Ep. 381 This Is a True Story with Haley Cohen Gilliland

Written By Wy'Kia Frelot

Haley Cohen Gillian, the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative, joins us this week to discuss her new book, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children, which chronicles the grandmothers who searched for their children and grandchildren who were disappeared by Argentina's brutal dictatorship. In this episode, Haley gives us insight into how she came across this history and how she grappled with the moral complexities throughout. She also talks about the subjectivity of truth and details her research process and organization.

The Stacks Book Club pick for July is God Help the Child by Toni Morrison. We will discuss next Wednesday, July 30th with Dana A. Williams.

 
 

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TRANSCRIPT
*Due to the nature of podcast advertising, these timestamps are not 100% accurate and will vary.

Haley Cohen Gillian 0:00

So over the course of the project, I was lucky to benefit from advice from authors that I really admire, and one person who was generous with their time was Patrick Radden Keefe, and I remember having a conversation with him about how I could have researched this book until the end of my life, like I could have lived to be Rosa rosenblit years old and still be researching. You know, it was a comforting process for me. It was an exciting process for me, but I also had to know when to stop and when to start writing. And I think it was helpful to talk to Patrick about that, because he was like, Yes, I think that that's true for all narrative nonfiction writers. You have to, you have to just start writing at some point.

Traci Thomas 0:46

Welcome to the Stats, a podcast about books and the people who read them. I'm your host, Traci Thomas, and today I am joined by journalist and debut author Haley Cohen Gilliland to discuss her new book, A Flower Traveled in my Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children. This book tells the story of the abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a group of grandmothers who challenged the Argentinian government to find their missing children and grandchildren who were stolen by the Argentine armed forces in the late 70s and early 80s. This book spans over 100 Years of Argentine history, and Haley and I talk today about this massive feat, including how she organized herself, her notes and her research. We also talk about objectivity and ethical dilemmas that Haley faced as an author and as a human while researching this story, and we talk about why Haley wanted to structure her book around one family to tell the broader story of a nation. The Stacks book club pick for July is God Help the Child by Toni Morrison, and we will be discussing the book on Wednesday, July 30, with Dana A. Williams. Everything we talk about on each episode of the podcast can be found in the link in the show notes. And if you love the stacks and you want inside access to it, there are two ways to earn some extra special bonus perks. You can go to patreon.com/thestacks to join the stacks pack. And you can go to tracithomas.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter, Unstacked. Now it's time for my conversation with Haley Cohen Gilliland,

Traci Thomas 2:28

Okay, everybody, I am thrilled to bring you today's author and book. I read it extremely quickly. I liked it more than I thought I was going to, even though I have already been so hyped about this book. So I am joined today by Haley Cohen Gilliland, who is the author of a flower traveled in my blood, the incredible true story of the grandmothers who fought to find a stolen generation of children. Haley, welcome to the stacks.

Speaker 1 2:57

Thank you so much for having me. Traci. I love this podcast, so it's an honor to be here.

Traci Thomas 3:01

Nothing makes me feel better than when people who write books I like say that they listen to the podcast. I am so easy to flatter, and I am so grateful so that being said, let's start where we sort of always start, which is like, in about 30 seconds or so, can you tell people what your book is about?

Speaker 1 3:16

My book is a narrative, non fiction history of the abuelas de Plaza macho, who are a group of Argentine grandmothers that banded together in the 1970s at immense risk to themselves when their country was under a military dictatorship, to find their grandchildren who were actually stolen from them by the military during that period.

Traci Thomas 3:39

And in a lot of cases, the way that the children grandchildren were stolen was when the parents or the children of these abuelas were abducted. The some of the women were pregnant, and in some cases, the children were taken with the parents. Small children were taken with the parents. So there. So they were taking kids, but they were also taking women who were pregnant and holding on to them until they had the babies, and then disappearing the women fully.

Speaker 1 4:09

That's exactly right, and it's, I mean, it's hard to pick what the most brutal thing that the Argentine military did during the dictatorship, but to me, that crime sticks out, and it always has, and it's just, I've I lived in Argentina for four years. I worked on this book for nearly five and it's still hard to process. It's still hard to wrap my head around.

Traci Thomas 4:31

It's extremely upsetting stuff. I mean, the book, what's in the book, is pretty upsetting, like, obviously what we just said, but just, there's the whole situation. And I have to just be extremely honest, I knew basically nothing about Argentinian history. My pretty much, all I knew was about the Nazis who came to Argentina after World War Two. Because World War Two is really one of my historical sweet spots. I really we've talked about. A lot on this podcast, but so I sort of knew that stuff. I even have never seen the musical Evita, so I knew like nothing about any of this. And what I thought was so great about your book is that it's framed through the story of one of the abuelas Rosa Roisin Blitz, who is looking for her for information about what happened to her son, her daughter in law, and her daughter in law's unborn child. She doesn't even know if it's a boy or girl. She does. Knows nothing. She just knows that she's very pregnant at the time of these the disappearance. But what you've done is you framed the book through Rosa's story, and Rosa lives is still alive. She's like 105 years old. So you give us this sort of 105 year old history of Argentina, and I wanted to know sort of how you came to the shape of this whole thing, because it's a big thing.

