Every Time We Say Goodby by Natalie Jenner

A special thank you to the author, Natalie Jenner, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

In 1955, Vivien Lowry is facing the greatest challenge of her life. Her latest play, the only female-authored play on the London stage that season, has opened in the West End to rapturous applause from the audience. 

The reviewers, however, are not as impressed as the playgoers and their savage notices not only shut down the play but ruin Lowry's last chance for a dramatic career. With her future in London not looking bright, at the suggestion of her friend, Peggy Guggenheim, Vivien takes a job in as a script doctor on a major film shooting in Rome’s Cinecitta Studios. 

There she finds a vibrant movie making scene filled with rising stars, acclaimed directors, and famous actors in a country that is torn between its past and its potentially bright future, between the liberation of the post-war cinema and the restrictions of the Catholic Church that permeates the very soul of Italy.

As Vivien tries to forge a new future for herself, she also must face the long-buried truth of the recent World War and the mystery of what really happened to her deceased fiancé. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a brilliant exploration of trauma and tragedy, hope and renewal, filled with dazzling characters both real and imaginary. (From HarperCollins.)

Jenner's latest once again brings a vibrant cast of characters to life—including cameos from her previous two novels (The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls) and by classical Hollywood cinema's leading ladies. 

The story takes place in post-war Italy where a group of American and British expatriates become entangled in controversy while making a movie about a female Italian resistance fighter during the occupation called "La Scolaretta," the Schoolgirl assassin. Her story makes up the dual narrative. 

Meticulously researched, this novel demonstrates how impactful art is not only to preserve our history, but as a medium to communicate to the masses as well as entertain. 

Every Time We Say Goodbye is a cinematic novel of love, art, grief, and of confronting the past to face the future.

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NATALIE JENNER is the author of the instant international bestseller The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls. A Goodreads Choice Award runner-up for historical fiction and finalist for best debut novel, The Jane Austen Society was a USA Today and #1 national bestseller, and has been sold for translation in twenty countries. 

Born in England and raised in Canada, Jenner has been a corporate lawyer, career coach and, most recently, an independent bookstore owner in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives with her family and two rescue dogs.

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Q & A with Natalie Jenner*

GWR: How long did it take you to write Every Time We Say Goodbye, and how many drafts were there before publication?

NJ: I tend to have a “four seasons” energy when it comes to writing: I start with the hopefulness of spring, finish with the sharpened-pencil mood of fall, buckle down in our Canadian winter to edit, and deliver the final MS at its end. With Every Time We Say Goodbye, it was the same: roughly a year, May to April, and about three substantive drafts in total—but months of line editing in between! 

GWR: What was the genesis of the novel?

NJ: In the spring of 2021, I was rewatching Day For Night, an old Francois Truffaut film about film, and ended up falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole when I learned that Rome’s famous Cinecittà studios had been used as refugee camps during and after WWII, and that some refugees might even have been extras during filming there of the Hollywood epic Quo Vadis. This lit a creative spark in me, and I decided (helped by lack of travel in 2021 due to the pandemic!) to set my next book in Rome, my favourite city.

GWR: What do you have more fun with, character development or plot? 

NJ: I write line by line, without outlining or knowing what is going to happen, so everything—plot and characters—is fun for me. This also means that the characters drive the plot: I feel like I am a tin can tied to their collective bumper, being pulled along in their wake, and only discovering their secrets along the way. The absolute most fun for me is when I finally realize what those secrets are.

GWR: Your books are always meticulously researched and detailed—can you tell us about the process?

NJ: My process is very haphazard, in part because the subject matter of each book drives the research. But basically, I research just enough before I start writing to ensure a sense of time and place, then as I write I research whatever pops up in the plot. I can say that the research for Every Time We Say Goodbye was the most intense, intensive, and harrowing that I have ever done. From war orphans, partisan resisters, religion and censorship, to Italian laws, culture, cinema, and politics: much of this was brand new to me, and I felt a real imperative to get it as right as possible, out of respect for that amazing country and its equally amazing people.

GWR: What made you decide to write a dual timeline? Was it easier or more challenging?

NJ: I never had any intention of writing a dual timeline. In fact, I was halfway through the book, when one morning (and I will never forget this moment) I sat down at my laptop and suddenly the words “The handbag is almost empty inside” just popped onto the page. Right way, I realized I was inside the head of la scolaretta, the fictional “schoolgirl assassin” that many of my 1950s characters had been referencing in the plot. In a way, she made me write her, probably to get her right—or at least better than I had been doing! So again, the story sowed the seeds for that decision. It wasn’t necessarily easier, but I did love finding ways structurally to connect the two timelines, and create echoes between the respective plots, themes, characters, and settings.

