Today I welcome Lara Prescott to World Reads, a blog that features interviews with authors who’ve written a story set outside of the United States for adults.
Thank you so much for having me!
I first learned about THE SECRETS WE KEPT (Knopf, 2019) from a children’s bookseller. She recalled my book, LARA’S GIFT (Knopf 2013), set during the Imperial era in Russia, and thought I would love THE SECRETS WE KEPT. And she was right! If you loved DR. ZHIVAGO and enjoy history and intrigue, THE SECRETS WE KEPT delivers on both. I was fortunate to get an ARC from my publisher and read it by the time the author, Lara Prescott, came to the Book Passage to do a reading.
Lara, where is THE SECRETS WE KEPT set?
The Secrets We Kept is mostly set in the 1950s in Washington, D.C. and Moscow, but it also travels to Milan, Brussels, London, Vienna, and Paris.
An original CIA copy of DR. ZHIVAGO in Russian
Could you give us a succinct plot description of your story?
The Secrets We Kept is a fictionalized account of incredible true story behind Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago and how in the 1950s, the CIA engaged a mission to covertly print the book and smuggle it back behind the Iron Curtain where it was banned.
THE SECRETS WE KEPT has gotten quite a bit of praise, check out a this link to see what reviewers are saying, as well as a starred review from Kirkus!
How are you connected to the setting of your story?
The connection to my novel goes way back. And I mean way back. I have my parents to thank for naming me after Boris Pasternak’s heroine in Doctor Zhivago. My mother had loved the David Lean film and as a child, knowing nothing about the book or movie, I’d wind up her musical jewelry box again and again to hear it play “Lara’s Theme.”
Over the years, each time I’ve read Zhivago, I’ve taken something different away from it. As a girl, I was most interested in the love story. Later, I was most taken with the sheer brilliance of Pasternak’s sentences. On my more recent readings, what struck me most are the ways in which Pasternak conveys the importance of free thought. Through the life of Yuri Zhivago, the author demonstrates that yearning for freedom remains an indestructible force—in spite of the political systems that seek to repress it.
During the research of my novel, I had the great fortune to travel to Moscow and Peredelkino, which was a lifechanging and inspiring journey.
As for the D.C. half of the novel, I lived and worked in Washington for almost a decade and I’m very familiar with its streets, haunts, history, and a few of its secrets.
What inspired you to write this story?
I first learned about the CIA Zhivago mission in 2014, after my father sent me a Washington Post article about newly-declassified documents that shed light on the CIA’s Cold War-era “Books Program.” What had caught his eye was its discussion of Doctor Zhivago as one of the books the Agency had used to great success. With my interested piqued, I devoured the incredible true story behind Zhivago’s publication.
The first CIA memos on Zhivago described the book as “the most heretical literary work by a Soviet author since Stalin’s death,” saying it had “great propaganda value” for its “passive but piercing exposition of the effect of the Soviet system on the life of a sensitive, intelligent citizen.”
And it was seeing the actual CIA memos with all their blacked-out and redacted names and details—that first inspired me to want to fill in the blanks with fiction.
Photo credit Trevor Paulhus
What was the biggest challenge you had writing your story? How did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge I faced was having the confidence to keep writing when I got stuck. I think many writers face a “block” only because we are so self-critical that we want every sentence to be perfect on the first go-around. It was an important lesson for me to learn that a first draft doesn’t have to be perfect and that it is easier to revise a full page than stare at an empty one.
What kind of story can we expect next from you? Is it set outside of the United States? If so, where? And what is it about?
I’m currently interested in writing about where I come from—Western Pennsylvania—a part of the world where many immigrants settled to work in the coal mines and steel mills.
What else would you like us to know about you or your story?
Part of the motivation behind writing The Secrets We Kept was that I wanted to give a voice to the long- forgotten women spies of the early CIA—women to whom monuments should be built to mark their courage and contributions.
During WWII, women had served as intelligence officers in the OSS. But after the war, those same women were stuck behind desks at the CIA. In my novel, the characters Sally and Irina were very much inspired by real spies like Elizabeth “Betty” McIntosh and Virginia Hall.
Can you remember the first book that made an impact on you? And why?
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison was the first novel that made me cry, which was a profound experience. It exposed me to a world that was completely different than my own and opened up new pathways of empathy.
Learn more about Lara Prescott and her books on her website, follow her on Twitter and Instagram. Where can readers go to learn more information?
Thank you, Lara Prescott, for joining us at World Reads and for writing such a memorable story! Good luck with your book tour and launch.
