GEORGIA JEFFRIES: THE YOUNGER GIRL
Special guest Georgia Jeffries joins us to discuss her novel The Younger Girl (2024).
Learn More: Check out our questions for Georgia Jeffries.
Get Excited: Check out the 2024 book list and weigh in!
TRANSCRIPT: GEORGIA JEFFRIES, THE YOUNGER GIRL
Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.
Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …
Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …
Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.
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Sarah Harrison 01:39
I am so excited to introduce The Younger Girl today by Georgia Jeffries. I’m gonna read you the summary of the book. So this is based on a true crime The Younger Girl, a debut novel by trailblazing, award winning writer, Georgia Jeffries combines fiction and supernatural suspense to unravel a thrilling tale of family, betrayal and redemption. On March 2, 1933, Chicago tabloids trumpeted the death of 20 year old town Bell Aldine Eris lane, married man held the son of the mayor of Pontiac, a rich farming community south of Chicago, was convicted of manslaughter, but the dead girl’s baby brother, Owen, grew up in a broken family and suspected his beloved sister’s killing was orchestrated by their wealthy uncle in 1996 Owen is an old man desperate to make peace with the tragedy of Aldine’s death. His daughter Joanna takes her still grieving father back home to claim his share of his sister’s lost inheritance. Together, they are caught in a dark labyrinth of family betrayal crossing three generations. Owen is found raving during a violent thunderstorm, and now believes his daughter is his sister, Aldine returning to him, Joanna races against time to save her father and unearths unearth damning secrets that threaten her own life, the guilty will be exposed at the psychic bridge linking past, present and future, but at what cost and who will survive the revelations. So that’s so hard to talk about books for modern authors, because we never give away the ending. And I so much want to ask you questions for one of our, oh, I would ask so many spoiler questions.
Carolyn Daughters 03:50
One of our 1930s novels, we’d probably start there. But we’re not spoiling The Younger Girl because everybody will want to read to find out what’s gonna I hope so. Okay, so George, Jeff, yes, we certainly did. Thank you. Georgia Jeffries is a writer of Emmy award winning drama and critically acclaimed noir fiction, honored with multiple Writers Guild Awards, Golden Globes and the Humanitas prize. Her work in film has been praised by the Los Angeles Times a standing ovation television. The Los Angeles Review of Books described her short stories in the national anthologies odd partners and the last resort as firecracker tales and domestic tragedy, brilliantly segueing into comic farce. She has also written, by a lot, biographical profiles for Huff Post and u c press, including the last gun of Tiber seal Bucha busques, which can be viewed on the K CE T TV website. Art bound, born in the Illinois heartland. She worked as a journalist for American film before. Writing and producing ground breaking female driven dramas, Cagney and Lacey, China Beach, and Sisters. Her screenwriting career has been distinguished by extensive field research, from patrolling the mean streets of rampart with the LAPD to crashing of Vegas bounty hunters convention to reporting from a Walter Reed Army Hospital surgical Bay, each investigation the basis for one of her many docudramas and series pilots for CBS, ABC, NBC, HBO, and Showtime. A cum laude UCLA graduate, Georgia Jeffries is a professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts, where she created the first undergraduate screenwriting thesis program at American University. Welcome, Georgia.
Georgia Jeffries 05:45
Thank you so much. Carolyn.
Carolyn Daughters 05:47
It’s an incredible bio. We were talking by email with you have a publishing team, and I was saying before we read the book, we have a number of books we could be reading and discussing. Like everybody else, our time is is valuable, and we’re trying to figure out, like, which ones do we want to read? And before I had read The Younger Girl, I said, Oh my gosh, she was connected with Cagney and Lacey, and that was such a formative show for me and Sisters in China Beach. And I just thought, I don’t even the books good, bad or other. I don’t care. I want to meet her. And then the book is, of course, great. So it was this amazing experience.
Georgia Jeffries 06:40
I wanted to ask how Cagney & Lacey was formative for you. I just turned it around. So, how was it formative for you? You would have been very young, very young when you were watching episodes.
