My Book Tour Must-Pack List, Plus Women Everyone Should Know About

As most of you know, I’ve been touring Australia to promote my new book, The Mademoiselle Alliance, for the past month and a half. 25 events done, another 9 to go. It’s exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure. The most crucial thing is to keep your energy levels up—when people come along to an event, they expect you to be entertaining and upbeat, even if the clang, clang clang of a railway crossing has kept you awake all night! (I managed to avoid that by a swift change of room as soon as I noticed the problem!)

I’ve done a few book tours now and I have a list of essentials that I wouldn’t travel without. Things that make the process easier—sleep is essential as is not having to wash the enormous quantity of hair that I have on my head every day! For those of you who love the truly behind-the-scenes stuff, here is my odd list of things that must be in my suitcase, even if fitting them in means leaving one outfit behind!

1. Silk eye mask—some hotel rooms are bright, even at night. If I have my eye mask on, I can sleep regardless.

2. Silk pillowcase—keeps my hair looking good so I only have to blow-dry it every 4-5 days. There usually isn’t time between events, book store visits and interviews to do it more often.

3. Muesli bars—often there also isn’t time to eat between all the appointments on the schedule. Even my publicists carry them for me in case I forget! Nobody likes a hangry author!

4. Artline Calligraphy Pens, Size 3 or 4—I have embarrassingly terrible handwriting and I hate to ruin anyone’s book with my scrawl when I’m signing. These pens make anyone’s handwriting look good!

5. Umbrella—nobody wants to get wet just before they walk onto a stage

6. GHD Curve—best curling wand ever

7. Parlux DigitAlyon Hairdryer—lightest and most powerful hairdryer on the market. I swear by it.

8. A pair of stylish flat shoes (I love Bared’s silver Firecrowns)—sometimes you’re walking into and out of book shops all over the city for the whole day, signing stock. You cannot do that in heels!

9. Tea bags—there’s nothing better than a hot cup of tea when you have an hour in your hotel room between events. It always resets me and gives me a much needed moment of calm. My fave flavour right now is Dilmah’s Rose and French Vanilla.

10. A sense of humour!

Any other authors reading this, what’s on your book tour must-pack list? And readers, anything here surprise you?

Let’s Talk About Remarkable Women

One of my favourite things about this tour has been talking about what an extraordinary woman Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the heroine of my novel, was. Both during and after my events, it’s been a natural segue from discussing Marie-Madeleine to discussing some of the other real but forgotten women I’ve written about in my previous novels. In fact, it seems to be, from talking to lots of readers over the past month, that the thing you all like best about my books is the way they do focus in some way upon an inspiring woman from history, someone we can all admire.

So I thought I’d quickly recap some of the other real-life heroines I’ve written about in case you’re in need of a dose of inspiration right now.

The Photographer

I’ll start with Lee Miller. I’ve written about both her and Kate Winslet’s biopic of Lee in this article, but I’ll quickly recap her story, which I drew on in writing main character Jess in The French Photographer/The Paris Orphan (same book published under different titles in America and the rest of the world).

She was a famous model throughout the 1920s. Her face graced the covers of magazines like Vogue and Harpers Bazaar. Then her image was used without her knowledge in an advertisement for Kotex sanitary products and her modelling career came to an abrupt halt. It’s hard for us to imagine what a taboo menstruation was at the time, and how this could end a career but it was and it did.

Lee then went to Paris, met Man Ray and learned photography from him. With the advent of WWII, she became accredited as Vogue’s photojournalist, reporting from Europe. She documented the tireless work of the nurses, she took pictures of the women left behind in the rubble of destroyed cities, and she was one of the few women to witness the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, sending the images to her editor at Vogue along with a note imploring her to believe that the horrors she had photographed were true.

After the war, deeply traumatised by everything she’d seen, Lee tried to erase this chapter from her life—and so too did life try to erase her. Despite having put herself in danger to record a relatively undocumented side of the war, the only job Lee could find afterwards was that of taking pictures of socialites in Saint Moritz and of writing recipes for Vogue. When she died, even her son had no idea his mother had been a celebrated war correspondent. Thankfully, when he did find out, he resurrected Lee, and she’s now widely regarded as one of the war’s preeminent photojournalists.

Lee’s life was equal parts inspiring and equal parts heartbreaking. She was an artist and a documenter of the horrors of war, a beautiful woman with the strength to do a difficult job, and most certainly a woman who never deserved to be forgotten.

From L to R: Catherine Dior, Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller and Rose Valland

The Art Spy

Rose Valland is one of the main characters in my book, The Riviera House. To understand why Rose was such a hero, it’s important to understand that, during WWII, the Nazis systematically stole almost every private collection of artwork belonging to the Jewish families in Occupied France, some twenty thousand pieces in total. The thieved artworks included paintings such as Vermeer’s Astronomer, owned by Édouard de Rothschild and now hanging in the Louvre in Paris, as well as pieces by Van Gogh, Rodin, Picasso, and other celebrated artists.

Rose Valland secretly recorded all the details of the Nazis’ plundering. She wrote down, in hidden notebooks, the names of the stolen artworks, who they were stolen from, where they were sent—and in so doing, she saved countless works of art. She hid her spying behind a demure exterior, acting as the quiet and almost invisible caretaker of the Jeu de Paume in Paris, a museum where the Nazis stored their spoils. She pretended she couldn’t understand German when in fact she eavesdropped on all the Nazis’ conversations.

Without Rose’s heroic efforts, it’s certain that tens of thousands of priceless artworks would not have been restituted to their rightful owners after the war and would have been lost forever. She helped to protect and preserve the cultural heritage of a nation, despite knowing that if she were caught, she would most likely be killed. Indeed Colonel von Behr, the man Rose was forced to work for, once threatened to take her to the border and eliminate her. She kept spying, regardless.