GWR: Setting always plays such an important part in your novels. Although this book is largely set in Rome, it begins and ends in England—do you have ties to either country? 

NJ: My love for Italy, and Rome in particular, started in adolescence: I happen to be one of the last high-school Latin graduates in the province of Ontario! For six years I daily parsed the writings of Virgil, Ovid, and Catullus, and saw the intricate connection between that dead language and our own—in fact, it’s one of the few subjects I studied that impacts me still to this day and in a very fun, writerly way. I have since visited Italy several times, and Rome remains my favourite city in the world. 

I only recently realized that all of my books end in England, which makes me appreciate what some call ancestral memory—all I know, is that I have always felt an incredibly strong attachment and affinity to all things British. My father, brother, and I were born in England, and I grew up in a very British-Canadian household: kippers for Christmas morning breakfast, Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em on the tv. I continue to visit my paternal family and friends there every chance I get.

GWR: Was it hard to say goodbye to the characters in these books?  

NJ: No, but probably only because I always try to leave my characters in the best place in life that I can, ready to face whatever life throws at them next. I think I purposefully do that in order to feel closure—yet I keep finding ways to revisit many of my characters in subsequent books, so I think perhaps I am just really bad at goodbyes!

GWR: If your book was a beverage, what would it be?

NJ: An Aperol Spritz: summery and long-lasting, with a refreshing bite. 

GWR: What are you working on now?

NJ: I am putting the finishing touches on Austen at Sea, which is the tale of two daughters of a Massachusetts supreme court justice who start a correspondence with Jane Austen's last surviving sibling, a ninety-one-year-old retired admiral, and travel by mail packet steamship to meet him in the summer of 1865 just as the civil war has ended. In their absence, their widowed father's colleagues on the bench start a judicial reading circle dedicated to Austen as a means of distracting him. Louisa May Alcott also makes an appearance in the plot, leading the other women on board ship in a charity performance of vignettes from A Tale of Two Cities. A literary treasure hunt soon ensues, culminating in climactic court cases on both sides of the Atlantic involving a piece of Austen history and a multitude of characters including theatre impresarios, street waifs, newspapermen, suffragists, gypsy fortune tellers, and many more (my quasi-tribute to Dickens). These is also a very loose connection to my first novel, The Jane Austen Society, which has made the entire writing experience especially gratifying and “full circle” for me as a writer—see my failure at closure, above!

*A version of this post was published on STYLE Canada. 

Bloomsbury Girls by Natalie Jenner

A special thank you to the author, Natalie Jenner, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare book store that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager's unbreakable fifty-one rules. But in 1950, the world is changing, especially the world of books and publishing, and at Bloomsbury Books, the girls in the shop have plans:

Vivien Lowry: Single since her aristocratic fiance was killed in action during World War II, the brilliant and stylish Vivien has a long list of grievances - most of them well justified and the biggest of which is Alec McDonough, the Head of Fiction.

Grace Perkins: Married with two sons, she's been working to support the family following her husband's breakdown in the aftermath of the war. Torn between duty to her family and dreams of her own.

Evie Stone: In the first class of female students from Cambridge permitted to earn a degree, Evie was denied an academic position in favor of her less accomplished male rival. Now she's working at Bloomsbury Books while she plans to remake her own future.

As they interact with various literary figures of the time—Daphne Du Maurier, Ellen Doubleday, Sonia Blair (widow of George Orwell), Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and others—these three women with their complex web of relationships, goals and dreams are all working to plot out a future that is richer and more rewarding than anything society will allow.

Bloomsbury Girls is a story about friendship, perseverance, and the love of the written word. 

Vivien, Grace, and Evie are trying to forge their own paths in post-war London. Against the backdrop of a century old bookstore, the trio form an unlikely bond. Jenner's cast is further bolstered by the addition of some famous figures, shining a light on some of the overlooked women authors of that time. And there are also a few characters from The Jane Austen Society that make a cameo. 

Through the intertwined stories of the three women, Bloomsbury Girls examines class, prejudice, and gender roles. Each chapter opens citing one of the shop's archaic and stuffy rules—a clever plot device that becomes oh so satisfying in the Epilogue. Although this book features a larger cast of characters, they are well-developed and have purpose.     

In this union of historical and feminist fiction, there are flashes of romance as well as a little mystery. Jenner's meticulous research, beautiful writing, and rich detail make for another incredible reading experience. This wonderful followup to The Jane Austen Society will delight both historical fiction and literary fans.  

With its charming characters and bookshop setting, Bloomsbury Girls is every book lover's dream! 

