Behind Enemy Lines: The Untold Stories of Italy’s Female Warriors Who Sabotaged the Nazis
HMM: You had all these memoirs, other historical documentation, and these testimonies. Where are those testimonies?
SC: Carla wrote a memoir, which was great and very detailed, which is why her story is so vivid. Anita was interviewed – I had hours of her verbal testimonies. I found her testimonies in three different places. One was at an archive in Reggio. Another was at the University of Bologna, and then third was in a diary archive in the middle of nowhere Italy, this tiny town that I forced my family to come with me to and they played in the piazza while I did this research. It was interesting, having heard her basically tell the same story three different times, but each time, she added this detail but not that one, so I was able to layer it so it felt a little more robust. And that was the only time I ever really made up dialogue – she would be telling it indirectly, “And then I told him this,” and I just told it directly. I tried not to include any detail that wasn’t found in any testimony, with that rare exception, and I think I have it in italics the very few times that I created dialogue out of inferred dialogue.