Carolyn Daughters 06:55
I was not. I was probably in my, oh, I don’t even know, maybe pre-teen or early teen years, probably pre teen. And Mary Beth Lacey, there’s an episode, and I think this is before you were involved in the show, but there’s an episode where she essentially has this nervous breakdown, and the world is too much for her. There’s, she’s just, she’s got so much piled on, and she goes off to this beach area and to decompress. And I remember not really understanding what I was watching, because I was of an age where what was happening on the screen was not fully connecting with me, and yet on some like, like, very deep level, it was connecting very deeply with me. And I was understanding how you can be so overwhelmed with life and the events of life and the expectations life gives you that you just want to disappear and just like close the door and say, I’m taking a break, but in their episodes, the way these two women interact, and Christine Cagney. They’re both beautiful women, but Christine Cagney really just embraced the tomboy, which I loved, like, just in a different role, in a different series. She would have had long hair curled, and she would have been wearing dresses and because the actress is a beautiful actress, and yet it she just embraced the role and the character and who she was. And it for me, it it like showed possibility of what a what a person, what a young woman could be. If that makes sense. (I also enjoyed the character of Joanne in The Younger Girl.)
Georgia Jeffries 08:40
Yes, and I love it that you say that I loved writing both characters. I especially enjoyed writing Cagney, and I think it was because of her defiance. There was a defiance to Cagney in terms of her confronting directly the sexism of our time, past, present and future. Let me just say it, it’s still there, and Lacey on one hand, very much represented who I was in real life in terms of my roles as a mother, working mother of very young children. I remember it was significant to the male producers on the show that it was the first, I was the first writer who was actually a mother in real life. And time daily used to actually, that wasn’t quite true, because one of our more senior producers, she was, she was a writing partner, Shelley list and Jonathan Estrin. The last year that I was on the show as a producer, she was a mother, but she. Had grown adult children. I was the young mom still in the working mom, day to day trenches and so I brought that. I brought that every day to the office. And so Tyne, when she had a particularly strong point to make.
Carolyn Daughters 10:24
Before we move on to The Younger Girl, I wonder if you could talk some more about Tyne Daly’s character.
Georgia Jeffries 10:25
When she was confronting Harvey and maybe not not doing full diligence on his duties as a dad or protesting something, she would send the message up to me and our writing producer office as saying, I need Georgia to write me a mother speech. And I love that, because it showed her trust in me, especially as I came to the show, as they use at the time, a baby writer. I started as Story Editor, then executive Story Editor, worked my way up to producer over a three year period. So it’s very gratifying to know that these amazing stars of the show have faith in your work as a writer, in terms of really getting that character so Lacey was very dutiful, and she did her damndest to support her family on all accounts, and of course, bring in the bacon, especially when Harvey wasn’t doing that as much as the family needed it. Cagney had fewer obligations. The only person she was a caretaker for, besides Lacey, on occasion, that was that beautiful friendship between the two of them. But it was her father, her father, who was troubled in his own way, right? But otherwise she was ambition unleashed at different times, and she said what she wanted to say in any moment, and confronted authority in a way that Lacey would never have done, because Lacey was a more diplomatic character, and she couldn’t afford to lose that job. Cagney possibly could have afforded to lose it because she had some money in the bank thanks to her dead mother, but but she had higher aspirations. So writing the two women was a very different experience, and I loved that I could balance by being the voice of both. And of course, the actors were so wonderful. They always brought so much to whatever, whatever the dialog was, I’m glad, I’m glad that you such a young age, but that you saw the strength of both of these characters. And at the time, it was the only television drama that had two female leads. As I’m sure you know, it was created by two women, also the first time two women ever worked on a show together to create it. So it was in that sense, very the show was trailblazing, and that’s why my publisher and the publicist used the word trailblazing to describe me, because I worked on that show, but I give that show full credit for being my film school. That was my film school.
Carolyn Daughters 13:29
It’s a pretty good film school.
Sarah Harrison 13:33
We watched a little last night. I want to come back to your we’re probably going to jump around a lot between your TV work and the novel, but something you said about bringing yourself to your writing definitely was true with The Younger Girl. In fact, it’s about a woman who investigates the death of her aunt, only the woman in The Younger Girl, Joanna, but ostensibly, that’s you. So I’m interested in books that are based on real life, how much I believe, I believe you were an only child. I’d read that elsewhere. But how much of the of Joanna’s character is you, and how much did you fictionalize that character? Where does it deviate?
