Splintered Shadows: Recovering a French Résistante
Some stories are passed down in whispers. Others must be chased through the shadows.
Splintered Shadows: Recovering a French Résistante is an unconventional adoptee-search narrative told against the backdrop of World War II. After the War, Andrée married an American serviceman, left France, and carried the story of her earlier life to her grave. Her adoptive daughter, Marilyn Moriarty, was left with only fragments—photographs, names, and unanswered questions that hinted at a past far more complicated than it appeared.
Moriarty’s search begins with a single name on a 1945 photograph and leads her across Europe, uncovering a hidden life shaped by secrecy, imprisonment, and dangerous choices in Nazi-occupied France. As she pieces together her mother’s personal and political double lives, the narrative explores pressures faced by women under occupation and the lasting consequences of histories deliberately concealed. Moving between past and present, Splintered Shadows is a powerful story of discovery, reckoning, and making peace with a past inherited but never fully known.
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.
“Marilyn Moriarty brilliantly intertwines history, memory, family, and identity as she searches for the truth about her mother. This deeply researched and gorgeously written book illuminates the hidden contributions of women during WWll and the culture of silence that followed. A must-read for anyone trying to understand our fractured past.”
– Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies
“A book about lost mothers, wounded daughters, fractures lives, and the need to reclaim buried history . . . Deeply moving . . . it will hold you to the very end.”
– Bob Siegel, author of Criminals
“Marilyn Moriarty’s quest for her mother’s secret past quietly screams of love. In this exquisite memoir, Moriarty deftly telescopes from her own unending grief to all of France’s in World War II. Fueled by a will as strong as her mother’s, her pursuit is worthy of a movie.”
– Mary Carter Bishop, author of Don’t You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son
“Through Moriarty’s fine writing and meticulous research, we bear witness to some of the wreckage left behind after World War II . . . Through a compelling and chilling pilgrimage searching for memories of her mother . . . This gifted storyteller eases us to and from the present with tenacity and sharp intellect.”
– Ethel Morgan Smith, author of Path to Grace: Reimaging the Civil Rights Movement, Winner of the 2023 Eudora Welty Prize