Speaker 1 5:53

It is such a big thing, and it is so much history to cover, and that's why it felt very important to me to frame this story through one family, as I mentioned, this is something. This is material that I have lived with for a long time, and at times it's really hard for me to wrap my head around it. And so I felt that for an audience who might not have a familiarity with Argentina or Argentine history to wrap their heads around it, that it would be important to ground the story as much as possible in subjects that felt on some level, relatable. And in order to feel relatable, in my opinion, at least, you just have to go as deep as possible. And focusing on one family felt like a really powerful way to do that. You know, family is one of the only common denominators that unites us all, even if you you know, don't have a great relationship with your family, we all have a family. And so I felt that, though, thankfully, most of us cannot relate to the awful events portrayed in this book, we can all relate to being part of a family. And then when it came to the rosenblut family in particular, you know, so many of the abuelas. All of the abuelas are incredible, and each one of them deserves their their own book. But I was drawn to Rosa from very early on in my research. She is just a spunky Maverick of a person still is at 105 she's about to turn 106 in August, by the way. And you know, she was a first generation Argentine. Her parents were Eastern European Jews who fled what was then called Bessarabia. It's now modern day Moldova in at the turn of the 20th century in order to escape the pogroms and settled in the Argentine Pampas, the farmlands and became very successful ranchers. And from a very early age, Rosso was incredibly plucky and ambitious and driven, and she wanted to have a big career and a big life, and so she took an opportunity when she was only 15 to train to be an obstetrician, and eventually that that job brought her to Buenos Aires, where she met her husband, Benjamin, and they had their daughter, Patricia, their only daughter. And in 1978 as you alluded to before Patricia was taken by the military as part of this much larger purge that was taking place, and Patricia had been eight months pregnant. She was about to have her second child, and so at that point, Rosa just desperately threw herself into searching for her daughter and her unborn grandchild, and within a couple of months, was connected to this larger group of women who are in the same situation, the abuelos, the passama show, and ever since then. So this was 1978 1979 Rosa has just been a very central part of the abuelos movement. You know, she only stepped back from day to day activities a couple of years ago at the age of 102 and same Yeah, and just as a character, I mean, she's so funny and so brutally honest, which, for my purposes, was amazing, because this is a non fiction book, and I never had to question whether you know her interviews portrayed the truth, because I think she's incapable of doing Anything other than than telling the truth in our meeting, she she slid a photo of some of the Bucha across the table, kind of conspiratorially, and pointed at one, and she goes, she's just waiting for me to die so she could have my job. She is wearing glasses, but she doesn't really need glasses. She just thinks that they make her look pretty. And so she was very funny. And she, you know, she mentioned the word truth 22 times in our meeting, and often it was to say some version of, I only tell the truth. I'm only capable of telling the truth, the truth before everything. Thing. And so she just jumped out to me as somebody that I wanted to spend a lot of time with, you know, both in person as much as possible, but also just spend time with her life and getting to to know her, right?

Traci Thomas 10:12

Yeah, I want to get more into the abuelas, but before we go there, I do want to talk a little bit about the historical moment in which this happens. As I mentioned before, I knew nothing about the history, like I, you know, I had a lot of things wrong in my head. But in the 1950s and 60s and then into the 70s, there's a lot of like, political turmoil happening in Argentina. And in the 70s, they have a new leader, Videla, who is sort of this, like, very bad dictator, I guess not, sort of he is. He causes a lot of damage. And as I was reading the book, you know, I was stopping to like, Google things and look things up and try to like, you know, make some of the stuff really stick in my brain. And one of the things that was stunning to me was that he was only in charge for five years. And so I guess my question is, and maybe because of the moment we're in, what do we do in these moments like you think that five years is no time but to disappear 30,000 people and to destroy these families, and you know, not to mention a lot of economic turmoil started and happened during this time period into the more recent past. Like, what are we to make of of this moment in history, and does it Bode badly for us here in America? Yeah.

Speaker 1 11:48

I mean, it's a great question, and one that is very top of mind for me. I think there is no direct comparison between what happened in Argentina during its dictatorship in the 70s and 80s, and anything that we're seeing happening today, because, I mean, we're talking about a regime Videla. His regime not only disappeared pregnant women and new mothers and stole their babies, but their preferred means of killing people because they wanted plausible deniability about what they were doing was to sedate them, strip them naked, load them into planes in groups, and then push them into either the river that runs next to Bucha, or flying a little bit further and pushing them out into the Atlantic Ocean, so that their bodies would just completely disappear and nobody could pin those crimes on them. So it's just a level of brutality that is unimaginable. But I do think Argentina's history holds some really powerful lessons that feel more relevant, you know, today, than they maybe did when I started working on this book. And I think the main lesson is, you know, Argentina presents a really stark cautionary tale about what can happen when a government puts its agenda before due process and before the law, and the extreme places that that can, you Know, lead a country, and I think the abuelas, you know, the subject of my book, offer a lesson at how ordinary people, especially when working together, when banding together, can respond in those in those extreme moments. So I think that's the main takeaway for me.

Traci Thomas 13:39

Yeah, can I ask you, this was unclear to me, which is, why did the regime and those in power at the time to make sort of the decisions of the day to day of what would happen to the disappeared and the disappeared, you know, newborn children and The children that they took and then, you know, adopt it out. Why did they decide to keep the children and not just kill the children as well? Like, at this point, we're talking about people who are willing to abduct pregnant women, like, they're, they're already, at this point that sort of feels like, Well, we're here, you know, like, and in addition to the people like Patricia and her husband, who were political dissidents, if that's a reason to take people, they were also just taking people who were like, don't love it here. Like, the vibes are off. And so I guess, like, what was the moral line there? And why didn't they just kill the pregnant women, like, why wait and keep them alive for a few months?

Speaker 1 14:46

Yeah, it's a great question, and I think it's a baffling one for for many of us, the best explanation that I can offer is that the military was very influenced by Catholicism, the Argentine military and the AR. Argentine Catholic Church, and I'm very careful to say the Argentine Catholic church, because the churches elsewhere in the region had very different responses to what was happening in their countries, but the Argentine military and the Argentine Catholic Church had a very close and intertwined relationship. They had actually participated in ousters and coups together before and the military was very influenced by conservative Catholic ideology. And I think that, as you said, it was just where they drew their line. They were okay killing new mothers who had just given birth to newborns, but viewed newborns as malleable and defenseless, and creatures that could be taken from, you know, an image that comes up a lot in Argentine history is the fruit of the poisonous tree. So taking the babies away from their biological families that had somehow fostered this ideology that the military disagreed with. You know, if they could take this blank slate of a creature and and place it with a military family or a police family, or a family that subscribed to the ideology of the military, that baby could be raised to have the correct and correct is very much. In quotes the correct Argentine ideology, and they saw it as something noble. They thought, you know, they thought that they were saving not only the lives of these babies, but the souls of these babies.

