How to Make Ghosts Come Alive: Writing Real-Life Characters When Almost Nothing Is Known About Them

While penning 'The Art Spy,' Michelle Young learned how to meticulously research subjects who are no longer alive and stories that are not widely known. Here, she shares tips on how you can do it too.

Rose Valland in her 20s, in her apartment in Paris. (Photo courtesy Camille Garapont family collection)

For the last four years, I’ve been working on the narrative nonfiction book The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, which comes out today. It’s about a lesbian Resistance spy and art historian in France during World War II who helped take down the Nazis’ art looting operation.

The book is based entirely on historical facts, and while working on it, I faced several primary challenges: Rose was long gone so I couldn’t speak to her firsthand, and the best spies never reveal much about themselves. Rose did leave behind hundreds of thousands of documents, reports and personal papers, which I was fortunate to be given access to. In them, though, she rarely expressed her emotions or personal reactions to the events unfolding around her. She was, first and foremost, an academic and civil servant, and given her spy work and closeted sexuality — she wasn’t out to anyone but her closest friends and family — her reticence is not surprising.

But when you want to make someone come alive in narrative nonfiction books — which are intended to read like fiction thrillers — you have to be relentless in your research. This means casting a very large net for information in order to gather enough details to convey someone’s personality and innermost thoughts. Most of the people who knew Rose, however, were dead or near death, along with most of the eyewitnesses from World War II. (One woman who agreed to an interview had a pulmonary embolism the day I was supposed to meet her!) And sadly, the ones who were alive, both Rose’s family members and those of her lifelong partner, Joyce Heer, a half-German British citizen, told me they did not know either of the women very well.

Some of the stories about them, including one about Joyce being imprisoned by the Germans and getting broken out by the Resistance, seemed more family lore than established fact, and as a journalist, I knew I had to take them with a grain of salt. I was also informed that earlier generations of Rose’s family burned most of the letters between the two women, which would have given us more of a window into their intimate relationship, and as a result, our heroine.

So, I scoured what little I could find of Rose’s handwritten scribbles, and carefully read and re-read what was left of her writings and letters — including drafts of her dry, academic memoir, Le Front de l’Art — for clues to construct her personality and allow her to tell her story in her own words. While I was able to piece together a bit about Rose’s upbringing and her Resistance work, I found little when it came to Joyce. I was only able to put together the briefest outline of her life. Nobody I spoke to knew where or when she and Rose had met, when they began living together, or what Joyce’s experience during WWII was. Joyce was not a public figure and Rose had purposefully kept her out of the public eye, given how conservative the French ruling class was.

I decided to approach this mystery like a missing person’s investigation, inspired by the work of historian Philippa Langley (The Princes in the Tower), and I dedicated months to this quest. I was armed with just one clue: Joyce had worked as a secretary and translator for the U.S. Embassy in Paris at some point, and I pulled on this thread.