Jillian Cantor: Half Life

Bronia did tragically lose both her children much too young, as described here, and also outlived her husband and Marie. She was medical director of the Radium Institute in Poland when it first opened. Irène worked with her mother in the field during World War I and afterward at her Institute in Paris. She married Frédéric Joliot (against Marie’s wishes—Marie did make him sign a prenuptial agreement), but he did grow on Marie after they married. Irène and Frédéric went on to win their own Nobel Prize in 1935, a year after Marie’s death, for their work on artificial radioactivity. Ève became a concert pianist, then a writer (penning her mother’s biography after Marie’s death), and a war reporter during World War II. She married an American diplomat and later worked for UNICEF. She was the only member of her family not to win a Nobel Prize, though her husband, Henry Labouisse, did—he won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with UNICEF. She also lived to be 102, untouched by the high amounts of radiation that would kill her mother and her sister at much younger ages.

I made one notable omission to Marie’s family. In real life, there was one more living Sklodowski sibling in these years, a brother, Józef, a doctor, who lived in Warsaw and was a part of Marie’s, Bronia’s, and Hela’s lives. I left him out of this story for my own novelistic purposes.

The city of Loksow is fictional, though all the other places in the book are real, from Zakopane (where Bronia did have a sanatorium) to Saint-Rémy, where Marie and Pierre did spend one last wonderful Easter weekend before his death, to L’Arcouëst, which was a summer playground for the faculty of the Sorbonne. Marya’s women’s university is fictional, but the Flying University was a real thing in Warsaw. And the real Marie did attend with Bronia before they both moved to Paris. In real life, the school became legal around 1905–1906 and later became known as the Society of Science Courses. After World War I, it became Free Polish University. Agata and the other women at the school with Marya are all fictional, with the exception of Leokadia Jewniewicz, who, in real life, was the concert pianist who married Kazimerz Zorawski in the years after he broke up with Marya. I wondered how her life would’ve been different too if Marya had married Kazimierz instead, and if she’d continued with her piano career instead of marrying and having children.

For further reading about the real Marie Curie’s life, I suggest Marie Curie by Susan Quinn, Madame Curie by Ève Curie, and Marie Curie and Her Daughters by Shelley Emling. These books were enormously helpful to me for establishing the timeline of both Marie’s and Marya’s lives, and any errors or omissions here, intentional or otherwise, are all my own.

SOME BOOKS come to me easily, their plots fully formed. But with Half Life I struggled for months with how I wanted to tell the story, where and when to set it, and who the main characters would be. Over the course of a year I began (and scrapped) two different novels called Half Life , each connected in a different way to Marie Curie and each set in a different time, with different characters than the ones in this final book. It wasn’t until I was eighty pages in the second time that I realized that Marya Zorawska needed a voice, and that the real story I longed to tell was this one.

I am always enormously indebted to my brilliant agent, Jessica Regel, and even more so this time that she not only trusted me to figure this out, but also that she didn’t think I was crazy when I called her and told her I was starting this book over, for the third time. I’m also so grateful that she read and encouraged me through the false starts to the final version, and that she never lost enthusiasm for me writing a novel about Marie Curie. Thank you also to the amazing team at Foundry who work so hard on my subsidiary rights and contracts, especially Claire Harris, Richie Kern, Sarah Lewis, Sara DeNobrega, Marin Takikawa, and Natalie Todoroff.

Thank you to my wonderful editor at Harper, Sarah Stein, who was amazingly unfazed by me changing my mind early on, and whose wise advice and careful edits helped me make Marya’s and Marie’s stories shine. Thank you also to assistant editor Alicia Tan for helping with so many details throughout the process. I’m very grateful to the entire sales, marketing, and publicity teams at Harper for getting my books into the hands of readers. A huge thank-you to Doug Jones and Amy Baker for their continued enthusiasm and support for my work

I’m grateful to have so many supportive writer friends who are always there to listen and read early drafts. Huge thank-you to T. Greenwood, Maureen Leurck, and Brenda Janowitz who kept me sane with text and email support and offered early feedback. I always call my friend Eileen Connell when I get stuck on a plot point and she talks me through it—this time, she helped me figure out what the final two chapters should be. An enormous thank-you also to Jean Kwok and Marie Benedict, who read and offered their endorsements and support (even during a pandemic). And to Andrea Katz, who is an amazing champion of my books, but I’m also lucky to count her as a friend. To my friends on the homefront, thank you for the mahj and the mimosas and the Facetimes and the endless love and support.

Thank you to my family who always believe in my writing even when I’m struggling to figure it out myself. To Gregg for still being my best friend after all these years, and for always offering to be my first and most enthusiastic reader. And to my kids, who are amazingly wonderful teenagers and readers.

Thank you to all the incredible booksellers and librarians who support my books and get them into the hands of readers. And last but not least, to my readers around the world who keep reading and discussing my books in their book clubs—an enormous thank-you for choosing to read my books and allowing me to keep doing what I love.

JILLIAN CANTORhas a BA in English from Penn State University and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She is the author of award-winning and bestselling novels for teens and adults, including The Hours Count , Margot , and The Lost Letter , which was a USA Today bestseller. In Another Time , her latest historical novel, was an Indie Next pick. Born and raised in a suburb of Philadelphia, Cantor lives in Arizona with her husband and two sons.

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Why did you choose to write a novel about Marie Curie set in two timelines, a real and an alternate one?

I knew I wanted to write a novel about Marie Curie and call it Half Life for a year before I figured out exactly what story I wanted to tell. After two false starts, I kept coming back to one detail about Marie’s life that fascinated me most of all: the fact that she had been engaged to Kazimierz Zorawski as a young woman in Poland, and that the only reason she didn’t marry him was because his mother thought she wasn’t good enough for him. So much about this intrigued me! There was the fact that this amazing, brilliant woman, who would later go on to change the course of science and win two Nobel Prizes, was deemed not good enough as a young poor woman in Poland. And then I read that in his later years, Kazimierz would sit in Warsaw and stare at a statue of her, erected after her death. All those years later, did he still regret not marrying her? But what if he had married her? Her life would’ve turned out totally differently if she’d never moved to Paris to get her education or met Pierre.