Georgia Jeffries, Author of The Younger Girl

You’ve written groundbreaking, award-winning, female-driven dramas such as Cagney & Lacey, China Beach, and Sisters. What made you now try your hand at writing novels?

I want to ask you about your work as a producer. You got your start in Cagney & Lacey. Season 6 episode 3? Tell us about joining that team and your role there.

Talk about journey from producer to writer. Talk to us about the episodes you wrote.

You’ve said that “Subjects choose us as much as we choose them.” You’ve also said you were waiting your whole life to write this book. Tell us why.

How is writing a novel different from writing screenplays? Which do you prefer? Talk about your transition from writing journalism to writing fiction. How did this occur and how did you feel about it?

The Younger Girl is based on the 1933 murder of your aunt Aldine Younger, presumably by the married man she had been seeing on and off, Asher Bentley. Aldine sees Asher as a “man of the world,” and they start seeing each other when he’s 40 and she’s only 15. How and when did you learn about your aunt’s story?

In 1996, you and your father traveled to his hometown in Illinois to investigate your aunt’s murder. What prompted that trip? What did you learn while there?

The relationship between Owen and his sister was one of the most heartbreaking elements of the story. Can you speak to this? How do we write about our families while being respectful of their personal lives and perspectives?

There are many ways a writer might tell your aunt’s story. A writer might write a nonfiction-based account of Aldine. Or fictionalize the entire story, using Aldine’s experiences as a springboard for a new story altogether. Or blend truth and fiction. How did you decide to fictionalize the real-life story of your aunt and have two protagonists – Aldine in the past and Joanne in the present?

The story is told through a few methods, such as a typical novel, but then also clippings and journal entries. Did you have access to any of Aldine’s old journals?

What sort of first-hand material did you incorporate? Where were you true to Aldine’s character and where did you fictionalize? Did she write poetry?

Aldine Younger lived from 1912-1933. What was life like for a young woman in a 1930s small town in the Midwest? What would life have been like for an African-American attorney like Marcus Washington’s father?

You had to do a lot of research to get the story about your aunt. You interviewed people, reviewed historical public records, and read period newspapers, trial transcripts, and family legal documents. Were you able to get the “whole” story? What was your research process?

Tazewell – disinherited by his father, Owen’s brother – seems like a mysterious and somewhat ominous character. Owen. Is Tazewell based on a real person?

Both Owen and Joanne seem to be grappling with demons of their own – or possibly historical ghosts that want to be put to rest. His behavior ranges from challenging to problematic in the book, and at one point she says his “work and heart [had] dried up in equal proportions.” She also says, “a dead woman took her father captive.” Talk about the decision to include supernatural elements in the book and the degree to which these ghosts “haunt” the characters.

As the woman investigating her aunt’s death, Joanna is ostensibly you, but clearly many elements were changed. What parts of yourself did you incorporate into the character and which did you change?

You’re a professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, where you created the first undergraduate screenwriting thesis program at an American university. Tell us how that came about. Tell us about the BFA television thesis program

You’ve been a working Hollywood writer for most of your career. Tell us some of your most memorable adventures in writing for TV through the years.

What’s some advice you might share for those who want to become TV writers?

What’s next – what are you working on now?