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My guest today is Lynn Cullen, author of When We Were Brilliant, listed in the Photography and Film categories on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/86MVn-3LjhY

• Eve Arnold, the only woman Marilyn Monroe ever let photograph her: who she was, why Lynn had never heard of her either, and the shock of discovering that among all of Marilyn's photographers, there were no other women.
• Using Eve's own coffee table book on Marilyn as the novel's framework: six photo shoots over ten years, with scenes built around individual photographs, including the famous mirror shot.
• The ghost of Marilyn: standing on the actual Seven Year Itch subway grate in New York on a windless night when Lynn's coat suddenly swirled up around her, and how that moment made her feel responsible for getting Marilyn right.
• Why Marilyn sought Eve out, never the reverse: Lynn's hypothesis that Marilyn trusted Eve and wanted Norma Jean to get some credit, showing up for Eve's camera looking nothing like the bombshell the world knew.
• Reclaiming Marilyn from the victim narrative: a self-made, intelligent woman with real agency whom the studios fought because she had power, and why the "Hollywood made you and broke you" line from Candle in the Wind is exactly what Eve set out to correct.
• The verdict of Eve's grandson Michael Arnold: "You so captured my grandmother," and how Lynn ended up at the National Portrait Gallery's Marilyn centenary exhibition with him.
• The accidental second person: how a "mistake" at page 60, with Eve addressing Marilyn as "you," revealed the book as Eve's love letter and apology, despite Lynn resisting it at first.
• Photography as relationship: what Lynn learned about portrait photography, what a subject gives each photographer, and why Eve never had a subject like Marilyn again.
• The perennial choice women face: Eve's struggle as a working mother traveling the world as a top photographer.
• Setting the record straight on Marilyn's death at 36: an accidental overdose by a woman who had gone furniture shopping that day and had plans for plays and movies.
• Reading from When We Were Brilliant: the chaotic beach scene where Eve first meets Marilyn, a Botticelli Venus in a white bikini and army boots descending a cliff into a feeding frenzy of gawkers.
• What Lynn learned: to let the novel speak, even when the story demands a choice you resisted, and that eight books in, you still need beginner's mind.

Read more about Lynn Cullen on her website: https://lynncullen.com/

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

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My guest today is Kate Whouley, author of The Maestro and Her Protégé, listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fr_fJ9t9G_o

• Nadia Boulanger, the most influential music teacher of the 20th century: who she was, why she matters, and how Kate first encountered her by way of her terrifying theory professor when she was a music student.
• Inventing Hannah Schaefer, a fictional conductor who studies with the very real Boulanger, Leonard Bernstein, and Philip Glass.
• The demanding mentorship paradox: why Boulanger's near-dictatorial teaching style was exactly what Hannah needed, and when that kind of discipline helps versus harms.
• Women on the podium: why female conductors are rare even today, and what it feels like to be at the top of your game and still have to fight battles a man in the same position wouldn't.
• Structuring a novel like a musical composition: Overture, Reverie, Rhapsody, and Coda, and why Kate ultimately let go of strict sonata form.
• What women give up: Hannah's choice to be married to music, Boulanger's infamous black-edged sympathy cards sent to promising students who married, and the question Hannah faces at 58: could there be more?
• Grief as artistic processing: the cluster of losses Hannah suffers, how she writes pieces for the dead rather than mourning them, and why that catches up with her.
• Paris as a character: ten years of research trips, sobbing at Boulanger's grave in Montparnasse, and the moment Kate threw out her draft and understood the real story.
• From memoir to fiction and back: how writing Cottage for Sale and Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words, her memoir about her mother's early-onset Alzheimer's, shaped her approach to the novel.
• Reading from The Maestro and Her Protégé.
• What Kate learned: that it's okay to follow the characters, that every word must have a reason to exist (Boulanger again), and that some books like to be written late at night.

Read more about Kate Whouley on her website: https://katewhouley.com/

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

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My guest today is Elisabeth Storrs, author of Fables and Lies, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/lCJfOypSQr4

• The genesis of Fables and Lies: how a 30-year obsession with Priam's Gold and its mysterious disappearance after the Russians took it from Berlin led Elisabeth to create Freya, a young German woman working at the Museum of Pre- and Early History in Berlin as the war closes in.
• Himmler's SS Ahnenerbe, the pseudo-academic research institute that weaponized archaeology to justify Nazi ideology, and how the curator of Freya's museum being a member of it transformed what began as a novel about two women into something far more complex and sinister.
• The real inspiration behind Indiana Jones: Himmler's belief in the occult, Atlantis, and the Holy Grail, and the expeditions he sent to Tibet and Bolivia that Spielberg later drew on.
• Writing from inside the Nazi regime: Elisabeth's personal hesitation about telling the story from a German point of view given her father's experience as an Australian soldier in World War II, and why she decided the story needed to be told anyway.
• The Brenner family as microcosm: how Freya, her morally anchored father Konrad, her MAGA-adjacent mother Elsa, and her fully indoctrinated sister Volla each represent a different response to life under the Reich.
• Why Freya had to start as a true believer: the challenge of creating a protagonist who is indoctrinated, the small cracks in her worldview from the opening pages, and how Darien, the Cambridge-educated outsider archaeologist, opens her eyes.
• Berlin as a character in the novel: Elisabeth's research trip to the city, the walking tour with a Humboldt University history student, and the discovery that the Museum of Pre- and Early History sat next door to Gestapo headquarters on what is now the Topography of Terror site.
• The parallels to today: how Elisabeth finished the novel before the current global rise of fascism made it feel even more relevant, and what the preconditions for Hitler's rise in Weimar Germany have in common with what we are seeing now.
• The carpet bombing of Berlin, the Soviet artillery siege, and the absurdity of dropping leaflets telling civilians to overthrow the regime while destroying their city around them.
• A reading from the opening pages of Fables and Lies: Freya cycling home through Berlin on 24 August 1939, and her first encounter with Dieter, the jazz-loving teenager whose punishment plants the first seed of doubt.
• What Elisabeth is working on next: a four-timeline novel tracing Priam's Gold from a Bronze Age goldsmith in Troy through Schliemann's 1873 discovery, the Russian Trophy Brigade, and Freya's granddaughter piecing it all together in the 1990s.

Read more about Elisabeth Storrs on her website: https://elisabethstorrs.com/

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...