Traci Thomas 16:35

Speaking of the Catholic Church, I can't help but remember that the previous pope, Pope Francis, was from Argentina. I tried to do a little digging, but what was his like? What I mean, there's famous Catholic priests from other places who were assassinated in these moments, like Romero, right? Wasn't he assassinated for, like, speaking out. I went to Catholic high school, so I vaguely remember about three things about Catholic things, but Pope Francis, I mean, we know he was not murdered in the 1970s and 80s. We know that he went on to have great success as an eventual Pope. So what was going on, if anything, with him and his relationship to the dictatorship?

Speaker 1 17:24

Yeah, it's a great question, and it's actually so I was in I was living in Argentina when Pope Francis was elected, and I got to see all of the pomp and circumstance around his his election, and got up at like, two in the morning to watch the, oh gosh, you're gonna have to help me here if you went to Catholic High School.

Traci Thomas 17:46

But, like, Jewish, I just went to Catholic High School. I don't know, James.

Speaker 1 17:50

We're hopeless here. But when they, when they did the equivalent of swearing him in, okay, you know, a horse conclave? Okay, maybe that

Traci Thomas 17:59

conclave is like, when they pick them, and then when he like, does his first speech after, yeah, and he like, goes out on the balcony and he's like, I'm Pope, exactly. I think it's called a papal address. Let's call it that.

Speaker 1 18:11

Okay, let's call it that. Well, anyway, it took place in at the Vatican, which is several hours ahead of Argentine time. And so, you know, the Argentine faithful gathered before dawn in the center of the city to watch his papal address on giant screens that the city government had set up. And I got to witness that, and I wrote a piece a long time ago about his experience performing religious services in Argentina's more indigent areas. They're called VICIS miserias, and that was those types of activities were actually quite dangerous during the dictatorship. I think the military viewed priests who ministered to the poor with a lot of suspicion, but there have been some accusations that Pope Francis during that time, not that he was necessarily directly involved in anything, but that he knew what was going on and didn't do enough. And so those are sort of, it's all blurry, like much of what happened during that period. But those, those are accusations that are sometimes made.

Traci Thomas 19:24

I mean, you're so right that so much of it is blurry. I think one of the things as a reader that I was grappling with, and I think you know, in your end notes, or like your your notes from the author towards the end, you sort of allude to you are grappling with, too is like some of these ethical quandaries that come up throughout out the book. Like, for example, one that I would say is like, if you were a person who was not related to the dictatorship or the military in any way, and you adopted one of these children, and you raised them for a. 1820, whatever, years without knowing the source of the child. You know, there is a question about the ethics, I guess, of that, and also, like the trust in the adoption system, if it should be there, all of these things. There's also this question that comes later on around forcing children to give blood in order to test their DNA to be able to hold the people who were in power accountable. And so I'm wondering, how much are you concerned with, like, quote, unquote, right and wrong as you're reporting a book like this. Like, how much do the ethics of what's being debated matter to you as the writer, and how are you sort of grappling with presenting these things?

Speaker 1 20:51

I think I my main goal with this book was just to share this story with readers as accurately as possible, you know, as powerfully and accurately as possible. And to me, those things are sort of synonymous. It felt like the closer I could get to what really happened and the real story, and the more that I could just report that out, the more powerful the story would be, and it felt important not to shy away from those thornier questions and and areas where the abuelas have faced some criticism in their history, in part because this is a true story, and I wanted it to feel true. And no story is a complete fairy tale. And I think glossing over those debates would have just really flattened this history in a way that didn't do justice to the fact that even though these events are really hard to believe, this is a true story. And so I think it felt very important to me to give space to those debates, but not necessarily to choose a side, if that makes sense.

Traci Thomas 22:11

Okay, and then the sort of deeper version of this question is like now, not as an author, but as a person. How do you grapple with some of the more difficult pieces of this as you're thinking about writing it, like you Haley, not necessarily what you're putting on the page, but like, how who you want to be in telling this story?

Speaker 1 22:33

Yeah, I mean, I made a decision very early on that I did not want to appear in the book. I don't appear. Don't want you in the book.

Traci Thomas 22:44

No, I don't. It's one of my big pet peeves where I'm like, You're writing history. I don't need to know. Like, and then I wrote an article about this. Like, No, thanks.

Speaker 1 22:51

100% I mean, I think it can be a very powerful tool. I can tell you, I have used it in magazine pieces before, different, and I can different and I think, but again, it's a very high bar for me. It needs to be justified. And I can tell you the cases in which I've used it, but I am generally very sparing with use of the first person. And so, yeah, that just felt very, very important to me. I'm not in the book at all until the author's note, but certainly I mean off page, I was grappling with a lot of these, these issues, and trying to suss out what, what I thought about them. But at the end of the day, once again, you know, maybe it's just the type of journalism that I was trained in but I'm trying to present the debate in the most neutral way possible and let readers make their own decisions about them.

Traci Thomas 23:50

I guess the follow up to that then is like, how do you determine what is neutral?

Speaker 1 23:57

Yeah, it's a really good question. I think, making sure that the research is just as robust as possible, and that if there is a criticism on the other side, I'm at least aware of the criticism that's being made. And you know, can maybe draw that in, right? But it's a really, it's a really great question. I know that I've, you know I've listened to your other episodes, and know that objectivity in writing and in journalism is something that you know you have thoughts on. I'm such a thorny topic.