But who has heard of Rose Valland? Who, when standing in front of Vermeer’s Astronomer at the Louvre, knows what she risked to save that painting? My hope was that, in writing The Riviera House, a lot more people would be able to say: I am inspired by her. Her legacy lives on.

The Dior Who Should Be Famous, But Isn’t

Ask anyone to name a famous couturier and doubtless Christian Dior will be one of the first to come to mind. But Christian’s sister Catherine Dior was by far the more courageous of the Dior siblings.

She worked for the French Resistance during WWII, gathering information about the Nazis and passing that information back to the British. Her work was so important that, after the war, she was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Légion d’honneur by the French, and the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom by the British. But in 1944, she was captured by the Nazis and sent on the last train to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp just days before Paris was liberated.

She survived torture, starvation and forced labor, and escaped from the camp in 1945, emaciated, ill and barely alive. She made her way back to Paris, recovered her health and never spoke of her wartime experiences again, eventually becoming the first female flower seller to be licensed to sell her blooms in the Les Halles market.

She almost lost her life in the fight for freedom and yet the Dior sibling we remember is the one who once made beautiful dresses. That’s why I wrote about Catherine in my book The Paris Secret. I knew she was a true heroine, one my readers would also be inspired by.

The Journalist

Martha Gellhorn is sometimes known as one of Ernest Hemingway’s wives, but she was much more than that. She was a war correspondent who fought incredibly hard against the many ridiculous rules that were in place to “protect” female war correspondents during WWII, rules that actually stopped them from doing their job.

For example, the female correspondents were not allowed to go across to mainland Europe to report on D-Day and the invasion. Only the male correspondents were. When Collier’s, the news magazine Martha worked for, heard about this, they decided to get someone else to do Martha’s job. They chose Ernest Hemingway — Martha’s husband. And they didn’t even have the balls to tell her; they asked Ernest to break the news to Martha instead.

A lesser woman might have been felled by that betrayal. Martha wasn’t. She stowed away in the bathroom of a hospital ship going across to Normandy and became the first woman correspondent to land on French soil post-invasion. She got her story. Ernest didn’t. He was stuck in a boat out on the water.

But when Martha returned to London, she was locked up in a nurses’ training camp. Her passport and accreditation papers were taken from her. She’d broken the terms of her accreditation — but only because she was a woman who went to Normandy to do her job. None of the male reporters were locked up for doing exactly the same thing.

Martha was amazingly resilient. She escaped from the training camp and, without a passport or papers, she hitched a ride on a ship going to Italy and she spent a few months reporting from the Italian front until she was finally allowed back to the main theatre of war. She continued to report from warfronts all over the world until she decided to end her life before the cancer that had invaded her body killed her.

You’ll find her as another character in The French Photographer/The Paris Orphan.

More Women

There are so many others I’ve written about. Did you know, for instance, that almost all of the senior management positions at the House of Christian Dior in Paris in its first year of operations in 1947 were held by women? The directrices of sales, the studio, and the ateliers, as well as Dior’s assistant designer, Mizza Bricard, (who I’ve written about in detail here), and the premières of each workroom, were all women. Without those women, I don’t think Dior would have been the icon he was and still is today. But nobody knows their names or that they even existed, let alone the fact that they were the talented team behind the man’s name. I wanted to resurrect them from the amnesia of history and show the world how integral they were to Dior’s success, which I hope I went some way to doing in The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre.

In that same book I wrote about the staffette – the Italian women who helped the partisans hiding in the mountains in Italy to fight against the Nazis. These women were incredibly courageous and are virtually unknown today. They walked eighty kilometres every day, fed on nothing more than cabbage, carrying heavy packs of arms, ammunition and messages into the mountains, even through winter. As soon as the Nazis understood that these women were aiding the partisans, they began to arrest them. Many were tortured and killed. Despite their sacrifices and their bravery, after the war, the women of the staffette were not permitted to march alongside the men in the offical victory marches. How heartbreaking that must have been for them.

Which other remarkable women have you discovered in a book that you’ve read? Let us know in the comments, as well as the names of the books they’re in, so we can all add a bit of inspiration and woman-power to our reading piles!

Short and Sweet

• For my North American readers, we’ve just added a brand new online event. I’m thrilled to be hosted by the Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights to discuss THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. It’s on May 14 at 6.30pm ET—all you have to do to join is is go to this YouTube link on the night and the event will stream there automatically.

  

• I still have a few more in-person events to go on my book tour, including a new event in Sydney in July and a new event in Cottesloe in late May. You can find out more here.

• If you participated in our group read of The Blind Assassin, you might like to know that the podcast interview I did with

  Reading Between Deadlines
  is now live and you can listen to it here.

• Brooke Lea Foster
  recently interviewed me for her wonderful Substack, and we chatted about everything from beach houses to what makes me cry. You can read the interview here.

• If you’ve ever wanted to walk in my footsteps in Paris to visit some of the incredible places I go to when researching my books—private fashion ateliers, fashion museums, Ritz high teas and lots more, then you might be interested in this tour to Paris and Lisbon that I’m hosting alongside fellow historical novelist Madeline Martin.

For all the writers out there, this post about point of view from

Rebecca Makkai

is excellent. A true masterclass in a post.

That’s it for today! I’ll be back in the inboxes of my paid subscribers in a week or so to talk a little bit about the structural edit of The Chateau on Sunset (2026), which I’m buried in right now—and what a great place it is to be buried! Have a great week!