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NATALIE JENNER is the author of the instant international bestseller The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls. A Goodreads Choice Award runner-up for historical fiction and finalist for best debut novel, The Jane Austen Society was a USA Today and #1 national bestseller, and has been sold for translation in twenty countries. 

Born in England and raised in Canada, Jenner has been a corporate lawyer, career coach and, most recently, an independent bookstore owner in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives with her family and two rescue dogs.

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Q & A with Natalie Jenner*

GWR: Is there a particular author/work that inspired you to become a writer or the way you write? 

NJ: When I was very little, L. M. Montgomery was my biggest influence and inspiration – although I read from the age of three, the Anne of Green Gables books were the first ones that looked and felt grown-up to me and I overly identified with Anne as a victim of her own imagination! Quickly on Montgomery’s heels was Jane Austen, whose books I discovered relatively young in life on my parents’ shelves. I loved the efficiency of Austen’s prose: how she just dropped you into scenes and didn’t overly describe the characters’ physical appearance or setting. Ironically it felt very filmic to me, very alive – I now see how part of Austen’s genius was knowing exactly how much to give you, the reader, so that your own imaginative work as you read gives you the greatest possible satisfaction and reward.

GWR: What comes first for you—the overall idea or the characters?  

NJ: The idea for sure. I will read something in The New Yorker, or hear a line in a Netflix documentary, or hit my head on something while falling down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, and it just starts to itch. They say you often end up writing about the one thing you can’t not write about. Once I know the setting, time period, and what’s at stake, I sit down to write and then the characters just start showing up, fully formed. It’s so much fun meeting them.

GWR: Did any minor characters become major characters over the course of the novel? Do you have a favourite character? 

NJ: My characters all seem to innately know their place as I write, so it’s rare that one gets out of control. But Daphne du Maurier definitely ended up being a much more pivotal character for the women in the bookshop than I had originally intended, particularly in terms of the mentoring relationship she develops with Vivien. Vivien was a favourite character of mine as I wrote (all that sass and fashion-forwardness!), but honestly, I had a soft spot for all three women in the shop. I also developed a serious writing crush on Lord Baskin as I wrote, and Ash Ramaswamy slowly but stealthily stole my heart. By the end, I would have given Ash anything he wanted.

GWR: I loved your portrayal of what life would have been like for strong, intelligent women who are living outside of what is expected of them. Was there anything that you learned about that time period that surprised you? 

NJ: I was actually pleasantly surprised by how much women were getting done behind the scenes, so-to-speak. Clarissa Spencer-Churchill and Sonia Blair (George Orwell’s widow) really did have the run of the place at the literary journal Horizon whenever the men went off. It was strangely similar to the war: when the men were absent from the workplace, women were entrusted with things they otherwise weren’t, proving their competence all along. 

GWR: The inclusion of actual literary figures and social figures was fascinating. Can you tell us about the research you did? 

NJ: I do this weird thing as an author when I get that first “itch” to write something new: I look for relevant books, movies, and articles lying around the house (I own a lot of books and DVDs) and work from those first, because they are a sort of embryonic reflection of what intellectually turns me on. With Bloomsbury Girls, I had several books on Du Maurier already on my shelves, as well as a fascinating book published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Foyles Bookshop in London called The Romance of a Bookshop 1904-1929, which set out its earliest financial, staffing, and sales history. As I write, I will trip across new resources which often end up informing the plot: for example, when I learned about Peggy Guggenheim’s time working at the Sunwise Turn, one of the first women-owned and operated bookshops in America, I was thrilled to discover that a 1923 memoir of that shop had recently been reprinted only six months before. So that account became both another seminal resource for me as well as a kind of thematic endgame for the women in my story, who decide to try to take over the bookshop where they work. And the inclusion of Samuel Beckett came about because of a throwaway line in a Netflix documentary on Guggenheim which mentioned her affair with Beckett in the 1930s. So the research process for me happens both before and during the writing, and can look quite haphazard from the outside, but through it all runs a thread of personal meaning—even quirkily of fate—which makes it a joy for me to find ways to incorporate into the actual story.

GWR: What was the inspiration behind the shop rules? 

NJ: I come from decades of working in human resources, most often as a career coach and recruiter, so looking back I think the rules reflect all those HR handbooks and guides I had to administer! The rules also come from the personality of Mr. Dutton, the shop’s general manager: I remember writing the interview scene with Evie Stone at the beginning, and right away picturing how Dutton would have his own HR handbook of a sort, properly framed and installed where everyone would have to see it when sitting in his office. But even before that, different rules had started tumbling out of the various disaffected employees’ mouths as I wrote their initial dialogue, reflecting the strained work environment they are all about to rebel against!