Traci Thomas 24:37

I just, I personally am just always so curious. Because, like I said, your book, and books like your book are the kinds of book, kinds of books that I love the most. And I think when done well as yours is, it brings up a lot of questions about ethics, not only of like the subjects, but also of you know the. Outside person coming in and telling these stories and these histories. And I think, like we in America are taught so much about this idea of, like objectivity or like journalistic ethics, and the more that I read books like this, and the more that I think about these types of stories, the harder it is for me to buy in to that, and the more that I think what I'm actually having to do is buy into the author's own ethical code, right? And then it's like more an individual thing, which is why I'm always asking people who write books that I really like and respect, like, Well, how did you draw these lines? Right? Because, like, what Andrea Elliot told me is different than what, you know.

Speaker 1 25:46

I was fascinated by listening to, like Jason De Leon,

Traci Thomas 25:50

Yes, and Jason, right? Because anthropologist is an anthropologist, and he very much is in his book, you know, and like, by choice. And I think in his case, he sort of had to be, because he was not just doing reporting. He was a co conspirator in a lot of ways, like, he was involved in a lot of the activity that is extremely morally ambiguous, right? And, like, depending on who you ask. And so I'm just, I think for me, as I'm like, thinking about these things, I am now starting to realize that there isn't this bigger, overreaching thing anymore and more that it comes down to whether or not I think the author handled the complexities with the care and rigor that it deserves. But I'm also so curious and how you think about it?

Speaker 1 26:38

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this is sort of veering away from the original question, but one of the things that I found so compelling about this story was that I think to build on your point, there are so many different versions of truth depending on who the truth teller is. Yes, but there is a truth in this story that is completely undeniable, and that was genetic truth. And that was what the grandmothers, in the end, really harnessed in order to in their search to find their grandchildren. And that is a truth that is not subjective in any way, shape or form. That is just an objective truth. You cannot argue against genetic testing.

Traci Thomas 27:22

I think that's right. But also, okay, this is what I thought was interesting about that. Is that, and you know this as a journalist, it also depends on what the question you're asking is, right? The question is, like, are you genetically related to this person? There's a yes or no answer. But like, is this your family? That's a totally different question, and the genetics don't answer that question, right? And it's like that was the thing that I found so fascinating with your book. Is like with the with the question of the Adopt adoptions that happened with people who are not affiliated with the military, like who did not know about the disappearances and the children per se, is that the question of, is this, is this, my child legally, is different than should the people who made this, who made this happen, be held accountable legally, right? And so it's like there's all these different your book is full of so many different truths and so many different questions, and the answers to those questions are sometimes like, so at odds with each other, and so I just, like, as a reader, I'm trying to sort it out. So that's why I'm like, how were you trying to sort it out? As you're, like, getting this information or reading it, or like, at some point, like, you have to make choices. Haley, the writer of like, what story am I telling? And so I just, I'm just fascinated by, by that piece of what, what you've done here, and what it what the job requires you to do.

Speaker 1 28:58

Yeah, I mean, as you're talking, I feel like research, like research, is my shield. I think in some cases, it was also my crutch. You know, I remember, over the course of the project, I was lucky to benefit from advice from authors that I really admire, and one person who was generous with their time was Patrick Radden Keefe, and I remember having a conversation with him about how I could have researched this book until the end of my life, like I could have lived to be Rosa Roisin years old and still be researching. You know, it was a comforting process for me. It was an exciting process for me. It did, I think, help me feel confident about portraying these ethical debates in their their fullness, but I also had to know when to stop and when to start writing. And I think it was helpful to talk to Patrick about that, because he was like, Yes, I think that that's true for all narrative nonfiction writers. You. Have to, you have to just start writing at some point.

Traci Thomas 30:02

And it's just like, helpful to talk to Patrick, because like, like, Patrick is a good example of someone who has a very strong point of view. Like, you know, what he thinks about the thing, in a way, and not as much in say nothing or say nothing, but like very much so in the Sackler book, yeah, you know, like very much so in his articles, like, I don't I never. I'm like, oh, what's he thinking? Like, I'm like, oh, okay, I see, like, it's just, again, it's just a different style and a different choice that, again, the author has to make about how they want, how, what they want their book to do. And I think in the case of your book, The like more removed, like objectivity is helpful, at least for me as a reader who didn't know a lot of this information. Like for you to have a more pointed point of view on the page, I think would have been, would have made me less able to receive the contradictions. If that makes any sense.

Speaker 1 31:03

That makes total sense, and I'm really glad that you had that experience of the book. I mean, I think so. I lived in Argentina for four years shortly after graduating college, and I did not know this story when I moved down. I had a background knowledge in what happened during the dictatorship, I knew that 10s of 1000s of Argentines had been disappeared by the military, but I had no idea the military was also abducting pregnant women and stealing their babies shortly after birth and but then I lived in Argentina for four years, and in Argentina, The abuelas are iconic. Everybody knows who they are. Everybody knows the story for the most part, although with time, yeah, that's starting to change. There are some younger Yeah, there are. There are some younger generations that don't you know, for whom this story is not as present. But for the most part, the abuelas are this, the abuela story. Maybe not this particular story, but the abuela story is very widely known, and so this book really is, you know, I'm hoping that someone who does know about the abuelas will find value in this book, just in the depth of exploration and in the personal stories, but it was mainly written to educate people who had no idea that any of this happened, because I was a history major in college. A lot of my friends were history majors. And one of the things that brought this idea back to life for me, because I had always been fascinated by the above us ever since living in Argentina, but I hadn't thought to write anything in depth about them, until moving back to the States, and part of what fanned that desire was just talking to friends and realizing how few of them knew that this had happened, and how unfamiliar people were with this period in history.

