We touched the old seats she might have sat upon. We explored London and found the remains of the trucks the Dollies drove in museum reconstruction sheds. Driving their converted two and a half ton trucks with coffee machines and donut makers in the back, I knew these women were assigned to troops on the front line, providing snacks and small talk to exhausted GIs.Įventually I took my family-the wife and daughter my mother never met-and we set out to retrace her steps. I had the basic facts: the women had to be 27 years old, preferably with some college experience. The Red Cross eventually assigned more than 300 women to the European theater, volunteers culled from across the country in a highly competitive recruitment drive. However, I was not prepared to discover how little information I could find about the women of the WWII Clubmobile Corps. I thought I might be able to write a nonfiction account of my mother’s World War II experiences, taking what I could sketch out from her memories and filling it in with the historical record. I tried to reconstruct my memories of the occasional impressions my mother had given me of her time in the European theater. When I began to research my new novel almost 10 years ago, I started with the photographs, scrapbooks and journals she had left behind. I never understood how she had ended up in Tijuana or why she stayed in California. She never took me to visit New York or the family she abandoned. But what I didn’t know is why she never returned home. I knew from the deep scars on her legs, that she came back from the war horribly wounded. And I knew that my mother at age 27, left them all to volunteer with the Red Cross Clubmobile Corps in World War II. I knew there was an aunt who grew raspberries in impossible Mattituck, Long Island, though it was a hard place for me to picture. She’d grown up in a magical sounding place called Staten Island, and her mother had owned an antique shop in Manhattan and knew Steinbeck and Einstein. The stories she told me sounded like something from the Emerald City. She grew up in New York, which sounded so far away from our dirt alley apartment. Growing up, I knew bits of my mother’s history she was born in 1916, which sounded so long ago. I was born in Tijuana and raised in Barrio Logan in southeast San Diego.
My mother died before my first book was published in 1993, and it’s only now, 17 books into my career, that I understand it was perhaps all an apprenticeship to earn the right to tell her story. The fact that I have spent my career writing about the borderlands and my family therein is an irony I have wrestled with. The fact that I am a writer shows she won, that her constant tending of my literary interests set the path and ultimately paid off. My mother, however, enchanted me with Dickens, Twain, and stories of a fairy tale kingdom called New York, where she had grown up. In my childhood, the Mexicans seduced me with bullfights, handmade tortillas, and the perpetual gossip and tall tales that only tias and abuelitas can pull off. Her name was Phyllis, but they called her Feliciana – which roughly translates to The Joyous One. Her elegant manners delighted my relatives, and when she served them coffee in her antique demitasse cups, it was the most exotic thing in the world to them. When we gathered, she laughed easily and often, even when she didn’t understand the jokes. She didn’t speak Spanish, she didn’t like California, yet she often was the life of the party. Although she doubted from time to time whether she was talented enough, Anne wanted to write anyway.My mother was the only American in our uproarious Mexican family. She hoped one day to become a famous writer or journalist. The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings otherwise, I'd absolutely suffocate. It is noteworthy that in The Secret Annex, Anne left out her notes about her love for Peter and her vicious remarks about her mother, such as 'my mother is in most things an example to me, but then an example of precisely how I shouldn’t do things.' What does writing mean to Anne?
Since the original diary letters from 1943 have not survived, we do not know anything about them. There, the differences between the original diary and Anne's rewritten version are the greatest. She gave to the texts written during the first six months in hiding an especially thorough going-over. What are the main differences between Anne's diary and The Secret Annex?ġ5-year-old Anne looked very critically at the texts written by 13-year-old Anne.
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