Georgia Jeffries 14:27
The emotional life of Joanna definitely reflects her relationship with her father, Owen. It definitely reflects the dynamics of the relationship that I had with my father growing up. Joanna is an only child. Yes, I was an only child and but the I should say, like the costume design of this character is. Different in some ways. She grew up in Southern California, in the Inland Empire. From a very young age, I grew up in Illinois, and then later when my family moved to California in the San Francisco Bay Area. Okay, a lot of similar areas. She went to Berkeley. I went to UCLA. Okay, we’re both in the UC system. And she was the first in her family to go to college and to graduate from college, and so was I. So there’s a lot of Joanne’s experience in the world as having grown into a much larger world than her parents had, in terms of time and Background and I guess there would also, I would also have to say that Joanna, as I wrote her, was more similar to who I was two decades ago than I am now. So in a sense, yes, Aldine Younger is the main character of The Younger Girl, but Joanna is the protagonist because she is on a quest for justice on behalf of her father, who lost his beloved sister Aldine when he was only a child. So I take Joanna into territory that into more dangerous territory than I personally experienced in researching The Younger Girl. But the antagonist is very much a composite of some of the people who created obstacles for my learning more easily the truth of what actually happened with the embezzlement of my aunt’s inheritance. And yes, I’ll stop at that. There’s more revealed in the book.
Carolyn Daughters 17:28
I’m thinking also of your writing career for television, but there’s so many different ways to tell a story, right? So you could tell a biographical story about your aunt. And you could just say, this is, this is the story. I researched it. This is who she is. You could use that as a springboard for a completely fictionalized tale. You can bridge the two, which, to some degree, you do here and then beyond the bridge. What you do is you have two women who are helming this thing, right? We have our protagonist, we have Joanna, and then we have Aldine. And it’s just an interesting way to choose to tell the story in The Younger Girl. Did you grapple with this at all? Did you have to say to yourself, Okay, how do I want to enter this story and share this narrative, or did you just automatically come into this knowing this is how I’m going to tell this tale? I’m sure these questions occurred to you many times in the television world as well, where Tyne Daly said, Hey, write me a mother speech, and you’re like, I got one. Like, I got 10. How did you make the decision about how to tell this story?
Georgia Jeffries 18:48
I grappled. The verb you chose is the perfect verb. I grappled. And I grappled over time. As you know from reading the author statement, this was a story that started and stopped over decades, and I actually didn’t probably put pen to paper until over 10 years after I had traveled back to Illinois with my father, shortly before he died, where he was taking me on the path of not only what he experienced as a child, but the last day and night of his sister’s life. Is he understood it before she was killed, and we went back at my request. There was a family reunion involved. At the time, he declined. At first, I had to really sell I want to go back. I want to take you back. I think this would be good for you. Dad and No, no, no, he was too tender hearted. He didn’t want to revisit things. Yes, and at the point that I approached him, it was probably at least 25 years after I had first discovered the newspaper clippings that were buried underneath a family album about my aunt’s death, about the killing that had made the Chicago papers, Chicago tabloids, and at the time that I discovered that my father refused to discuss the issue with me, it was my mother who told me, from her point of view, what had happened. So for me to actually muster the courage with my dad shortly after, in my early 40s, and say, I really want to know more about what happened with your sister. And would you go back with me for Aldine, that’s why he said, It may have been because he felt that it was so important to me, but I think most deeply he needed to go back because of their relationship. So I just knew that I needed to explore her life in some way as a writer in The Younger Girl. I didn’t know how I was going to do that. I thought it might be a novel. I just finished my first novel at that point, and there was a lot of attention with that that was also based, based on a crime, actually, that occurred in Los Angeles. But I had, I didn’t have any personal relationship to it. My husband happened to he worked with a man who was accused of murder. That’s another story, and that’s the one that hopefully I’ll be talking to you about in about the next year or so, because there’s, there’s some renewed interest in that. But the grappling occurred on two levels. One, the first time I went back with my dad, actually the only time, because he died. Very extraordinary. A lot of oral histories with family members, some who were sympathetic to my quest in the search, some who were not at all and felt that it was embarrassing, as it was a family scandal, and as I asked harder and deeper questions about the missing money that she never collected at the age of 18, the doors closed even tighter. So I came back with all of these oral histories, and then about 12 years later, I went back and delved into the transcripts in the courthouse, all the transcripts about the two trials, and that’s where I collected a lot of information, but then how to approach it. So at first, I knew it would be a father daughter quest, and I also needed. I need. I knew I needed to portray Aldine as a character, but I had no idea how. And as soon as I knew I had to write Aldine through first person as opposed to third person point of view. And I can’t even tell you exactly where that happened, because it was such an on and off journey, but once I knew that I was writing her first person that was the key to The Younger Girl and through all of the through all of the years, when I was working on another novel for hire that was supposed to be published during the lockdown, and, of course, I was being paid for that, and other projects I was working on, and Daniel girl would go into the drawer until there’d be a time like maybe during summer break from teaching, that I could pull it out again, but it was always a very challenging balancing act to get back to the father daughter structure, because so much of that was based on the actual research, and I had to discern how much to use, how not. But with LD, once I knew I was writing her first person. It didn’t matter what time of day or what time of year, I could come home at 10 o’clock at night after a late class, or I could go to bed. I’d wake up in the middle of night at 3am couldn’t get to sleep. I’d go into my writing room, and I could write Aldine and I wrote a first person, and I didn’t write in sequence, so what you ultimately read as a diary was not originally created as a diary. I was just writing what Aldine would write down as an angry, young teenage girl who wasn’t getting what she needed in her life. So she was my muse.