GWR: If Bloomsbury Girls was a beverage, what would it be? 

NJ: It would definitely be what I recently learned the British call “builder’s tea”: strongly brewed black tea, with heaps of sugar and some milk, that is the reward for hard work and a source of camaraderie in the workplace, be it at a construction site or in a bookshop.

GWR: Evie has traversed your novels, do you have more stories for these characters? 

NJ: I am working on a third book which, like Bloomsbury Girls, is a stand-alone but carries forward one of its new characters: Vivien Lowry, the insolent shopgirl and budding playwright. This book takes place five years later at the Cinecittà movie studio in Rome, where Peggy Guggenheim has lands Vivien a job as a script doctor after her latest play bombs. Part of the fun with this book was having a few characters from The Jane Austen Society suddenly show up that I wasn’t planning on, and getting to catch up with them all over again. 

GWR: What is one thing you hope readers take away from your books? 

NJ: I do believe that no matter how difficult life is, you have to find ways to move forward, big or small. That even the smallest decisions or choices (a new book, chatting with someone behind you in line, a cup of coffee with an old friend) can lead to something huge and sustaining. That is, ironically, exactly what happened to me five years ago, when I turned to the works of Jane Austen to get through a difficult health challenge for my family. I had no idea it would lead to my finally getting published after decades of trying, and I so hope that my books always give people that same measure of hope and optimism, as well as a sense of the rich value of our relationships with those around us and in our communities at large.

*A version of this post was published on STYLE Canada.

The Jane Austen Society: A Novel by Natalie Jenner

A special thank you to Libro.fm and Macmillan Audio for an audiobook listening copy, and NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Chawton, a village in England, is famous for being the final home of Jane Austen. A hundred and fifty years later, it is still home to a few of her distant relatives. When the last pieces of Austen's legacy are threatened, an unlikely group forms in the efforts to preserve Austen's home and legacy. These people—a labourer, a young widow, the local doctor, and a movie star, among others—could not be more different and yet they are united in their love for the works and words of Jane Austen. As each of them endures their own quiet struggle with loss and trauma, some from the recent war, others from more distant tragedies, they band together to create the Jane Austen Society.

This powerful and moving debut is a fictional account of one of England's most celebrated authors. Jenner's appreciation and enjoyment of Jane Austen is apparent—she shares the same joy of Austen's writing with her characters. 

Natalie takes the utmost care in developing her large cast. She fully fleshes out their backstories and connections to one another. This is some of her strongest writing—these relationships that she creates rival those in an Austen work.

The Jane Austen Society is an exploration of the resilience and strength of the human spirit in times of great tragedy and loss. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this book will delight historical fiction and Austen fans everywhere.

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NATALIE JENNER obtained her B.A. and her LL.B. from the University of Toronto, where she was the 1990 Gold Medalist in English Literature at St. Michael's College, and was Called to the Bar of Ontario in 1995. In addition to a brief career as a corporate lawyer, Natalie has worked as a recruiter, career coach, and consultant to leading law firms in Canada for over two decades. 

Jenner was born in England and emigrated to Canada as a young child. Most recently Natalie founded the independent bookstore Archetype Books in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives with her family and two rescue dogs.

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Q & A with Natalie Jenner*

GWR: How many hours a day do you write? What does your writing process look like?

NJ: When I am working on the first draft especially, I write every morning from 5 am to 7 am, awakened against my will by my characters already in mid-conversation with each other. I love writing very early in the day because that’s when I face the least risk of interruption—or distraction—by the world outside. I will spend more time later in the morning, after breakfast and exercising, going over the new material and editing it until I am satisfied enough to move forward again. The rest of the day I spend on twitter. Not really. But sort of.

GWR: Are you a pantser (fly by the seat of your pants) or a plotter?

NJ: Completely flying by the seat of my pants! When I start the first draft, I don’t have any idea of what is going to happen from one word to the next. I write, day after day, seven days a week without a break, in order to find out what is going to happen. It’s a very exhilarating way to write. Your characters will surprise you, and misbehave, and you will discover twists and turns—and even larger themes—that your own creative subconscious mind has already been setting up throughout the text without you even knowing. For me, the first draft is like a drug, a dream—revision is the penance for the fun of the first draft.

GWR: How did you come up with the concept for The Jane Austen Society? What was the inspiration?

