In the spring of 2002, I returned to Florence alone, rented an apartment for three months, and walked. Accompanied by the tingly awareness that being alone and lonely in a strange city brings, I prowled. And poked. And stared. And, yes, I shopped. I don’t know exactly what I had learned by the time my husband joined me at the end of May, but I was undoubtedly better dressed than I had been—although I had a pretty weird haircut—and I had finished my first novel set in Italy, The Faces of Angels.
We were lucky in where we lived in England. Not only because it was beautiful, isolated, and usually rather boring—no bad thing if you’re trying to be a writer—but also because it was close to a regional airport that EasyJet began to fly in and out of shortly after we arrived. It didn’t take us long to figure out that we could be in Milan faster than we could be in London, and that—if we were willing to fly at ungodly hours on odd days of the week at either very short or very long notice—we could do so for approximately the same cost as the train.
And so, for the next nine years, we went to Italy at every opportunity. We went for weekends and weeks and months. We went north and south and even east. We drove and took trains and occasionally flew or took boats, and did not walk as much as either of us now wish we had. We found favorite places, and places we thought were wonderful and then “went off” of, and places we hated at first and then liked better, and a very few places we did not like at all. And when we wanted to go somewhere that felt like home, in the sense that we knew how it would smell and feel and sound, when we wanted a favorite walk, or when we wanted to be surprised yet again at what had been achieved on a relatively small patch of ground by a very small handful of humanity, we went back to Florence.
For all that we found familiar—the same greengrocer, the taxi route from the airport, the place I like where you can get a dish of chicken liver and sage, the dark creepy shadows of the fish—I do not think that there was ever a time when Florence failed to surprise us or remind us of what we did not know or understand. No company will ever bottle that, although I daresay every perfume house has tried—the delight, disappointment, familiarity, and contradiction; the endless refracted strangeness that fills a familiar container we have come to love.
It was on one of these trips, somewhere down the line of years, that I noticed for the first time the plaques on walls. I bumped into one in Florence. Then, once I started looking, I saw memorials to the Partisans in towns of every size everywhere, and I began to understand how little I understood about Italy’s experience in World War II. My second novel set in Italy, Villa Triste, came directly from my effort to comprehend, both in political and human terms, not only what had happened during the War, but how it had happened.
In terms of Italian history, we all know about the Romans: Julius Caesar and gladiators and horrid stinky vats of oil and fish paste that are periodically pulled off the ocean floor and found to be still edible today. And about the Renaissance: the Medici and Humanism and The Decameron and Michelangelo’s David and Da Vinci’s flying machine. After that it kind of dribbles off into one long bleach of Tuscan sun, with spurts of Shelly and Byron and odd goings-on in Venice. Merchant–Ivory films and Vespas. All of which are fine, as far as they go. But like all lovers, I wanted more. And more. Every niggling little bit of history. Which was how I ended up at the Red Brigades.
My family lived in England during the IRA years. I remember photograph after photograph of when the secretary of state for Northern Ireland’s car exploded as he was leaving the House of Commons. And the December bombing outside Harrods, where we always had a family day of Christmas shopping. I remember that the horse the IRA did not kill with a nail bomb in Hyde Park was called Sefton. From farther afield I remember news footage of Black September and the Baader-Meinhof Group. But I do not remember the Red Brigades. And I do not recall one moment of the Aldo Moro kidnapping, which, through the series of letters published in newspapers, became nothing less than an extraordinary public dialogue over how terrorists and terrorism should be treated. So, when I came across this most human drama—something that could be playing out today in Syria or Somalia or Afghanistan and raises many of the same questions—I found that Italy had surprised me yet again, and I wanted to know everything I could.
The Moro kidnapping itself proved surprisingly easy to outline in detail. The newspapers were a primary source, followed by the trial transcripts of the Red Brigade members involved in the kidnapping. We know a great deal about how he was taken, how the private messages and tapes and letters were passed to the family, and about the apartment where he was held. All the details down to the giant wicker basket used to transport his body to and from the garage, the furnishings of his room, and that sand from the beach at Ostia found in the blanket he was wrapped in after his death, which for a while led to the erroneous belief that he had been killed there. Eventually, these facts fit together into a mosaic. Filling the mosaics, gaps—some wider than others—in as plausible and emotionally convincing way as possible is the special province of the historical novel.
As with Villa Triste, I now had a factual framework. The challenge, again, was to stick to it faithfully. Everything about the Red Brigades in The Lost Daughter, where and how Mara Cagol was shot and even the rumors concerning her second autopsy, for instance, are true. I felt strongly that I would find the novel, yet again, in the gaps—the spaces between that can be filled only with “how it might have happened.” And, of course, why.