Sarah Harrison 25:08
You bring up so many things I have questions about. I’m not sure where to start. Whenever I read books based on reality, I always am asking myself, is this the real part?
Georgia Jeffries 25:24
That’s what myself always, that’s what we do.
Sarah Harrison 25:30
When going through source material for The Younger Girl, you mentioned transcripts, etc.. It sounds like you did not have an actual diary from Aldine that’s mostly channeled.
Georgia Jeffries 25:41
That was my creation entirely. In fact, that was one of the frustrations of all the research I could find. No as I, as is, it was called, when I was a history major in college, no primary sources in her own hand, other than the will that she signed at the age of 18, leaving all of her earthly goods, including the fortune, the inheritance she thought she would be receiving to her mother, I have that one signature. That’s all I have from anything that she had written. What I do have from the lawyer, from my grandmother’s This is my grandmother in the novel. Her last name is Morris. That’s not her real name, but grandmother Morris, my father’s mother, had a personal lawyer. She was involved in a lot of litigation in her life, in particular, a lot of very sophisticated legal dealings with her managing the inheritance of her daughter. So believe it or not, all of that correspondence was still in the lawyers Law Offices when I went there, probably was now 15 years ago, and they dug it all out for me. I saw the ledger that my grandmother had kept where she had to account for every single dollar that she spent on Ellery clothing, her etiquette lessons, her every possible thing you can imagine. And just to give you an idea of that, this is going on without any doubt, in the middle of the Depression, my grandmother charged my aunt room and board, of course, because my grandmother had been widowed twice, and she needed to support her other four children, and Aldine was the child of my grandmother’s wealthiest husband, who died when Aldine was only a baby. So all of these things you were mentioning, Sarah, is that true? Yes, everything from the transcript, everything that relates to Aldine’s legal life, all of that is true. I mean, Marcus is a character, is a composite character, but the specifics that I use in The Younger Girl about all the trials and the inheritance are just straight, straight out of the historical record. So there are things, of course, that I’m not a historian, I’m a dramatist. So when I go, when the shall I say, When? When the dramatic arc is elevating and elevating. And there is danger, danger involved for both Owen, the Father, and then ultimately, even more so for Joanna, that’s where my, my, my dramatist, shifts in to higher gear, to better to better, I think for the reader, show how deeply buried the secrets were and how militant the Family was really one part of the family in withholding the truth of what really happened to her inheritance and also how that was related to her killing.
Carolyn Daughters 29:33
In your mind, is this, then, for you, a search for the truth? You say, subjects choose us as much as we choose them. And you’d waited your whole life to write The Younger Girl. What is it about this book that said to you, I have to tell this story. And in the middle of the night, Aldine is speaking to you, and you’re like, oh, I’ve got to get up and write this down. I could, I could do it three at. Morning, three in the morning, if I’m awake at that time, and what is that story that you felt like you had to tell.
