Splintered Shadows: Recapturing a French Résistante
Splintered Shadows: Recapturing a French Résistante is an unconventional adoptee-search narrative told against the backdrop of World War II. French Andrée married an American serviceman after the War, left France, and went to her grave with the story of her life. Marilyn Moriarty, her adoptive daughter, was determined to learn about her mother’s past, a search complicated by the discovery of her mother’s personal and political double lives in Nazi-occupied France. A mysterious name on a photograph from 1945 became the clue that led Moriarty into her mother’s war.
Andrée had concealed her past so successfully, no one in France or America knew the whole story, driving Moriarty to travel to Europe on several occasions in pursuit of the truth. Moriarty unearthed a series of disquieting discoveries about her mother’s past, including her prison record, her biological children, and other haunting details presumed buried with her mother.
With enough history to illuminate the stakes, with a mother-daughter situation that sheds light on the role of women in a conservative regime, with its theme of children conceived and concealed enfolded in a mystery plot, and with cameos of Paris in the forties, this epic story of heartbreak and reconciliation engages the most difficult question of the next generation: how to make peace with the past.
Marilyn F. Moriarty is a prize-winning writer and the author of the creative nonfiction book Moses Unchained, and the textbook on scientific writing, Writing Science through Critical Thinking. Her essays have been published in The Antioch Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Creative Nonfiction, Dappled Things, The Kenyon Review, Raritan, Relief, River Teeth, and other literary and online journals and anthologies. Three essays have been designated “Notable” from the editors of The Best American Essays series. She was a Visiting Writer at the American Academy in Rome. Her nonfiction has received the Pirates Alley Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal for the Essay and the Associated Writing Programs Creative Nonfiction Prize, and her essay “Bone Lab” was selected for Best Spiritual Writing for 2024. Her fiction has been awarded the Peregrine Prize for Fiction, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and the University of Utah Novella Prize. Moriarty received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, and has taught literature at Hollins University, where she was the Inaugural Berry Professor of Liberal Studies and the recipient of the Herta Freitag Award for Critical and Creative Achievement.
