Code Name Hélène
Code Name Hélène
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Ariel Lawhon on Code Name Hélène
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
An ultimatum, then a question she couldn’t answerThe project began not with Lawhon’s own discovery but with a friend’s mother who had run out of patience waiting for someone to write Nancy Wake’s story. The email carried an unmistakable threat.
The mother of a good friend emailed me Nancy’s story one day several years ago and told me that if I didn’t write about Nancy next we could no longer be friends.
The threat worked, but what kept Lawhon was a gap she could not explain from the outside. Wake had gone to Berlin in 1933 as a journalist and sat across from Adolf Hitler. Eight years later, she was killing German soldiers with her bare hands in occupied France. No biography she found closed that distance for her emotionally.
I wanted to know how a woman goes from being a young, naive journalist to quite literally killing the enemy with her bare hands. [paraphrased from audio]
That eight-year transformation, from witness to combatant, became the engine of the whole novel.
How she wrote it
Four books, a borrowed voice, and a timeline cut apartLawhon’s research for previous books had sometimes required dozens of sources. For Wake she had a comparatively narrow archive, though one of the four essential texts took eight weeks to reach her after she ordered it from a London used bookstore.
Relatively easy compared to some of my other books! I only had to read four biographies instead of fifty.
One of those four biographies was Wake’s own memoir, and it solved a problem Lawhon had not yet named. First-person narration requires a specific, recognizable inner life, and Wake’s prose handed her one: a sensibility she could study and eventually inhabit.
Once I caught on to that, it became easier and easier to imitate as I went along... there are plenty of places where I didn’t have access to her thoughts on a particular event that happened, so I had to make them up, but after a while, keeping consistency was easy because she gave me the foundation for that and I built on it. [paraphrased from audio]
Wake’s story covered eight years, and a straight chronological telling would have included long stretches of inaction between operations. Lawhon had written chronologically first, then diagnosed the problem: momentum kept dying. The dual timeline was the solution, anchored at the 1944 parachute jump and stepping back to 1936.
The switching time frame allowed me to cut out all the parts where she was not doing anything, and it gave a sense of momentum to the story itself. [paraphrased from audio]
Her editor and agent questioned whether the novel needed the chapters told from Henri Fiocca’s perspective, since the rest of the book belongs to Nancy’s first-person voice. Lawhon defended them on two grounds: structural usefulness and narrative honesty. Henri’s sections are where he teaches Nancy the skills, swearing in French, holding her liquor, riding a bicycle, that later prove essential to her Resistance work.
Getting the battle scenes right. I’d never written a book where my characters went to war and I really wanted to get that part right. I wanted the reader to feel like they were there, with Nancy, dodging bullets and blowing things up.
The hardest scenes to write were also the most historically accurate. After the book’s publication, a reader asked on Goodreads whether the episode involving Olivia Sautine was invented. What Lawhon had written was already difficult; the historical reality was worse.
I’m sorry to say that the scene with Olivia Sautine really did happen. It was quite a bit worse in real life, I’m afraid. It was horrible to write and I imagine it is grueling to read. But I included it because I wanted my readers to understand exactly what Nancy was facing and what the stakes for France were if she failed.
On what the book is wrestling with
Whether a good marriage can survive on the pageLawhon has spent her career writing women who operated at the edge of what was permitted or survivable. Nancy Wake is the most extreme version of that subject. But the relationship at the center of the novel posed a different kind of problem: how to write a love story where the conflict is external rather than internal, and where the marriage itself is genuinely good.
I wish there were more good marriages portrayed in print. I understand why there’s not, it’s hard to write about a loving marriage. There’s no conflict, and conflict is the heart of story. But I want to see more good ones. [paraphrased from audio]
Her reasoning about historical women extends beyond Wake. Across her books, Lawhon returns to the same argument about where the texture of history actually lives: not in official accounts, but in the memories of the people who were present without being credited.
If you study history, and you want to know what really happened, go talk to the women who were there. Go talk to the women who lived through it because they remember the small moments. They remember the little betrayals. They remember the humanity of the situation and not just the fighting and the wars and the battles and the weapons.
What she wants us to sit with
Bravery as a debt we all eventually oweWhen asked what she wanted readers to carry away from the book, Lawhon gave an answer that moves outward from Wake’s specific biography to a claim about ordinary courage. The final clause is the one that lands hardest: bravery, in her reading, is not a fixed trait but a moment that arrives for everyone.
That love is more powerful than war or fear or any circumstances we face. That there are always brave men and women willing to stand in the fire so that others can pass safely through. That we should remember and celebrate Nancy Wake for all the extraordinary things she did during the war. That sometimes we are only brave when we have to be, but we are all given the chance at some point in our lives.