Georgia Jeffries 30:14
It wasn’t my first choice for The Younger Girl. That way, lots of times, I’ve got the mind keeps going. Gotta write this note down, and that note down, I suppose, a lot has to do with the way I discovered that she existed as a child. I mean, that was a surprise to me. It was a family secret and a family grief and tragedy that just hadn’t been addressed. And of course, my father’s resistance to addressing any of it always only made me more curious as a child. But truly, I have to say, her picture, her picture. I mean, I was so intrigued by not just the picture on the front of the Chicago paper, which was after her death, probably was one of the last pictures that was ever taken of her when she was 20. But there was a family picture of the five of the five children, and I was really intrigued by her face she was probably 14. In that picture, my father was six, and it left an impression, and I wanted to know what really happened. And from everything my father told me, it was a really tangled tale, I wanted to know the truth. And you know what I knew? I knew that from everything that I’d read, that Justice had not been served. And so you bet, you bet I was on a quest for truth and I mean, in all of my television work, most and a lot of the pilots that I wrote, also it’s very much about women, women who do not look the other way and who want to protect their families and also protect other people. I mean, Cagney and Lacey did that, didn’t they? And even in China beach, I mean, the Delaney, she was trying McMurphy, we’re trying to save somebody else. And so I guess I’ve always been attracted to tales in which strong women protect who they love and also, I guess, in one level, try to try to save people from harm coming their way. So in a sense, The Younger Girl is a cautionary tale. It’s a cautionary tale on what could happen to any 15 year old girl who is fatherless and being seduced by a man twice her age and is looking. And also a young girl who is, though she may be innocent, is also an adventurer. She’s an adventures. She wants to see more of life than she’s seeing in that small town. So it’s a character of contradictions and complexity. And those, of course, are the best characters for any writer to write very write very quickly.
Sarah Harrison 33:26
I just gonna go back to two of the relationships in The Younger Girl that I find the most poignant, the most heartbreaking relationships, both are Owens, both with his sister and with his daughter. And you’ve alluded to the fact that that relationship between you and your father is a real part of the book. And I always wonder, in those situations, how do you write about your own family and give it both the truth and the respect and the consideration and all the complexity that it deserves?
Georgia Jeffries 34:14
That’s a wonderful question, and it’s one that I grappled with throughout the writing and the non-writing of The Younger Girl. I felt a great responsibility to my family and to my thought the legacy of my father’s life and what he had the trust to share with me, particularly through The latter months and several years of his life, especially after he found sobriety and being sober, I think he learned to release a lot of the grievance grievances that had. It really shaped his life for decades before and of course, grievances are based on grief, right? It’s a grievance is a grief, I think, that’s not released, that’s repressed or somehow other fed in certain ways through the years. If we’re not able to process it, so family relationships, of course, are, I think, our greatest source of inspiration as writers. Sarah, are you a writer?
Sarah Harrison 35:37
I am not. I’m an engineer.
Georgia Jeffries 35:43
But are you a writer, Carolyn?
Carolyn Daughters 35:47
Yes, I am.
Georgia Jeffries 35:50
Well, what what forms us any more deeply than our family relationships? I mean, that’s the question, right? I mean nature versus nurture. I think it’s a balance. I mean, we do come into this life, I think, with certain personality proclivities, but it’s very much nature and nurture. And I don’t know what your horoscope sign is, but you might put that into the mix as well, right? So I’m a Taurus, Oh, and another, another earth sign. I’m a Virgo, yes. How about you, Carolyn?
Carolyn Daughters 36:31
I’m a Libra. So I see all sides of all stories.
Georgia Jeffries 36:34
You certainly do. And that’s my rising sign. And that end is very much on the cusp and so, and that’s also one of the challenges for me. It’s the opportunity and the challenge, because I see all sides. And so I feel my strongest writing is to show those many facets of any human being. I even had some empathy for the character of Tazewell, in terms of what helped to form him, and he was a composite of both of some family members and also some literary, particular literary inspiration. I did make a very conscious choice to include some, I guess I would say some biographical, autobiographical conversations with my father in The Younger Girl. And I had to come to terms with that, because, of course, there was a Do I really show that side and I, and I thought, I’m going to be authentic to the story and also to the life experiences in particular childhood that formed my father. I honor him by telling the truth of how that shaped his life. That’s how I ended. And somebody asked me at a reading a couple weeks ago. They said, Do you think your father would be happy with the book you wrote. And I said, I think my father would be very happy with what I have revealed about the tragedy that befell Aldi. I think he would be very grateful for that. How would he feel about some of the conversations I shared based on actual life experience. I think my dad, honestly, he had, he had a he had a good sense of humor when he was relaxed, a very good sense of humor. And one thing he used to say, and I think I quoted in The Younger Girl, was the only thing worse than a thief was a liar. And I think he would respect me for having told shared certain scenes that are really truthful, as in terms of how they unfolded, and he it’s I really want to give him, honor him by saying that in the last six years of his life, he shared so much with me, and the trust was there, and I’m so grateful for that, and he left me a great legacy to create from.