Traci Thomas 32:57

Okay, I want to take a quick break, and then I want to talk more about audience. Do Okay, we are back in your I wanna say acknowledgements, but it could have been the author's note you talked about your own grandmother as your audience for this book, or who you were writing toward. And I'd love for you to just maybe say more about why her or how? What about her made you want to write like made you feel like that's who you were writing to.

Speaker 1 33:26

Yeah. So my grandmother, Elizabeth, everyone called her Betty, or bets, passed away during the course of this project. So she was 99 Yeah. So almost Rosa age, but and she, first of all, just reminded me a lot of Rosa. I think part of why I was so drawn to Rosa is because she felt very familiar. My grandma was an artist. She was a language teacher. She actually taught Spanish, and that, you know, she was kind of seeded an early love of Spanish in me, although she was very exacting, and I run these pronunciation drills, and I could never quite measure up, but she was just extremely curious, and a woman ahead of her time, and she also just had almost the identical reading taste to me, or maybe I just inherited, you know, maybe that's genetic, and she just passed it along. But she almost exclusively read non fiction, and she mostly read just non fiction tome. She read a lot of Doris Kearns, Goodwin, you know, a lot of David Bucha. She loved really thorough histories. And, yeah, I just, you know, she never got to read this book. As I said, she passed away while I was working on it, and she'd suffered from Alzheimer's for quite a while before that, but she was always top of mind for me. This is a book about grandmothers. I was extremely close to her, and. And so it it felt powerful to have anyway. I think it felt less intimidating to to be writing for writing for my grandma, than to think about who else might be, you know, picking this book up. But, yeah, I hope she would have liked it.

Traci Thomas 35:15

I mean, it's so good, of course she would have liked it like I'm a stranger, and I like it. Your grandma would have loved it. As you're thinking about, you know, you were talking about your friends who are also history majors and people who really don't know this story. What like, I know that I get obsessed with things, and I go, like, really deep, and then I assume that everybody else knows everything. So how were you sort of balancing your deep knowledge as you're researching and reading and going, you know, deep, deep, deep into this stuff, with telling us, like, what were there people that you were relying on to kind of bring you out of your sort of rabbit hole? Or were there other things, like, because I did not feel like, I didn't know, like, I felt like, as I was reading it, you were taking care of me. Like, I was like, oh shoot, you would say someone, then you'd be like, you know the guy who did this? And I'd be like, thank you. I did it. I couldn't quite remember, but now I do know. Okay, we're back. Like, like, the doctor comes up a lot, and the first few times he comes up, I was like, Wait, who? And then you'd be like, the doctor. And then later when he comes up, you'd remind me. I was like, Oh no, I remember. That's the doctor. So, like, how were you thinking about that kind of stuff?

Speaker 1 36:25

Yeah, I mean, writing is writing, and particularly writing a book of this length is such a team sport, and I relied really heavily on my editors friends, you know? I think so. My the editors that I worked with, in this case, did not have a background knowledge of this material, and I think that that was really helpful. They also didn't have a background in much science, nor do I, and there's a lot of science in this book as well. And I viewed both of those things as advantages, because I wanted this book to be accessible. Once again, I wanted it to have value to people who do know a lot, just in its depth. I think that that's how I hopefully tried to add value for those people. But I wanted it to be accessible to people who came into this knowing nothing about Argentina, nothing about genetics, and so I think having editors who did not have a background in these things, who could point out holes where I was jumping from A to C, was extremely helpful. I also just enlisted a lot of friends to read things, and you know, some of those friends were Argentine or had spent time in Argentina. One of my mentors was somebody that I worked with at the economist who kind of brought me on, and he read an entire draft of the book. Actually, two people at the economist did, which was really generous of them. And so I got a lot of notes back from people, and it was immensely helpful to hear like, oh, I, you know, totally didn't understand this. You need more detail here, or no, people basically know about this. You can pick up the pace a little bit here. So I, I kind of relied on other people to point out blind spots. You know, I wrote with my intuition and then outsourced it to other people to see if there were gaps.

Traci Thomas 38:17

I think it worked. I think it worked.

Haley Cohen Gillian 38:19

Okay. Well, thank you everybody who participated,--

Traci Thomas 38:24

--fun for me, not fun, but you know, it worked for me. It worked for me. Speaking of the science stuff, there's this figure in the book, Mary Claire King, who I did not know her name, but she can, I don't think this is a spoiler. She discovered Broca, the BRCA, the cancer, breast cancer gene. And then she also, like, discovered the way to do the DNA testing that the abuelas needed. I mean, what is are there, like, books about her?

Speaker 1 39:01

There are books that mention her, but I, over the course of this project, was very much a champion of the idea that she should write her own book. She's also a really brilliant writer.

Traci Thomas 39:12

I mean, she's like an American hero here, absolutely.

Speaker 1 39:14

And she's such a compelling person. So I got to she in the reporting process. I probably got to spend the most time with Mary Claire King, right?

Traci Thomas 39:23

You talk on that in the acknowledgments. It's like your shortest interview was like three hours, and your longest one was nine, and you were like eating snacks to like, stay time.

Speaker 1 39:33

I learned my lesson, because she's in her 70s, and I think we started our meeting at like 10 or 11, and I'm my blood sugar dips I need. I'm a snacks person. You have your process. I'm a big processor, and so excited for that. But yeah, the first time we met, we met for three or three and a half hours, and we did not take a break to eat or drink anything. And I was so. Woozy by the end. And so I learned my lesson, and for a second interview, I baked her a banana bread, so it looked like a kind and, you know, courteous gesture. But I was like, if I come into this interview with shared food, then I can eat it, like, sustain my energy.