We packed up and went to Ferrara. I chose the city because the Red Brigades were largely a product of the affluent north and in particular of the University at Padua, which has a tradition of radicalism going back four or five centuries and is, relatively speaking, Just Up The Road A Piece. Ferrara was not only close by but smaller and quieter, less a hotbed, which was what I was looking for.
In January the city was freezing and beautiful and haunted by the ghosts of the Finzi-Continis, who never actually had a garden there. Antonio is a composite figure. The farmland in the Po delta is as described, and the factory explosion did happen. Many people were killed, but the brothers, although likely, are a product of my imagination. The character of Angela is based on a real person. One I knew existed, in that apartment in Rome. But that was all. The rest—the woman herself, her life, where she came from, what happened and did not happen to her and the hows and whys of her heart—was a gap.
From the start, I was fascinated by three questions. The first was: How do you come to be an intelligent, well-educated, middle-class, twentysomething native Italian—this is the typical profile of Red Brigade members—in an apartment in the middle of Rome, holding the nation’s most famous politician captive? The second was: Once you’re there, what do you do? And the third was: If you have been a part of a kidnapping that ends with ten bullets, do you ever stop being a part of that? Do you ever really have “another life”?
In order to write The Lost Daughter successfully, to make that convincing case, I needed to know everything I could about the Red Brigades. Not just factually, which was comparatively easy, a matter of public record. But viscerally and emotionally. I needed to understand who they were in their heads, why they did what they did.
That the Red Brigades were more professional than the Baader-Meinhofs, and, even arguably, the Provisional IRA, that they posed more of a danger to the stability of the state than either of those groups said something about them, about their discipline, dedication, and control. In order for Angela to be a viable character in the novel, it had to be possible that her “official version” of what she knew and when she knew it could be true (whether it is or not is up to the reader to decide). To that end, I had to understand how the Red Brigades worked—how they became so disciplined and how the “cells” were set up, the system that dictated and controlled who knew what and when. I put a great deal of time and energy into this, and I became utterly convinced that the possibility of lovers and spouses and best friends being on the most intimate terms, sometimes for years, with be
st friends and lovers and spouses whom they had no idea were active, long-term members of Brigate Rosse was not only possible, but happened. This was precisely what made them so dangerous.
Discussion Questions
Both Kristin and Angela lost their mothers at a young age. How did each of them deal with those losses?
Mary Louise isn’t surprised when Kristin asks her for money after their night of bonding, thinking, “However many Kristins there were fluttering around like moths inside that blond, blue-eyed glass, one of them, the biggest, was always and indelibly Kristin Carson” (part I). How much of Kristin do you think is genuine and how much is an act? Are there other characters who shift between different personas the way Kristin does?
Angela and Antonio finally came together after they’d each experienced a painful loss. How do you think this impacted their relationship?
In part IV, the author writes, “It was a myth, that love encompassed everything…Like everything struggling to survive, love was selfish, and narrow, and fanatical.” What does she mean by this? What do you think of this view of love?
Enzo’s mother says that many young people “thought they’d been betrayed—been promised a better life, then had it snatched away” (part I) and that this outrage led to the formation of the Red Brigades. What led Antonio to join the BR? Do you think he was motivated by that same sense of betrayal?
When she goes to the police station to confess, Angela tells the officer that she killed Aldo Moro (part IV). Though she didn’t pull the trigger herself, is Angela responsible for Aldo Moro’s death? Why do you think she didn’t go to the police sooner?
Antonio went to great lengths to lure Angela back to Italy. Do you think his desire to see her again was fueled by vengeance or by love? Explain.
After Antonio’s death, we learn that Barbara was the one who let him know that Angela was still alive. When Pallioti asks her why, Barbara says she “thought Angie would have wanted [her] to” (epilogue). Do you believe that Angela would have wanted Antonio to know that she was all right? Is Barbara to blame for the events that followed?
When Pallioti puts in his resignation, he says, “When we become Judge and Executioner, there is no difference between Them and Us”(epilogue). Do you agree? Were you surprised by his decision?
Just as Antonio hid so much of his life from Angela during their relationship, Anna kept her true identity a secret from her husband. How much of their dishonesty was justified in each of these cases? Do you feel that we are required to be completely honest with those we love?
Acknowledgments
With special thanks to Peter Straus and all the wonderful people at Rogers, Coleridge & White. Special thanks also to Beth de Guzman, Scott Rosenfeld, and everyone else at Grand Central and Hachette Book Group, who work so hard to make their authors look good!
About the Author
Lucretia Grindle was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up spending half her time in the United States and the other half in the United Kingdom. Continuing as she started out, she still splits her time, but now calls the coast of Maine home.
Also by Lucretia Grindle
Villa Triste
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Prologue
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Epilogue
A Note from the Author
Discussion Questions
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Lucretia Grindle
Newsletters
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Lucretia Grindle
Cover design by Brigid Pearson
Cover photo by Mark Owen / Arcangel Images
Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN: 978-1-4555-4879-8
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