An Author Interview with Claudia Friddell, Author of ‘The Mysterious Virginia Hall’

Hello everyone! Isabelle Knight back here again with another author interview! Author interviews are some of my favorite things to include on my blog because I get to ask lots of other authors about their writing process, their tips for young writers, and I always learn something new along the way! And it’s also incredibly exciting to be able to ask some of my favorite authors questions that I’ve longed to ask them for quite some time!

Anyway, I recently read a fantastic book, The Mysterious Virginia Hall by Claudia Friddell! You can find my review of this book here. It is a nonfiction book about Virginia Hall, an American spy in World War III, and it was just such fun to read and I loved the book! I’m not a huge reader of nonfiction, but I think this book might have changed that! And since this book is so fantastic (and soon to be released!), I reached out to Claudia Friddell to do an interview!

She did respond, and it was amazing getting to ask her some questions and getting to hear her fantastic answers to all these questions!

1. Hi Claudia! Thank you so much for doing this interview! To start us off, what was it that made you decide you wanted to write this nonfiction book about Virginia Hall? What gave you the idea for it? How did you first hear about Virginia Hall?

Hello Isabelle, thank you for the opportunity to interview with you! My adventures with Virginia Hall began when my brother sent me an article about her, and since she had attended the same school as my daughter (a century earlier!), he asked if I knew of her. Surprisingly, I had not! I was fascinated and headed right over to Roland Park Country School and found her senior yearbook and student file. That information hooked me! The more I discovered about this local woman with a wooden leg who overcame discrimination and an amputation to outsmart the Nazis, the more convinced I was that this was a story I wanted to share with young readers.

2. What do you think was the hardest part about writing this book? What was the best part?

I think two challenges in particular stand out for this book. My goal, and challenge, was to tell Virginia’s riveting life story in a simple but mature way that would captivate teens, especially reluctant readers and those who might be hesitant to read about World War II. I describe Virginia as a cross between Wonder Woman and James Bond with a wooden leg! I wanted to keep the pace moving so her true story would read like a thriller. It wasn’t easy to trim away so many fascinating related details. Another challenge was learning how to research and acquire photos and documents. That requires a whole separate skill set, and I learned a lot!

Now for the best part of my journey with Virginia—that’s easy. Meeting and interviewing Virginia’s niece, Lorna Catling, and great-nephew, Brad Catling, was definitely a highlight of my career as an author. I have rarely had the opportunity to meet the relatives of my historical subjects. Hearing first-hand accounts of Virginia’s life, looking through family photos together, and receiving their feedback was invaluable. As a historical writer, I spend years with my subjects who I will never know, so time traveling with Virginia’s relatives was magical!

3. What made you decide you wanted to write nonfiction?

Before I was an author, I taught first grade boys for almost twenty years. I loved sharing well written true stories from long ago, especially the ones that my students loved so much they would not only scoot in closer and ask questions, but they would also go to the library and find more books relating to those topics. I also fell in love with these books, and I wanted to learn how to write them. A well told story can bring history to life and encourage a lifelong love for reading and learning! I’m no longer teaching, but I hope my books will inspire kids to read and be curious about the past.

4. Did you always want to be a writer when you were a kid? Why or why not?

Actually, I always wanted to be a teacher. While I didn’t aspire to be a writer, I did write a lot growing up. I wrote plays with friends, poems for birthday surprises, and, maybe because I moved around a lot, I wrote a lot of letters! In school, I preferred writing essays to taking multiple choice tests. So, I guess I always had the writing bug!

5. How much research went into writing this book and how did you go about conducting all this research? You also mentioned in the Author’s Note of this book that you were able to speak with relatives of Virginia Hall! What was that like?

Since I write nonfiction, I make sure to source everything I write. I had access to essential primary sources—Virginia’s US and British spy files and documents from the National Archives, the British Archives, the CIA, and the Library of Congress. Since Virginia was a Baltimore girl, I had easy access to sources at her school, the Baltimore Pratt Library, The Maryland Center for History and Culture, and the amazing International Spy Museum in Washington DC. It is time consuming but making sure the sources are organized and double-checked for accuracy is very important!

I was fortunate to connect with a few experts from France who had important information about Virginia Hall when she was a French Resistance fighter. As I mentioned earlier, interviewing Lorna and Brad Catling was invaluable for making Virginia’s story personal and hopefully relatable for teen readers. They were so generous to also comment and review my book. I’m so grateful that Lorna wrote my blurb and Brad wrote a lovely foreword.

6. What did the first draft of this book look like, and how many drafts did it take to get to the final book?

Well, I sold this book to Calkins Creek for a younger audience, but my editor and I agreed it would be best to introduce this freedom fighting female phenom to a YA audience! My first draft was much shorter and written for an upper elementary student. For this project, I wrote three very different leveled drafts with more detail and more mature content to bring it up to a YA audience. Of course I edited those drafts a million times!

7. And finally, what’s your advice for young writers (or writers of any age!) who are just starting out and would like to get published? And what about advice for writers who specifically want to write nonfiction?

My advice to any writer is to read everything you can in the genre(s) you have chosen. Study the work of authors you admire. Study the craft of writing and the unique world of publishing. Joining SCBWI is a great way to learn more about the world of children’s books. And then practice! Write and rewrite. Hopefully, you will fall in love with the editing stage of cutting, adding, and rearranging, because that’s an important part of the journey. For nonfiction writers I would give the same advice and then suggest learning more about your subject by visiting museums and libraries, watching documentaries, and listening to interviews. Don’t forget, librarians and archivists are incredibly helpful. It’s important to be a meticulous researcher. True stories based on documented facts can be as exciting as fiction and are so important to share!

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Hello! This is me, Isabelle, again! Claudia Friddell, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview! The Mysterious Virginia Hall is such a great book, and it was amazing getting to get a look into your writing process for writing nonfiction and of course, your fantastic writing tips! This interview was so much fun to put together, and I cannot wait to read more of your books!

And thank you, dear reader, for, well, reading! I hope you enjoyed this interview and that you learned something great from it! Again, it was amazing to put this together, and I especially loved Claudia’s advice for young writers!

So yeah! And don’t forget — The Mysterious Virginia Hall is set to be released on June 24, 2025 in hardcover and ebook, so if you wish to read this book, you can get it when it comes out! (Or pre-order it, well, wherever books are sold!) And my own book, Enchantria: The Last Hope, is set to be released on July 20, 2025, and I am ever so excited to say that we have a few official blog tour dates!

But yeah! Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed this interview, and I shall see you again in the next post!

Isabelle

P.S. And I forgot to mention! I did promise to let all of you know when ARC requests for my to-be-released book are open, and they are open… now! Eek! So if you’re a book blogger and would like to be an ARC reader/be in the blog tour, you can find all the details here: (scroll down to the last part of the post for all the ARC request details) https://springfallschronicle.com/yaaaayyyy-we-have-a-book-trailer-and-a-lovely-review-and-arc-requests-are-open/