The Diamond Eye
The Diamond Eye
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Kate Quinn on The Diamond Eye
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A name that refused to stay in a footnoteQuinn was deep into research for The Huntress, her 2019 novel about the Soviet Night Witches (the all-female bomber regiment that flew against Hitler’s eastern front), when a different woman kept surfacing in the records. The discovery was accidental, and the pocket it landed in was mental.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko (aka Lady Death) I found when I was researching *THE HUNTRESS* — as I looked up information about the Night Witches (the all-female bomber regiment that flew against Hitler’s eastern front) suddenly all kinds of other Soviet women war heroines were popping up in my research, chief among them Lady Death. So I immediately tucked her in my pocket for a potential future book.
Pavlichenko fit a pattern Quinn has described as the engine behind every book she writes. The principle is less about era or geography than about a specific kind of historical injustice: achievement without recognition.
I look for women of the past who did astounding, incredible things, and didn’t get enough credit for their achievements during their lifetimes. I want to do my part to shine a light on those women, their courage, and their work.
Bringing Pavlichenko to an American audience required Quinn to reckon with decades of cultural conditioning. The Soviet Union had been the enemy in film, television, and politics for the better part of fifty years, and that legacy sat between the reader and the character Quinn needed them to care about.
One of the difficulties in writing a Soviet heroine for an American audience is that we’re so used to seeing the Soviets as the bad guys. A thousand James Bond movies, all that Cold War propaganda when they were the enemy for so long. What I’m trying to do with Mila is make her accessible to a modern-day American audience.
The book was drafted in roughly three and a half months across late 2020 and early 2021, and it landed in bookstores in March 2022, weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Quinn had not planned for that timing, but the research had already taught her something she said directly in launch interviews: “Never underestimate the toughness and grit of Ukrainians, especially Ukrainian women.”
How she wrote it
Reading the gaps in a Soviet memoirMost historical women Quinn writes about left behind no first-person record. Pavlichenko was an exception: she had written a memoir late in life, and an English translation existed. That document became the research backbone, even though it required reading through a layer of Soviet editorial interference to reach the real woman underneath.
I was lucky that Lyudmila Pavlichenko wrote a memoir late in life which detailed her war years and goodwill tour, and that the memoir was available in an excellent English translation. That really gave me much of the insider view on what it was to be a sniper on the eastern front.
One passage in the memoir stood out as an obvious insertion. Pavlichenko describes a meeting with Stalin just before her departure for America, but none of the other delegates mentioned any such meeting in their own accounts, and a meeting with Stalin was not the kind of event anyone would omit. Quinn’s reading of how that passage got there, offered in a video interview:
I think the propaganda office said, please insert a flattering reference to the great comrade Stalin in your memoir, please. And she was probably like, okay, whatever. I’ll do it. [paraphrased from audio]
Pandemic lockdown closed every firing range in the country while Quinn was drafting the book’s climax, a sniper duel set in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. She had acquired a Mosin-Nagant rifle with PE sights, the same type Pavlichenko most often used, but could not fire it. For the physical geography of the duel, she found a different tool.
Plot a sniper duel on Google Earth. I had to; it was deep in the 2020 lockdown with no vaccines in sight, and there was no way I could travel to Washington DC to walk the ground myself and see what it looked like.
For Eleanor Roosevelt’s sections, Quinn read through the fully digitized archive of Roosevelt’s “My Day” newspaper columns. That reading left one overriding impression: the sheer volume of what Roosevelt managed to do and respond to, week after week, convinced Quinn that a sustained friendship with a Soviet sniper she barely knew was entirely in character.
I cannot believe how busy that woman was. Did she never sleep?!
The assassination subplot that gives the novel its thriller structure was not in the original draft at all. Quinn described the early version as unusually tight: “This one drafted very fast and very tightly. I ended up adding more later (the entire assassination subplot) but not a lot was cut.” The subplot drew on a documented scheme by powerful business interests to remove Roosevelt from power, and on the real attempt on his life early in his presidency. Quinn’s question was simply: if you needed a plausible suspect, why not wait until a Soviet sniper was already in Washington?
What she wants us to sit with
What women do with swallowed angerThe book’s most discussed passage is Mila’s observation that women make effective snipers because every woman has already learned to suppress rage and appear calm. Quinn has said that observation is the novel’s real argument, and that she built toward it deliberately. In the Writer’s Digest interview, she explained what she was actually trying to excavate:
I really did want to explore the fact that — for her and for many women — underneath a surface calm and ‘don’t rock the boat, go along to get along’ that there is a lot of anger over a whole variety of issues and how do people use anger to fuel the things in life that they need to get done.
The friendship between Mila and Eleanor Roosevelt carries that argument forward into a second register. What persuaded Quinn the friendship was worth centering was something she found in Roosevelt’s own writing: evidence of a specific, unusual capacity that made the cross-cultural bond plausible rather than romantic invention.
Eleanor always had that gift of being able to reach out from that huge pedestal... and yet she had the gift to reach past that to people whose lives were nothing like her own and to make friends and to constantly empathize. [paraphrased from audio]
Quinn has described a recurring frustration with how fiction handles exceptional women: the lone-genius framing that makes one woman’s achievement feel like an anomaly rather than evidence of a wider pattern. The antidote she built into The Diamond Eye was structural, not thematic.
I’m never saying, here’s one extraordinary woman. I want to say here’s one extraordinary woman, but look, there’s also other extraordinary women around her, even if they are not the focus of this novel as protagonists… I want to show a whole variety of the female experience and how many women succeed and not just one.