Sarah Harrison 39:27
Let me put it that way, into that, because you just You said something that really resonates with me. So I want to just throw out this idea to you and our listeners, the concept of telling the truth. One of my favorite books I’ve ever read, it’s, uh, it’s by Orson Scott Card, and it’s called speaker for the dead, and it’s the second, it’s the second book in the Ender series, but it’s basically Ender goes around the galaxy, because it’s sci-fi. Of course, he goes around the galaxy. And he is essentially just telling the truth about complicated people and bringing peace to the family and the situation in that way. And it just really reminded me of what you were saying about relating your relationship with your father truthfully as a way of honoring him.
Georgia Jeffries 40:21
Thank you. Thank you very much for saying that. When I was signing at the at a book reading on Saturday night, I wrote that I made The Younger Girl to several of the readers who are buying books. Made this story help your own family story of healing, because as happy as any childhood, apparently, is, we all, we all carry other from our experiences in school. If we survived our childhoods, we have enough story material probably to last four or five, six decades so. And that’s just because as different personalities, we experience a sense of belonging or not belonging, or judgment or whatever. And it can be with our peers. It could be with our family. But isn’t that why people read stories so they they can see how other characters have managed their way through these, these obstacles at the time. They give us hope. Those characters give us hope. They entertain us, for sure, and they intrigue us. And I think sometimes they’re role models.
Carolyn Daughters 41:36
Tazewell, I was wondering how to pronounce that name.
Georgia Jeffries 41:39
You did perfectly. Tazewell.
Carolyn Daughters 41:44
Where did you come up with this name of this very interesting character? I will not spoil The Younger Girl, but I’ll say he plays an integral role in the story. He does tell us about this character. You said, a composite. So and do the people who are part of the composite or the relatives of the composite, did they recognize him? Have you? Have you heard any feedback about Tazewell?
Georgia Jeffries 42:09
No, I haven’t, and I don’t really expect to, but I could be surprised when I was doing some of the deeper research into what happened to my aunt’s inheritance, one of the family members that I was meeting with over lunch and had acknowledged that he knew that I was trying to get more material about What had happened. He acknowledged that there were family papers that were safe in safe and that it was not in the best interest of the family to provide them. And what he was saying was not in the best interest of his branch of the family, but I felt it was in the best interest of my father’s branch of the family. There’s inspiration from several different levels. And actually, Tazewell, I will tell you, is a name of a county in Illinois, and it was a county in which I went to school before my family moved to to California, and I suppose, in a sense, Tazewell, the name is a metaphor for Joanna’s education. Joanna gets a very strong education dealing with Tazewell, very strong. And we’ll just say that. I say in the beginning, I think there’s a loss of innocence. With Joanna in the arc of this story, there’s a loss of innocence. And sometimes we need to lose our innocence in order to individuate, to use a union term right as adults, in a maturity separate from who we were as children and our family. So I guess you could say TAs will definitely provides an education for Joanne, and hopefully she provides a little education for him down the road, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Carolyn Daughters 44:26
I did not get that sense in The Younger Girl. But you never know.
Georgia Jeffries 44:30
You never know. We never write anybody off, right? We have to show compassion for all of our characters and there were times I did feel real compassion for Tazewell, and I really understood him from a certain point of view. I really did. And so in that sense, I do have entities for him.
Carolyn Daughters 44:54
The forum, basing this story on real events and real people. It resembles the memoir to some degree, though it’s this is obviously not a memoir per se, but you hear from a number of memoirs, including a memoirist we had on Erica Kraus just maybe a month ago or so. But how hard it is to tell the truth about one’s family and put it down. And you have different family members. You have this corner of the family, and that corner and this camp and that camp, and it takes, to some degree, I think, an act of bravery to take a story and be the one to put it out there in the world. Did you feel that when you were researching and interviewing and trying to capture oral histories from people, and you’ve got some people who maybe were effusive, and other people who pushed back and said, No, I don’t have really anything to share.
