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Pam Jenoff is the author of The Kommandant's Girl (a Quill Award finalist, a Book Sense pick, and a finalist for the ALA Sophie Brody Award), The Diplomat's Wife, Almost Home, and Hidden Things. She attended George Washington University, Cambridge University in England, where she received a master's in history, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. A former Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army and State Department Officer, she lives in Philadelphia where she works as an attorney.
Pam Jenoff's website
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What was the inspiration behind
The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach
?
Some twenty years ago, I conceived of a story in which a girl who is an only child becomes close to
a family with four sons—kind of a reverse
Little Women. I began working on the manuscript but life
and other projects intervened. A few years ago, when I returned to the story, I realized that it needed
to be set against the backdrop of World War II and that the families should be from different
religious and ethnic backgrounds. This provided not only fertile ground for the love story itself, but
for exploring many of the cultural aspects of the era.
What kind of research did you do for this book?
What are the challenges of writing historical
novels?
One thing that was so fun about this book is that the research was more personal. My dad's side
of the family is from Atlantic City and owned small hotels and restaurants there in the 1930s and
40s; I summered there as a girl and it is very much in my blood. It was so much fun to drive around
the shore and visualize what it would have looked like. I also had a grand time in the archives of
the Atlantic City Library, looking at old photos and postcards and news clippings to learn...
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I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now only that place where the books are ...
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