NJ: Following a very sudden and extremely harrowing medical diagnosis for my husband a few years ago, I had been reading a lot of books by and about Jane Austen as I often due in times of stress, as well as watching a lot of Escape to the Country and dreaming about far-off bolt-holes in England! Over time I found myself becoming very intrigued on an intellectual level by Austen’s unique ability to soothe my emotional pain. Through my reading, I was also inspired by how Austen’s cottage in real life was saved by a society set up by very regular, local villagers, and by how letters, artifacts, and places can help future generations understand the great geniuses of our past. Finally, as a former and recent bookshop owner, I had been inspired by the many moments of connection in my shop, whether with me or between customers, over a shared love of books. All of this coalesced into my wanting to explore how books can comfort and connect us, despite seeming differences, as well as the question of who gets to write, affect and change history.

GWR: Do you have a favourite character in this book?

NJ: I bit off a lot with eight main characters in this book, and I don’t think you do that as a writer unless you are going to love and be fascinated by them all. But if I had to pick one, it’s probably Evie. She is the only character based at all on someone real (my daughter, who was exactly Evie’s age when I was writing the book), and recently I realized Evie is also an homage to my self-taught mother (one of the delayed discoveries we pansters get, even years after writing). Both these women in my life have a strong educational bent, the ability to become very single-minded in focus, and a refusal to be beaten back by bad luck in life.

GWR: What character did you sympathize with the most and did that change while writing the book?

NJ: I sympathized tremendously with all my characters because, looking back, I now see that I was unconsciously using them to work through my own challenges involving my husband’s medical prognosis, which remains challenging and unclear. That intense relatability and osmosis for me with my characters is probably why my sympathies never flagged or changed. But if I had to pick one, I would say I sympathized the most with Adeline the schoolteacher, because she is given an excruciating level of loss to cope with—more than most humans will ever have to survive. And her owning of her grief—while internally fighting to not let it overcome her—emotionally affected me throughout the entire course of the book.

GWR: What was the hardest scene to write?

NJ: As a pantser, I find the chapters just flow through me, especially in the course of that first draft. It’s a magical process actually (in case anyone is wondering why writers do what they do, that “being in the zone” feeling is pretty intoxicating!). But I would say that the most emotionally difficult scene for me to write was when Adeline is so immersed in her grief, that you can see how cut off she is from any real or authentic connection with others. I also found the Christmas churchyard scene with Dr. Gray, where he contemplates the mistakes he has made as a doctor and as a man, very difficult to experience alongside him. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when I first heard the audiobook version of those two scenes, narrated by the British actor Richard Armitage, that I found myself brought to tears for the first time.

GWR: Tell me about the research you did for the novel?

NJ: Well, I sort of back-ended into this book because most of the research was done before I even had an inkling that I was going to return to writing after a ten-year break from trying to get published. In addition to all the reading by and about Austen that I mentioned above, I also took a trip to Chawton, the village in England where she had spent the final decade of her life, to essentially walk in her footsteps and pay homage to her for helping me through such a difficult time in life. Looking back, I now see that being in this very peaceful, beautiful, and historically significant place inspired me both emotionally and creatively. After that trip, I continued to read more about Austen herself, her own process as a writer, and her own internal struggles. Then, for my 50th birthday, I treated my daughter and myself to our first Jane Austen conference in Philadelphia, and the theme was her final novel Persuasion, particularly how grief runs through it. All of those experiences fused together to provide a very strong, emotive and almost intuitive feel for Austen that pretty much fuelled me the entire time I wrote this book.

GWR: How did you balance crafting a good story against historical accuracy in terms of character development?

NJ: I think I got lucky on this one. Because I had done what turned out to be a year of unintentional research, when I did feel that creative impulse to write again, I was able to keep all that completed research both in the back of my head and behind me, so-to-speak. It acted more as a whisper in my ear as I wrote, rather than something looming that I had to manage or contemplate in terms of accuracy. I focused the entire time on the characters, what was driving them, and their potential conflicts with each other, and used the historical knowledge I had unintentionally acquired to enhance their believability and create atmosphere and tone, rather than as an element itself of the plot.

GWR: If you could tell your younger self something about writing and becoming an author, what would it be?

NJ: That writing a book is not about getting published. It’s about developing a strong skill-set, a muscle, an intuitive radar for the mechanics of a story well told. And inspiration will come when it comes—even then, there is still no guarantee that it will be the kind of inspiration that will make your story resonate commercially and lead to outside interest. The only thing you can control is to make space for writing in your life, and to practice and develop the skill-set required, so that the minute inspiration strikes, you are ready for it.

GWR: What are you working on now?

NJ: I am working on another work of historic fiction, although I can’t say too much about it yet (partly because I am wildly superstitious while working on the first draft!). But as with The Jane Austen Society, this book is also set in England in the past—this time early 1950s London, in a bookshop. My lips are sealed on the rest!

*A version of this post was published on STYLE Canada.