TRAVELING SHADOWS

TRAVELING SHADOWS is Miranda Richmond Mouillot's search to find out what happened between her grandmother, Anna, and her grandfather, Armand, man who never uttered his wife's name aloud after she left him. But how to uncover what is so shrouded in silence?

In 1948, Armand and Anna, a married couple who had survived Nazi-occupied France, bought an old stone house in the south of France. Five years later, Anna packed her bags and walked out on Armand, taking a typewriter, a grapefruit knife, and their two children. The two never spoke to each other for the rest of their lives. For Miranda, it meant moving to that old stone house in a remote village in France, and delving into letters, archival materials secondary sources, and mostly, teasing stories from her reticent grandparents. The result: Two love stories spanning two continents and three generations, following a year in the life of a young woman who moves to rural France, takes up residence in a ruin, and herself falls in love. And that, more than anything, may be the answer to her grandparents' mystery. A note about the structure: Miranda uses a slightly unorthodox mix of fact and fiction, a blending of history, memoir, and a recreation of certain scenes between her grandparents. These dramatized scenes, which are clearly demarcated in the text, are to the best of her knowledge, exactly what happened based on her grandparents'' descriptions. Miranda's goal was to show how an intemperate silence, a failed love affair, and a run-down stone house a fairy tale, if you will helped her grandparents preserve and protect their own place in what was a time of great horror and atrocity. Miranda Richmond Mouillot graduated from Harvard University in 2003 with a degree in History and Literature. She is the recipient of the Henry Russell Shaw Fellowship, which she used to begin work on TRAVELING SHADOWS. She moved to France in 2004, where she lives with her husband, son, and two cats.