of the characters here pop up in my other books: Eve wanders onto an ocean liner for a conversation with my hero in “The Huntress,” and subscribers to my newsletter automatically receive a free short story I wrote (titled “Call Me Alice”) which details some of her spy work during the Second World War! I hope you'll check out both. The Huntress: https://bit.ly/31oigwN Kate's newsletter: https://bit.ly/2DfrgIz