Georgia Jeffries 46:01
Thank you for giving that greater context. I really appreciate that. I guess the simplest way to respond is to say I was on a mission with The Younger Girl. I was just I was on a mission, and I was just going to keep asking questions, even when people didn’t answer them. And of course, the reason it’s fiction is because I had to have the freedom of fiction to come to my own conclusions, because it was such a tangled story, and because it was very much as I approached it was Rashomon. It was Rashomon, I would hear one point of view and in one memory, and then another, another quote, and then another incident, and then depending on each person I met, and then how did I discern what I needed to pull out of all of that? And there is absolutely history in it, and there’s a verbatim history, certainly from a legal standpoint, because I had to be true to that. But I needed the freedom of going also I will. I’ll just go ahead and say it, to go more, to go more deeply spiritually into the story in The Younger Girl, as opposed to just the nuts and bolts of the legal cases or the memories of certain members, really, what was the essence of this story? And in the sense of who was Aldine, really, because she was lost, the person she was lost at the age of 20. So people have her in memory, and there’s, there’s in in one of the diary entries, she’s choosing, she’s describing because she loved fashion, and that’s collaborate, corroborated by everyone I talked to, and that she just loved dressing, and she had a great sense, I think of as a Libra visual beauty, right? And, yes, that’s true. And so I have her talking about a sailor dress. It’s a sailor design, which was very, I guess, in vogue in the 30s that she saw in a shop, and she was going to wear long white stockings with it and she had it all accessorized well, that actually was inspired by a conversation I had with one of her grade school classmates back in 1996 who described to me that she remembered how beautifully dressed she was, always the best dressed girl in no sixth grade or whatever it was, and she actually described the sailor dress to me, and I was in awe. And of course, that says a lot about the lady who was describing it to me that she had such an eye for detail. It was a beautiful gift to me. But I had also sensed that she really had a handle on who Aldine was at an early age too. As you know, I love doing interviews. And I started out as a magazine journalist and did a lot of interviews for American film and so on. But I also did some other stories that were more I guess I would call them a social justice oriented like the first oral School for the Deaf in in California, and that, you know it, that was not a big paying assignment by any means, but I felt it was very, very important to explore a different way of approaching how to teach the hearing impaired, and that was considered. Are very risky to do at the time. So, yeah, I like to. I do take risks because it makes life more interesting, does it not? And so, and doing all the investigations that I did. The first episode I wrote for Cagney and Lacey was actually inspired by that driving with a sergeant, LAPD Sergeant on patrol in rampart division, and we were shot at and I did make it home to see my baby daughter in the crib the next morning. That gave me such empathy for the jobs that police officers perform, and that really became the inspiration for the pitch of Cagney, in unusual occurrence, to be unfairly judged and ostracized and condemned by the press they don’t know the decision she has to make every day to serve her community and just to stay alive. So it’s the research, I guess part of it’s the history major in me too, but the research that I think brings the authenticity that I want to put into any story, right?
Sarah Harrison 51:25
Things I found really authentic. But also, I’m gonna say, I’m not sure how to phrase this question. I want to see how it lands. Really authentic, but also, like, really, really frustrating to me. Um, was some of the stuff Joanna was doing. And I won’t, I don’t think I’ll give anything away, because I’ll just name some events at the beginning of The Younger Girl. But I’ve noticed what I believe is a trend in folks who are dealing with really overwhelming situations. And I think of it in terms of this tunnel vision and this sort of self-focus. But so you see Joanna at the beginning, right? She’s having nightmares. So what does she do? She moves into her own bedroom, and she thinks of it as punishment for herself. She’s like, Oh, this is hard on me, but I’ll get through it. And not thinking about this is hard on my husband, like really, and throughout the book, she’s really hard on her husband and not considering him, almost like he’s almost an appendage. He’s not his own self that she while she’s busy concerned about her father, she’s neglecting her immediate family. Can you talk to me about those choices and how you came up with that?