Traci Thomas 40:18

Cut this open right now, because, like, what if you gave it to her and she just, like, put it away? Oh, my God, where's the banana?

Speaker 1 40:27

No, I was not gonna let that happen. I learned my lesson. But yeah, she's absolutely incredible. I really do hope that she, you know, writes her own story someday, because it deserves to be much more widely known in its entirety than I think it is.

Traci Thomas 40:43

I just, I mean, and also, as a baseball gal, her origin stories come from baseball, like baseball statistics. With her dad, she easily could have been, you know, the GM of the Cubs, or who, like, she easily could have taken a totally different money ball. Yeah, exactly. I'm just like, oh, sorry, Mary. Claire King, you're just a real life genius and like, do gooder genius. It's unfortunate for the rest of us that people like that exist. It's like, the bar's so high. How dare you. Okay? Again, I really was mining your EndNote or your notes and your acknowledgements, but you mentioned that on your first draft you had 3657 notes, correct? That is so many notes. Okay, so I have a few questions. One is, how many notes ended up in the final draft? Like, how much was cut from the notes?

Speaker 1 41:41

Almost, I think almost two thirds of the notes were cut. So I think in the end it was close to 15, no, it was, it was 1600 notes, and that makes up about 80 pages of endnotes.

Traci Thomas 41:57

And how do you decide what notes get the boot?

Speaker 1 42:04

Yeah, I think I mentioned this somewhere in the note on sources, but if something was easily Google able, so if it was a date, so I was very lucky. I worked with an outside fact checker for this project, actually several outside fact checkers, because the timeline was a little bit compressed. And so a lot of the book was annotated in keeping their work in mind. And so I even annotated things like dates that were very easily googleable. And so in the last, you know, in the final draft, I took those notes out because I figured that the reader could look them up. That was basically it, basically, if it could be easily Googled, it got the it got the AX.

Traci Thomas 42:46

And how do you keep all of this stuff straight? Like, what are you like pictures on a wall with the red string? Are you a timeline person? Like? Because we also get a detailed timeline at the beginning of the book, which I started reading, and then I decided not to finish reading because it was starting to tell me what was going to happen with the abuelas later. And I was like, I don't want this, because I'm going to read the book, right? But like, how do you, Haley, keep yourself clear and organized as you're working to know not only what you have, but maybe also what you don't have, what you need, absolutely.

Speaker 1 43:20

I mean, it took me a while to find systems that worked for me, and one of my biggest regrets at the beginning of this project is that there weren't really resources out there for how to there are a lot of tomes about writing good narrative nonfiction, but not about organizing research. I found that quite paralyzing. The beginning, I was like, how if I read a great detail and I don't want to forget it, but I'm not going to start writing this book for another nine months. Like, where do I put it so I don't forget it? It was very stressful for me, and ultimately, I kind of stumbled my way into a couple of systems that work really well for me. So the first thing, and this is very broad, but I used Google Drive to organize everything, and that was amazing, because everything is searchable, you know, even the contents of PDFs and things like that. So if I, for instance, remembered one of the details in the book. And to me, like great narrative nonfiction is so reliant on these tiny it's just a compilation of amazing little gems of details. And so on their own, they seem insignificant, but actually they're so important for building a world and building, you know, building a compelling narrative. And so, for instance, one of the details I wanted was what the preferred brand of cigarettes was that was smoked by left leaning youth in the 1970s and I knew that I had read the detail somewhere, but I couldn't quite remember where. I didn't yet have my system for tracking these things, but I could just. Type in like, secret issues into Google Drive, and it would pull up every document in my drive that had that until I could find, oh, it was preci or whatever. So organizing every, putting everything, images, text, PDFs, everything into Google Drive was really key. And then the two things that were really helpful to me. One you already mentioned building a massive timeline. So there's this timeline in the front of the book. I actually tried to excise a lot from that as it related to the buelas, because I didn't want to give the reader too much of an indication of what was going to happen with them before it did in the book. But I had this massive chronology, I think it was 100 pages or something, by the end of historical events, and events that were happening to the buelas and the subjects that I was following really closely, the rosenbict family, and it was all sort of organized by year. And that just helped me to see how the history interacted with the personal stories in the book, and it was extremely helpful for visualizing. And then the other document that I had was just, I called it a catch all document, and it was actually, it also grew to be massive, but that was the place where, if I read a really great detail, but for instance, the book was not going to be one where I took just copious notes about every single page. You know, I wasn't going to annotate the whole book. I could it was an alphabetized list of various topics. And for instance, that cigarette detail, I could have a heading that said, you know, left leaning youth descriptions, and then that would be in there. And I had to make sure that everything was like, linked and sourced in the moment, otherwise you just forget where those things found it. And it's the most I mean, for me, it's that is just the most hellish feeling of knowing that you read something and it was a great detail, and not remembering where you read it, and so you can't, or at least in my case, I couldn't use it, right? Yeah. And there were some really heartbreaking things that I know that I read that I just had to let it.

Traci Thomas 47:14

Yeah, well, that's my next question, which is, doesn't have to be this specific, but, like, what something that's not in the book that you wish could have been.

Speaker 1 47:25

Yeah, I mean, I think I say this in the author's note, but I did just struggle, even though I felt a lot of conviction around the idea that this should be focused on one family. But that doesn't mean I didn't struggle with that decision, because the I abuela step plus and macho, they really drive their power from working together. And so focusing on one family more than another, at times, just felt incongruent with that mission of we're all in this together, and no one's grandchild is more important to find than anyone else's. And even, you know, even once some grandmothers experienced success and did reconnect with their grandchildren, they continued to be a part of the organization and threw all of their energy into finding the grandchildren of the grandmothers who had not yet had that privilege and luck. And so I think, you know, on an emotional level, I wish I could have just woven in more of the above stories and more of the stories of the grandchildren, but I'm not sure it would have made it a better book. So intellectually, I don't necessarily think that I would would change, make a change in that direction.

