How Linda Donn Discovered Her Balloonist

After writing two nonfiction books (which she’ll tell you more about below), Linda Donn has come out with her first novel, The Littlest Balloonist. The story of how she found the subject and setting for this foray into fiction is a happy accident which I hope you’ll find as interesting as I have.

When I began to write about my heroine, Sophie Blanchard, I was surprised to find the little French balloonist as familiar to me as if I had known her for a long, long time.

I would like to explain how this came about.

Years ago, I was writing my first book, a nonfiction story about the friendship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and I did a lot of research in the Rare Book and Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Even on a blistering hot day in Washington, D.C., it is very cold in the archives. It helps preserve the old papers. And so, to warm up—and because you can’t help but get stuck in research sometimes—I would get up and wander around the room and pull out the drawers of files that describe the different collections in the Manuscript Division. There are large lives in there—Kennedys and Roosevelts and Fords and the like. But there is also a little archive, all in French, about the adventures of the early balloonists. I can read French, and so it amused me to read about their escapades—they once sent an elephant up in a balloon, and described as him as ‘superb’ and ‘modest’!

Then, too, I read descriptions of the young Sophie Blanchard, how generous and daring she was, and how she became Napoleon Bonaparte’s official balloonist.

When I finished writing the book on Freud and Jung, I thought of doing a book about that brave little band, but I couldn’t figure out how to structure the story. I mentioned the problem to a friend—who happened to be a Roosevelt—she said, “Oh, you like stories about relationships. You should write about a group of Roosevelt cousins.” Well, I went back to the Rare Book and Manuscript Division and pulled out the drawers of Roosevelts—and found a fascinating story. But on my research visits, inevitably, I would get cold and stuck, and so I’d wander over to the drawer of my French balloonists.

And this time, when I finished my book on the Roosevelt cousins, I pulled out the folders about hydrogen balloons in 19th-century France and went to work.

I found that a number of problems had already been solved: I would not write about the balloonists as a group; I would only write about Sophie. And I would not write another nonfiction book. Napoleon once said courage was the quality he most admired, and he had never seen it in a woman. Well. How much braver could a woman be than Sophie Blanchard flying miles—yes, miles!—up in the air? When she became his official balloonist, how could Napoleon not have fallen in love with her? I was sure he had. But I couldn’t prove it, and so I turned her story into my first novel.

The way I’m writing this, it sounds like these were decisions, and easily made. In fact, I don’t think that they were made at all. I think that, thanks to those years of having Sophie on the edges of my mind, the shape and texture of the story simply evolved.

But there was one thing I was aware of, early on. The notion of freedom interested me—and what better metaphor for it than a balloon in flight? And I was captivated by the quality of silk. So light and delicate looking—nearly transparent and almost nonexistent—yet strong enough to bear an airship through the sky. My debt to these metaphors was considerable. They showed me that Sophie’s story had its own inner life.

As I look over these paragraphs, I am struck by how little I can claim as conscious work. The structure of the story unfolded over time, and the metaphors of a balloon as freedom—and of silk as a complex form of strength—have an internal logic quite apart from me. In the end, those things pushed the story forward more than anything I consciously did. So much so that the next time I write a novel, I will look for the possibility of metaphor, for it’s the wind at my back.

23 January 2006 | guest authors |