The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau
The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau
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Kristin Harmel on The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The one angle she had never takenBy the time she began this novel, Harmel had already mapped much of the French Resistance across her catalog: document forgers, arms smugglers, escape-line operators, forest communities. Each book had staked out a different form of wartime defiance. What she had never put at the center was the act of theft itself, specifically stealing jewelry from Nazi occupiers to fund the movements that were trying to stop them.
I’ve explored this in the context of document forgers in The Book of Lost Names, Resistance arms smugglers in The Winemaker’s Wife, and those who worked on Allied escape lines in The Room on Rue Amelie, as well as the way an entire society came together to help save themselves in The Forest of Vanishing Stars, but I had never written directly about thievery to fund Resistance efforts. In the war, stealing was one way in which the movements were funded–and what’s more interesting than someone who specializes in stealing the most expensive pieces from the cruelest people? Exploring the character of Colette both during the war (when her stealing was clearly justified) and after the war (when the gray area between right and wrong was much murkier) was really interesting to me.
Making the protagonist an elderly woman was a separate creative decision, but it was tied to the same logic: the world’s habit of dismissing older women could become a weapon in Colette’s hands. Harmel saw the social blindness directed at aging women not as a limitation to write around but as the exact mechanism that makes Colette effective.
I love the idea that as we age, we have more and more to offer from our life experience, though too often, people write us off or look right through us. I liked that Colette uses this newfound invisibility as a cloak–and actually benefits from it. And I liked that in general, those most likely to write her off as having no value were those she’d most like to steal from.
The choice meant the book would have to live in two eras at once: the occupied Paris of 1942, where Colette’s skills were forged, and the 2018 Boston where she is still using them, still being underestimated, and still not entirely done reckoning with herself.
How she wrote it
Magician videos and alternating timelinesThe research problem that stopped her cold was practical and absurd in equal measure: she needed to understand exactly how a skilled thief lifts a piece of jewelry from someone’s body without being noticed. No archive could answer that. The solution came from an unexpected corner of the internet.
It’s not like you can just Google ‘How to steal a diamond bracelet.’ Believe me, I did try to Google that and every version of it. Then it occurred to me that that’s what magicians do when they perform sleight-of-hand tricks. If you go to a magic show, one of the tricks is usually taking someone’s watch or bracelet. So I went down the rabbit hole of watching magician instructional videos to try to understand how those tricks were done.
The novel’s structure alternates between occupied Paris and modern-day Boston, and Harmel did not draft those two timelines separately and stitch them together. The shape of the wartime story was clear to her early; the contemporary narrative around Colette as an old woman took longer to solidify. Once it did, she wrote the book in the order a reader encounters it.
The contour of the modern-day story wasn’t as clear-cut, but once I knew the shape that storyline would take, I became really invested in that time period, too, because I loved knowing Colette as an older woman, and I liked seeing Aviva figure some things out, too. In terms of process, I tend to write from beginning to end in the book, so I didn’t write the storylines separately; I wrote them essentially as you read them, alternating between the two timelines so that I could make sure the storyline flowed as a whole.
The prison sequences set at Cherche-Midi, the German military prison in occupied Paris, were among the most punishing to write. Her method for getting through that kind of material was to shift registers: when the emotional pressure became too heavy, she reached for the historian’s task instead.
I found Agnes Humbert’s fascinating memoir, Resistance, particularly helpful in nailing down some facts and details of prison life. Focusing on historical accuracy during the writing of difficult scenes helps me to take my emotional hat off and put my research hat on, which helps me get through particularly wrenching territory.
The personal thread
A diagnosis and an unfinished protagonistHarmel’s breast cancer diagnosis arrived in October 2022, while she was working through the questions this novel would raise. Writing an elderly woman who was still changing, still capable of being wrong, and still capable of growth was not only a structural choice; it was the kind of choice that looks different when your own future has become uncertain.
I was doing a lot of thinking about whether my own life would be shortened by disease. (Fortunately, I’m now in remission, but there’s nothing like a cancer diagnosis to get one thinking about what the future holds.) And I also like that Colette isn’t done growing. She still has some lessons to learn–and I think it’s a good reminder that we’re never too old to take a good, hard look at our own lives and ask ourselves how we could be living better.
Her orientation toward historical fiction traces back to a single childhood reading experience. Anne Frank’s diary did not just move her; it reframed what she understood writing to be for.
I always loved to write, but it wasn’t until I read Anne Frank’s diary that I realized that you could change the world for the better with words. That was the moment my dream was solidified.
What she wants us to sit with
When the same act means different thingsThe twin diamond bracelets at the center of the novel change hands across decades, and each person who holds them assigns them a different weight. Harmel built that layering deliberately, wanting the objects to carry moral and emotional history rather than function as simple McGuffins.
The bracelets take on different meanings for everyone who touches them: to Annabel, taking them back represents justice and a righting of a wrong. To Colette, they’re the last link to her past. They carry meaning for others, too, but I don’t want to give any spoilers. I think the fact is that items like bracelets — carrying emotional meaning and passed down to others — are more than just the jewels they’re made of. They can also be the things that connect us to others, to the past, or to a version of ourselves we wish we could reclaim.
The dual timeline was also a structural argument about visibility. For most of the war’s popular memory, the story was told as a sequence of military engagements between men. Harmel had been pushing back against that framing across her career, and this book continues it by insisting that the war was also won in drawing rooms, at dinner parties, and by people whose contributions were never counted.
Ten years ago, if you had asked somebody, ‘What do you know about World War II?’ they would have told you about the battles staged by men, but there were a lot of women behind the scenes, too, women working for the underground, the resistance and doing other important work that won the war. It is interesting to bring those stories to the forefront and remind people, not just of the women, but of all the people working behind the scenes in everything and how important they are.
The question the novel leaves open, whether theft is still theft when its targets are oppressors and its proceeds fund survival, is one she deliberately refuses to resolve. What she does resolve is the larger argument her fiction keeps returning to: that in moments when history demands something, ordinary people are the ones who answer.
I think what I gravitate to most is the idea that during World War II, ordinary people had to rise up and do extraordinary things — or the outcome of the war would’ve been different. Reading about World War II reminds us that you don’t have to find yourself in the midst of a war to say, ‘What can I do to make the world better?’