Traci Thomas 48:41

Again, you mentioned this in, I think the author said about, like, being an empath. And I just, I've never heard, like, an investigative journalist or any type person say that before. And so I'm wondering, like, how did that manifest for you? Like, what does that, what does that look like for you? How did that either get in your way, or were there times where you felt like like that was helpful to you or useful to you?

Speaker 1 49:07

Yeah, I so. I am, I think in the the author, should I say I'm an incorrigible Empath, and sometimes it does feel extreme, like I'm the type of person where, if I'm watching a TV show and I know something bad is about to happen. And I'm not watching with my husband, who will not let me do this, but I've been watching it alone. I have to pause. I have to, like, pace around the room. I have to prepare for the bad thing to happen. Sometimes I turn the volume down, like it's TV. It's, you know, fake story. Um, yeah, that is just how I've always been. And I think it cuts both ways. I mean, I think I love listening, and I think that that, you know, for people, especially when I'm asking people to share stories of immense trauma, that that, that. Maybe helps them feel more comfortable sharing their stories with me. You know, I'm not going to stare at them completely stone face and then look at my list of questions and move on to the next it, I think is going to feel like more of a conversation. But certainly, I think it probably made writing this book a lot more stressful for me than it would have been if I just had a different type of character. You know, I think it's really hard to work on something for four and a half years and to ask so much of people, you know, to ask them to share so much of their time, and again, I'm not asking them to share the happiest moments in their lives, or at least not only that, there's a lot that is so difficult about what I was asking them to do and the memories that I was asking them to mine. And so, of course, I was going to worry about how they would react to the depiction of those stories. You know, I think sometimes I feel like I'm, yeah, in the wrong profession, because I feel those things really, really deeply. But again, to focus more on the positive, I do think it also allows me to build, build trust with sources that maybe I wouldn't be able to otherwise.

Traci Thomas 51:15

No, I think it's good. I mean, we need, we need more, like empathetic writers, historians. Okay, I teased this earlier. How do you write snacks and beverages? Now we know you like a snack, so don't, don't let me down. Haley, this is really important, so tell me about it.

Speaker 1 51:35

Yeah, so I can write. I have to preface this, because I'm going to sound completely deranged and very high maintenance. I can write if the pressure is on in any situation, okay, but I have developed a very set system that it like definitely empowers my most productive writing sessions, and I feel like I've honed it quite a bit. So the first thing is, I, for the past couple of years, have mostly written while walking like I have one of those walking paths that goes under my desk. Yeah, and I don't do that when I'm in the more intense phases of editing and paring things back and honing things, but especially if I'm struggling to get words on paper in that drafting phase, it was so incredibly helpful to me, because if your feet are moving, it feels very awkward for your hands to be still, like, it feels very awkward to just stare at a blank, static piece of paper, like, everything feels like it needs to move. And I just, I didn't have a lot of time, and I wasn't getting to go on a lot of walks outside, just sort of like, so that is the first thing. And I am a huge proselytizer of The Walking pad. It takes some getting used to. I was super dizzy for, you know, a dinner too. And now I'm obsessed, yeah, and then I need a huge thing of water. You've probably seen peaks of it, but like giant cheers, giant Stanley Cup, I'm very addicted to iced coffee, so I have a second little cooler over there. Cheers, yeah. And then if I'm feeling fancy, I'll light a candle. But the main thing is, really, if I can walk, if it's in the drafting phase, oh, and I have a monitor. I don't write on a laptop. It needs to be I need a big screen.

Traci Thomas 53:38

So like a picture, and then, like a separate keyboard. Yeah. Also, yeah.

Speaker 1 53:43

Okay, but that's not a snack. Oh, snack, snack, snack. Yeah, okay. I'm a big popcorn person because I'm just like, mindlessly to it. I have toddlers, so I'm just like, my house is drowning in string cheese. I would say those are two main ones. And then after lunch, I just have to have some sort of chocolate, usually dark. I have a favorite brand if you're interested. I am, I am alter eco sea salt.

Traci Thomas 54:10

Okay, we will link to that in the show notes. Everything else smart that you said. But also this, okay, and then what's the word you can never spell correctly on the first try.

Speaker 1 54:20

There are a couple. I'm not the best speller despite my profession, parmesan. I don't think I could spell it in the chat if I try.

Traci Thomas 54:27

I don't think I can spell it that either. Yeah, I feel like there's an extra vowel that I'm not thinking of.

Speaker 1 54:33

Or is there one less vowel than your thing? That's a great question. I don't know. I don't know either I'm either thinking of too many or not enough.

Traci Thomas 54:41

No, I'm definitely not thinking of the right number of bills. Okay, for people who love this book, a flower traveled in my blood, what other books would you recommend to them that you think are in conversation with your work?

Speaker 1 54:59

I mean. Are so many books. I have an entire shelf of inspirational books that are just sent a few over here, and it's about 40 books long. But I guess, you know, I feel like I don't need to plug say nothing, because people know that book you don't need to plug it.

Traci Thomas 55:18

But to me, that is, like the closest comp of something that I've read in the sense that it's like this piece of history, and it spans a lot of time, and we sort of go in with this family, but it also does all the history work, and it's also sort of maybe suspenseful, mysterious in some ways, like they're very much in conversation. You don't need to plug it.

Speaker 1 55:39

That's the highest, highest compliment the possibly give me. And yeah, I think there are a lot of thematic parallels as well. And that's why I reached out to Patrick to talk, because his book is an intimate family story and also covers this wide swath of history. It opens with the disappearance of a mother like there's a lot that is, we're

Traci Thomas 56:01

not gonna plug it, but I'm not gonna plug it because everyone has probably read it, because I plugged it a million times. Yeah, you know my story with that book you were in?

