But I believe as the '20s and '30s came to a close, she found it more difficult to live in society as she wished. She raced boats, was the fastest women on water - was setting world records, racing her boats. "Joe" Carstairs was an oil heiress, and a world champion speedboat racer in the 1920s.Ĭourtesy of The Mariner's Museum, Newport News, VA. And I think some of these women may have walked away with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. And one of the things I noticed was that she was a female ambulance driver in World War I. Joe really fascinated me when I read Kate Summerscale's biography of her, The Queen of Whale Cay. I honestly can relate more to some of the characters that are sort of on the outskirts of fame, sort of operating around someone else's orbit. I particularly love Georgie, the girlfriend in the Joe Carstairs story. I sort of fell in love, which is a dangerous thing to do with your characters, as any biographer will tell you. And, you know, they were living with me for so long that so many of the stories were almost fully formed by the time I put them to paper. It really represents 10 years of my reading life. There was something stopping me about playing with historical fiction, but these characters, these women, they took up residence in my imagination.
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