Georgia Jeffries 52:44
Yes, and I’m glad you picked up on that, because that was the arc I wanted to create in The Younger Girl. So I’m glad, I’m glad that you received that because I, because I had to find a redemptive arc. I wasn’t going to find ultimate justice for Aldine, because that time was passed, and she is gone, and other generations have been here. So, so what is the redemption of this novel? And of course, every story I’ve ever written, I’m always looking for an aspect of redemption. The Redemption is, well, let’s see the redemption that I hope readers will receive as they get to the latter chapters, is that Joanna is able to free herself from the Weight of the tragedy that she absorbed from her childhood, from her father’s experience, so she can be more fully present in her own life with her husband, who is a wonderful partner, but it is an eye opening thing, and, and, and the thing with that the dreams is that it’s interesting that you experience it, that it was like self-punishing. See, she did have tunnel vision. She didn’t see that she was hurting herself as well as her husband by isolating or separating. She thought she didn’t want to bother him, but really what she didn’t want was to have her she didn’t want to be exposed to, didn’t want him to see the pain and the confusion that she was going through. She’s very much a character in control. You see that in the beginning, wanting to be in control, not just of her own life and taking care of her family, but controlling her father’s life to keep him safe, right? So she also is the younger girl in the novel in the sense that I wanted, and I hope for the reader to see that she grows into her mature womanhood by releasing who she was as a child. So there were, there were, yes, there were complex goals here.
Carolyn Daughters 55:28
In The Younger Girl, she doesn’t want to reveal the pain and that sort of experience that she’s having, but also what becomes an obsession for her, where, like the psychic distance between her father and herself is shorter, shorter, shorter, and so she’s almost taking on this, this experience for him, even when he’s not capable of doing it at one point in the story. And I know that I when I sometimes get very passionate about something, and I’m not talking about, like, hey, I really want to do this one thing today. I mean, like, for long periods of time, I’m like, I want to do whatever this big thing is. And I feel that my husband or someone close to me is going to be like, hey, you need to breathe and you need to stop and you need so I’ll just keep plowing through. And so there’s a point where she’s not taking her husband’s calls, because she knows what she’s going to hear. If he calls her, he’s going to call her out and say, hey, do you want me to come out there? Do you want to come home? Do you want like, he’s going to have all kinds of sensible suggestions, right? And she’s she won’t have it, because right now she’s here, like she has to do what she’s doing right now, and or feels she does. Yes, having been there, I identified with that, and also good very much. Felt for the husband and thought like, Oh my goodness. But I also, like, I understood that whole like, when you’re when you’re in it, you don’t feel like you have alternatives. You’re like, I have to do this. I can’t find the language to explain it over here, so maybe I just won’t take the call. I felt her being torn in all these different directions. But it became obvious to me that she was very passionate about and maybe even obsessed with, figure figuring out what happened to Aldine, and really like being in in the place where she is in Illinois, like she and her father are there, and she’s like, I’m here. There’s a reason I’m here. I want to figure it out.
Georgia Jeffries 57:34
Thank you both, because you brought such grounded and reaffirming perspectives to that whole art. I thank you for that. I tell you that when I was in Illinois with my dad, and it was like, almost like, being in a dream scape, because of what was being shared, and so much of it was just, it’s like another world to me, and yet, in some strange way, it felt familiar. And so I got a call from my agent and I was working on a Showtime project at the time, a series. Well, pilot, but by Agent call me to say, oh, Georgia, as soon as you come back, I want to set up a meeting with you and Robert Altman. Do you know who Robert Altman was the director. And so she’s saying this to me, and I’m thinking Robert Altman, and she wants me to have a meeting with Robert Altman, but I’m here, and this is so much more interesting to me than talking about a pilot, because that doesn’t seem real to me. That’s not real. This is real right now.
Sarah Harrison 59:04
Georgia, I feel like we could talk to all night, but we’re already over our time.
Carolyn Daughters 59:10
It happens. We very much enjoyed The Younger Girl and so enjoyed this time to talk with you.
Sarah Harrison 59:21
It’s our pleasure. Highly rate the book has a picture. It has a multiple pictures about Aldine and the family, and I love that that was included at the back. So I highly recommend folks, check it out. Check out. The book is fascinating read.
Carolyn Daughters 59:38
The book is The Younger Girl. We can’t recommend it enough. And thank you so much.
Sarah Harrison 59:51
Check out all of Georgia Jeffries’ other work. We just watched and Cagney and Lacey episode last night. I looked up your first produced episode. So we watched this. Season Six, episode three.
Sarah Harrison
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Carolyn Daughters
You can learn more about all our book selections at teatonicandtoxin.com. You can also comment, weigh in, and follow along with what we’re reading and discussing @teatonicandtoxin on Instagram and Facebook. And you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, please visit our website, teatonicandtoxin.com to check out current and past reading lists and support our labor of love, starting at only $3 a month.
Sarah Harrison
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.
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