Behind Splintered Shadows: Words from the Author
Author Marilyn F. Moriarty shares a glimpse into her upbringing and the personal history that inspired her memoir and led her to uncover and research her mother’s hidden past:
In the late 1950s, few structures stood completed in the sand-lot suburb when my sister Chantal drove with our father from Indiana to look for a place to live. “Pink and green,” Andrée, our mother, told her friends about the new house in Jacksonville, where we moved after our father retired from the Army in 1960 after lifelong service.
We three children – sister Chantal and brother Michael — grew up in that Florida house, its driveway host to the neighborhood paper boys where the Florida Times-Union truck unloaded bales of twenty-five papers to be rubber-banded before loaded into bikes with extra-large baskets. The morning driveway waited for Catholic school kids lining up when the bus appeared as a bright flash circling the bend. Day’s end, the bus stuttered at the end of the driveway, its accordion door spitting out kids in uniform. The driveway was a hub of coming and going, a bus stop, a newspaper drop.
Generations of cats made their home there. An elm tree blighted. Rose gardens came up.
As we grew, we walked to public school, played in the street, and ran around the woods. A dedicated homemaker, our mother Andrée drove us to the public library, dancing lessons, and ball games. She drove barefoot, likely owing to a broken leg she suffered during World War II after her underground work led to her capture, trial, and four-year prison sentence in Germany. At forty-seven years old, she went to her grave with the story of her past. Our father, a decorated veteran of two wars, raised us, then three teenagers. Andrée’s death overturned our lives and set me on the path to look into her past, the subject of my book forthcoming in 2026 with the University of North Georgia Press. Found at her death, her 1945 photograph inscribed “love” to my father was signed by “Liliane,” a name that would be a clue to her war-time experience decades later.
Those many trips to the public library fostered my lifelong passion for reading, a passion leading to a life of school and schooling, including a Master’s degree in English from the University of Florida, which followed the B.A., and later a Ph.D. on Shakespeare at the University of California, Irvine. Through many college years, I was interested in fencing and competed in the United States and in Scotland, where I studied linguistics for a year at Edinburgh University. Curiosity about the world led to nonfiction writing about topics like fencing, falconry, the Shroud of Turin, imminent domain, and AIDS. I am the author of two books, Moses Unchained, which won the A.W.P. Creative Nonfiction Award and a textbook on scientific writing, Writing Science through Critical Thinking. I also edited and introduced a book on postmodern architecture and compiled the text of two Shakespeare plays. Roanoke, Virginia, has been my home for the last decades. I regularly tramp through the woods here when I am not in a class where I teach at Hollins University.
— Marilyn F. Moriarty, Author of Splintered Shadows: Recovering a French Résistante
More About the Author
Marilyn F. Moriarty is a prize-winning writer and the author of the creative nonfiction book Moses Unchained and the textbook on scientific writing Writing Science through Critical Thinking. Her essays have been published in The Antioch Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Creative Nonfiction, Dappled Things, The Kenyon Review, Raritan, Relief, River Teeth, and other literary and online journals and anthologies. Three essays have been designated “Notable” from the editors of The Best American Essays series. She was a Visiting Writer at the American Academy in Rome. Her nonfiction has received the Pirates Aller Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal for the Essay and the Associated Writing Programs Creative Nonfiction Prize, and her essay “Bone Lab” was selected for Best Spring Writing for 2024. Her fiction has been awarded the Peregrine Prize for Fiction, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and the University of Utah Novella Prize. Moriarty received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, and has taught literature at Hollins University, where she was the Inaugural Berry professor of Liberal Studies and the recipient of the Herta Freitag Award for Critical and Creative Achievement.
Interested in learning more about the story behind Moriarty’s search for her mother’s hidden past? Chat with the author at Next Fest Author Festival on Saturday, August 29 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at UNG Gainesville Campus, in the Martha T. Nesbitt Academic Building.
You can also visit her author website to learn more about her and her work.
Preorder Your Copy
Splintered Shadows traces Marilyn F. Moriarty’s search for her mother’s hidden past. Beginning with a name on a 1945 photograph, she follows scattered clues across Europe, uncovering a life shaped by resistance, secrecy, and survival in Nazi-occupied France.
Visit the UNG Press bookstore to secure your copy ahead of release day — August 25, 2026.
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