The Secrets We Kept

by Lara Prescott

It’s been said that the typewriter was built for women—that to truly make the keys sing requires the feminine touch, that our narrow fingers are suited for the device, that while men lay claim to cars and bombs and rockets, the typewriter is a machine of our own.

THE SECRETS WE KEPT is a novel set in the 1950s about a group of women in the CIA’s typing pool and the fate of Boris Pasternak’s DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. The first voice that came to me when I started writing was the voice of the typists. I’d been reading the recently released CIA memos and reports pertaining to their secret Zhivago mission, and I wondered who typed those memos and reports. This led me to research the all-women typing pools of that era where I came across this quote by John Harrison from his 1888 Manual of the Typewriter: “The typewriter is especially adapted to feminine fingers. They seem to be made for typewriting. The typewriting involves no hard labour and no more skill than playing the piano." I wanted to play around with the idea that a typewriter was both a machine built for women—a machine that helped usher them into the workspace—but also an object that confined them to a particular role. Men could shoot for the moon (literally), but for most women the glass ceiling ended at the typing pool. But there is power in the typewriter and power in words! The typists know this fact and embrace it. And it is this power that first drew me write this novel.