Join us for a Q&A with Stephanie Dray, author of Becoming Madam Secretary, The Women of Chateau Lafayette, and other historical fiction novels. Feel free to ask her any questions!
Please join me in welcoming Stephanie Dray to our BookBrowse Community Forum online discussion. Stephanie is the author of several works of historical fiction, and we’ve had online discussions of two of them – The Women of Chateau Lafayette and, most recently, Becoming Madam Secretary.
Please use this space to ask Stephanie questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Stephanie, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.
Good morning everyone! Thank you 
so much for having me.
Things to know about me: I’m passionate about cats, government, history, books and a good pasta sauce. 
Most of my work centers around founding mothers of the United States. I love to uncover untold stories of women’s heroism and contributions to the world in which we inhabit. And I love the historical detective work of my job almost as much as I love talking to my reader friends!
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We recently held a discussion of Becoming Madam Secretary. Many of us, myself included, had never heard of Frances Perkins. What led you to write about her?
Thank you for participating in this online interview
I thoroughly enjoyed Madame Secretary and Frances Perkin’s relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. What other American women that have caught your interest.
I grew up in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington DC that had historically impact in our history.
Also being interested in Lafayette The Women of Chateau Layette was very enriching for me.
What was the process you used to research Frances’s life and career, and the era in which she lived? Did you uncover anything that surprised you?
I have enjoyed many of your books, especially Women of Chateau Lafayette.
What inspired you to become a writer?
Sometimes plots and characters take on a life of their own. Did you find you needed to make any significant changes to your initial outline for either one as Frances’s story developed?
Historical fiction is my favorite genre to read and fascinates me regarding how one goes about writing it. How far do you feel you can fictionize the subject’s story? What subject matter, for example, would be taboo to change or embellish too much? Do historical fiction writers ever get contacted by families of the subject about stretches from fact? The nuts and bolts of your craft could be a topic in itself. Love your story telling!
Greetings Stephanie!
I’m looking forward to discussing Becoming Madam Secretary with my library group in September. I’m holding off reading it until then. Your other novels have been so interesting. What time period was your favorite to write about?
I wrote about her precisely because so many people have never heard of her.
Frances Perkins is THE most important woman in our nation’s history. Her legacy is far reaching and has lasted almost a hundred years. There is not a single American life that has not been touched by her work. So how could I resist?
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Hi Lynn! I’m so honored that y’all wanted to chat with me. I keep a list of under-appreciated ladies in my phone that I think about all the time. I’m always eying founding mothers–my next novel will be about Abigail Adams! But I’m attracted to women who have interesting, unusual and operatic lives. And if they used their talents to help others, that’s like catnip to me. So naturally I have my eye on Dorothy Thompson, too.
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When did you learn about her, though, and how, if you remember? I know my reaction was, “How had I never heard about this remarkable woman?!?”
I started this book in March 2020 while the pandemic was roaring. That meant I wasn’t able to go and do the kind of research I might usually do, on site. Instead, I relied upon the digitized oral history of Frances Perkins as well as her biography of FDR and the biographies that have been written about her, including my personal favorite by Kirstin Downey.
It was really wonderful that for Frances, I was able to hear her voice in clips that have survived from the era. I was surprised to hear that Boarding School Lockjaw come out in her accent because she didn’t go to boarding school, but she did work with many people who did, and I guess she knew how to fit in when she wanted to.
Later in the process, I was able to review her personal letters and papers in the archives at Columbia and that’s when I discovered very touching love letters between Frances and her husband. Those surprised me because that relationship is often presented as more of a marriage of convenience without passion. I was glad to learn otherwise!
I was a natural born storyteller; I used to entertain the kids at my lunch table with tall tales. And I always joke that I learned to write in the backseat of my grandmother’s Ford Fairlane where she would order me to keep my sister and my cousins in the car. I would weave stories and cliffhangers to keep them inside while grandma shopped for bargains at garage sales. I also used to fill notebooks with stories when I was a kid. A whole novel by the time I was sixteen. None of it was very good, but I had the bug!
My mother wisely told me that I’d never make any money writing and I should do something practical. So I became a lawyer for ten minutes. But after that I decided to go all in on fiction writing and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since!
Hi @Connie_K–what an excellent question about how much to fictionalize in a histfic novel!
It’s a topic for hot debate in writer circles. When it comes to a historical figure that is still actively influencing our politics in the present–someone like Frances Perkins, or Thomas Jefferson, for example–I try to stick as close to the historical record as I can. And if I have to change or move something, I cop to it in my author’s note so that readers don’t leave confused or believing something false. I have literally sweat bullets over whether or not to move a famous headache that Jefferson had in France by a few weeks to make the scenes fit better together.
By the same token, sometimes the reader would really benefit from having eyes on something that my heroine might not have seen first hand, and if I can put my character where she might not otherwise have been for the reader’s benefit, I might do that.
And of course, if I’m writing about someone in the long-ago past who has no influence on modern day politics–let’s say someone like Empress Livia–I have no qualms about being as creative as I need to be to tell a cracking good story.
Ultimately, my job is to entertain, to make a reader feel something about the history, and want to know more. Sometimes that’s a tightrope to walk because people’s real lives do not naturally fall into the shape of a story arc. You have to kind of hammer it into one without doing violence to the facts. I’m looking forward to writing some books with a little more flexibility soon!
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Ah, yes, @kim.kovacs – They say that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. And that’s as true of writing as it is of combat. I’d originally wanted to have Charlie Wyzanski narrate some of the book so that we could see Frances Perkins from the outside, as the indomitable Madam Secretary that she was. But ultimately, my critique partners had an intervention and reminded me that it was poor form to have a book about the most important woman in American history narrated by a man. Even if that man was himself extraordinary. And so Charlie became a supporting character instead of a POV character.
There were other decisions to be made too, including where to start the story. I had a bunch of different beginnings, including one when Frances was undercover in Philadelphia trying to bust pimps and stop human trafficking. But ultimately her story with FDR started in New York, so that’s where I decided to start too.
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