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My aunt never got to see her novel about a Guernsey wartime book club become a worldwide success

Lily James plays the lead in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Studio Canal
Lily James plays the lead in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Studio Canal

How does anyone coauthor a novel? I haven’t the slightest idea, and I did it. I am the co-author, with my aunt Mary Ann Shaffer, of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and based upon this experience, my only advice for aspiring co-authors is: Live together for 45 years before you start writing.

I grew up in a close family. Close as in right down the street and close as in “Why haven’t you called? It’s been fifteen hours.”  One of the things I knew all my life was that my aunt Mary Ann was a writer. Even in my earliest memories, dating from the period when I had only just realized that grownups did not lie down sadly in a corner when I left the room, but actually led lives of their own, I knew Mary Ann was writing a book. It was a mystery about a French mouse. Later, she was writing a biography of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, the polar explorer, whom she adored. After that, she began a biography of Lady Kathleen Scott, Captain Scott’s wife, whom she loathed. Then there was a book about a Danish resistance fighter in World War II.  Mary Ann was always writing something. What she was not doing was finishing anything.

The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society is in theatres this week - Credit: Studio Canal
The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society is in theatres this week Credit: Studio Canal

In 1976 (or possibly 1980), Mary Ann was deep in the throes of a novel entitled “The Seven Body-Snatchers of Sir Simon Pidney.”  The title character was a corpse, deposited in various locales around an imaginary island called Scone that bore some resemblance to Guernsey. Accordingly, Mary Ann went to Guernsey to reconnoiter appropriate corpse-storage spots. At least, that’s what I think she was doing. Now, 42 (ish) years later, nobody in my family remembers the official goal of Mary Ann’s journey. What we remember is the story she told when she came back home to California, a dramatic tale that began the moment her plane touched down at the Guernsey Airport, when a “terrible fog” boiled out of the sea, shrouding the island in gloom. At once, all flights ceased, the ferry service shut down, and the last taxi rattled away, leaving Mary Ann becalmed in the airport lounge. But was she a woman to be cowed by a bit of drizzle? Never! She hid her belongings under a fainting couch and set out upon Guernsey’s one-lane roads to see the lay of the land.

In the next hour, she cheated death three times: once by plunging into ditch-water up to her knees, the second by leaving a full-body imprint in a hedge, and the third time lucky to get only the sleeve of her coat torn off by a side-view mirror. Chastened, she returned to the airport to wait out the fog. But that fog lingered like a dying millionaire for the next thirty-six hours, and so, therefore, did Mary Ann, alternately warming herself under the hand-dryer in the men’s restroom (the hand-dryer in the women’s restroom was broken) and slinking out to the Guernsey Airport gift store in search of reading material. Luckily for her and five million readers of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, she found it.

Jessica Brown Findlay and Lily James - Credit: ©Karwai Tang
Jessica Brown Findlay and Lily James Credit: ©Karwai Tang

Evidently, the airport gift store was at that time a major outlet for books about the German Occupation of the Channel Islands during the Second World War.  I have some of the books that Mary Ann devoured during her thirty-six hours; they are mostly first-person accounts of the Occupation by islanders, and I can just imagine Mary Ann’s face as she read them.  I can almost see her, wide-eyed, smoking like a stack, consumed, mesmerized, and appalled by what she was learning. It was the birth of a fascination that was to last for the rest of her life.

Then came the research. Every writer I know loves research — the pleasure of the hunt combined with the water-tight excuse for not writing — but Mary Ann loved it the most. She researched Guernsey’s Occupation for the next twenty years, until at last, her writing group threatened to lock her in a room containing only a typewriter, and she began to write her novel.

She wrote it, and she finished it. At the age of 71, Mary Ann completed her first book. And found an agent. And a publisher. My family rejoiced; we celebrated, we raised our glasses high, we called cousins we don’t like to gloat. It was glorious.

Lily James and Michiel Huisman in the film - Credit: Studio Canal
Lily James and Michiel Huisman in the film Credit: Studio Canal

The glory days soon ended. Mary Ann fell ill, and when her editor asked for rewrites, she did not feel well enough to begin work again. Because I am the other writer in the family, she called me to ask if I could finish it for her. I said, “Certainly I will, Mary Ann. Don’t give the matter another thought. I’ll take care of everything.”  Inside, though, I whispered impossible — how could I write Mary Ann’s novel, her voice, her characters, her story? Add to this the not-tiny problem of knowing nothing about the Occupation. Impossible! — but it didn’t occur to me to say no. It was Mary Ann; it was the book she’d been trying to write for twenty-five years; it was her masterpiece.

So I said yes and then did what any mature professional would do: I procrastinated. This took the form of research, lovely research. I read about the Occupation, Guernsey’s history, culture, geography, language, botany, and cows. I studied up on the Occupation, on the islanders’ experience of the war, on the evacuation of their children, on their slow starvation. I gazed balefully at the Guernsey Island weather-cam. I inspected photos, Nazi ordnance charts, genealogies. But came a day when there was no help for it: I had to start writing.

Not impossible. Quite possible. In fact, joyful. For after all, I’d been hearing Mary Ann tell stories my entire life. All the way back to that French mouse, I’d been listening, and as I wrote, I could hear the sound of Mary Ann’s voice, her delight, her charm, her sharp disdain for arrogance, her respect for bravery, her sympathy for suffering.  Moreover, I found many familiar artifacts. When I arrived at the villainess of Guernsey Literary, I thought Oh look, there’s Ella May, a dreadful lady who used to eat Christmas dinner with us, every year declaring that God would smite us before Easter. An angora cap worn by another character was part of an ancient family joke about Sonja Henie. When I read about the little girl Kit digging her elbow into the arm of her favorite, to pin him to her side, I caught sight of my daughter, who did the same thing. Knowing Mary Ann, I also knew Wuthering Heights would make an appearance, and Oscar Wilde, of course, and ghastly chickens. I suppose all books are covert keys to their authors’ lives, but working on The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was like writing a memoir.

Bio | Lily James
Bio | Lily James

I thought, when I agreed to finish Guernsey, that the outcome would be simple. Mary Ann would have her book, and the family would be proud. This is not what happened. Five months before it came out, Mary Ann passed away. She never saw the book. She never saw her novel become an international best-seller, published in 38 countries, translated into 35 languages. She didn’t get to watch the filming of the movie — her imaginary world, made real! — and she’ll never see the film itself, which she would have loved with all her heart. I find this not just sad, but unspeakably tragic. It makes me slightly crazy to think about it. But the redeeming justice in the story is that hundreds of thousands of readers now hold my aunt dear. They have brought her into their homes and had a long, lovely conversation with her.  If we only really die when people stop talking about us, Mary Ann is sitting right here.