Speaker 1 56:14

I do know he was a stalker, because I love this, but you were going into labor.

Traci Thomas 56:19

Well, I was reading it as I was pregnant, the end of my pregnancy, and yes, it was, like, the last book I was reading. I switched to, like, a sleep training book, and I didn't finish it until last year. Like, I had to go back and I reread it last summer. I just start over. So funny, I just never went back. Like, I just it just like, I mean--

Speaker 1 56:37

I remember, Wesley, you were like, packing books. I'm obviously a voracious reader, but I was not packing books in my hospital to go back.

Traci Thomas 56:44

Well, I was not, no, I was not at the hospital. This was like a week before. It was like, oh, and then I found I had to have a schedule. So then I found out, and I was like, Okay, let me sweat. So I took the sleep training book with me to the hospital because I had a scheduled. So I had to, like, Wait, yeah, the everything was ready to go. Anyways. Sorry, What books would you recommend that you would actually recommend, and not me just hijaking.

Speaker 1 57:08

No. So, I mean, I definitely recommend. Say that it's not that I know, of course, you know, I think that's the most aspirational comp that I could possibly have, one book that came out longer ago, and so people might not be as familiar with it, but it was very formative for me, because I took a class with its author, and she was the one who really awakened my love for narrative nonfiction. Is a spirit catches you. Yeah.

Traci Thomas 57:37

And you're gonna say that you don't know this, but the episode that people hear the week before your episode. Also, this book is recommended.

Speaker 1 57:44

Oh, wait, amazing. Yeah, I love that. This book is getting its--

Traci Thomas 57:48

I've never read it, but I'm going to, because I saw that you thanked her in your acknowledgement, and I was like, Oh, my God, Megan just mentioned that book.

Speaker 1 57:55

So, yes, it is fantastic. And once again, it is an intimate family story, but also gets at this, these stories of, you know, much bigger systems, and how those, how the family system and the wider system interact, and it's, she's just the world's most beautiful writer. And, yeah, so I highly recommend this book to everyone you know. I know you're an Adam Higginbotham fan. His works were really inspirational for me. Bob Kolker, Hidden Valley Road, like I feel like we just as like your podcast, your taste is very similar to mine in non fiction.

Traci Thomas 58:34

I got the same editor as Adam because you're both at AVID is

Speaker 1 58:39

a good question. So I my editor that I worked with most closely actually left avid my publisher right as I was finishing the book. And so I actually don't know who Adams editor is, that's a good question, but we have, we share a publisher, and so I get to steal his galleys when I go into the office, but I also buy them because they're amazing. Yeah, and I also, I do try to read some fiction as well. So I mean, the book that I tore through most recently, I was lucky. I got to go to this amazing book conference earlier in the year with some other Simon and Schuster authors, and one of the authors was Rob Franklin, oh yeah. And I tore through great black hope recently, and the bar is basically just, is this really beautifully written? And do I feel like from reading like everything for me, and this is bad, I need to program myself out of this, but it reading a novel. It needs to be a pleasurable experience, but I also feel like I need to draw something of use from it. And for me that is, is this author really deft at world building in ways that I can try to think about and apply to my non fiction writing? And, oh, man, does that book excel in that department? I mean, it is just a work of art.

Traci Thomas 59:57

It's beautiful. I need to read it. I need to read it. Okay? Have one final question for you, and I'm gonna put a slight caveat on it, because we already talked about your grandmother. So if you could have one person dead or alive, who is not your grandmother read this book, who would you want

Speaker 1 1:00:10

Oh, gosh, I think my answer would have been my grandmother. So now I'm gonna have to think a little bit. I think Jorge, Rafael Videla, because I would want him to grapple with the seismic and continuing impact of the terror that he wrought on Argentina.

Traci Thomas 1:00:35

Okay, everybody at home listening to this conversation a flower traveled in My blood has now been out. As you're listening to this for eight days, you are going to want to read it, because I feel strongly that we're going to be talking about this book for the rest of this year, but also for a much longer time. So you want to get it on the ground floor, so that you can talk to me about it, and so we can enjoy it together. It is out in the world. Now I listen to some of the audio book. It is really well done. I personally recommend reading it off the page only because there's so many details and references, and there's two picture sections, and there's just, like, so much stuff you're gonna and I'm sure you can get all of that on a PDF or whatever with the audio book. But I think you gotta, like be in this one a little bit. So the audio book is great, like she does a great job, and I listen to a few chunks on it through audio. But if you're asking me my opinion which you're getting, I would say, go with the physical copy. But either way, please read this book. I know you're gonna love it. I just it's, it's one of those books you guys, so please get it. Please read it, Haley. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Traci. That was really, really fun. And everyone else, we will see you in the stacks. All right.

Traci Thomas 1:01:56

Y'all that does it for us today. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you again to Haley Cohen Gilliland for joining the show. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to Alexandra, primiani, Alana Gold, and Eva Karens for making today's episode possible. Remember our book club pick for July is God Help the child, by Toni Morrison, which we will discuss on Wednesday, July 30, with Dana A. Williams. If you love the show and you want inside access to it, head to patreon.com/thestacks to join the Stacks Pack and check out my newsletter at tracithomas.substack.com, make sure you are subscribed to the Stacks. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, and if you're listening through Apple podcasts or Spotify, please leave us a rating and a review for more from the Stacks. Follow us on social media @thestackspod on Instagram, Threads and Tiktok and check out our website at thestackspodcast.com this episode of the Stacks was edited by Christian Duenas, with production assistance from Wy'Kia Frelot. Our graphic designer is Robin McCreight, and our theme music is from Tagirijus. The stacks is created and produced by me, Traci Thomas.

Wy'Kia Frelot
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