My first novel, We Were the Lucky Ones, began as an ancestry project. The idea was sparked by the discovery, as a teenager, that I came from a family of Holocaust survivors. Unearthing and recording my family’s Holocaust-era past took nearly a decade – it was a deeply personal project. So, when my editor at Penguin asked, “What’s next?”, I thought long and hard about where I wanted to allot my headspace, my heartspace.
And my head and my heart kept bringing me back to Europe, to the Second World War, and to the untold stories of the Holocaust. In time, the seeds of my new novel, One Good Thing, were planted.
I chose Italy as a setting in part because, despite being home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe, the details of its Holocaust history felt relatively unknown. I loved the idea of bringing the country’s history to life through the eyes of an ordinary young woman, experiencing it first hand.
I’m also drawn to Italy as it’s the place my parents met, in the early 1970s. They are both American. My mother was running a clothing business; my father acting, directing, and writing screenplays. They met through the expat community, fell in love, and stayed for a combined seventeen years. I grew up hearing stories about life in Rome (and in Sperlonga, where they ran a small trattoria in the summers) — about the people, the culture, the energy, the food. I took my first trip to Italy as a toddler. Despite my ever-growing bucket list, it’s a country I return to again and again. It holds a very special place in my heart.
Her story is a reminder that there’s power in choosing a path that feels right, even when we don’t know exactly where it will lead. And that, amidst the headlines and the chaos, it’s okay — imperative, even — to be fueled not by fear but by intuition, courage, and love.
My research for One Good Thing was eye-opening. It exposed me to just how confounding Italy’s WWII history is — from leadership and military tactics to politics and religion. Following the twists and turns of Italy’s alliances was a challenge. I tried to make sense of it all and to dig into the murkiness that would have been a part of my protagonist Lili’s worldview.
My research also opened my eyes to dozens of fascinating people and events, and I knit many of them into Lili’s story: a villa housing Jewish orphans in Nonantola, a famous cyclist shuttling false identification papers across the country in the frame of his racing bike, a courageous young woman who worked undercover for the Italian Resistance.
In the final phase of my research, I walked in the footsteps of these historical figures, along the path I chose for Lili. My mother joined me on this journey. We rented a Fiat and spent a week hopping between cities like Florence, Bologna, and Rome, and small villages where Lili sought refuge – communities of narrow streets and chiming church bells, built into the hillsides of Umbria, Tuscany, and Lazio. Assisi, a town perched on the side of Mount Subasio, overlooking a patchwork of farmland and olive groves, was one of my favorite stops. It was hard to fathom that such a serene, idyllic place was once home to an underground network of priests, monks, and villagers who put their lives on the line to hide over 300 Jews.
Lili grapples constantly throughout her travels with an endless onslaught of questions — whom to trust, whose door to knock on for help, whether she’s better off traveling by foot, at risk of frostbite and Allied bombs, or by train, with the threat of being stopped at a Fascist or Nazi checkpoint. Each decision is a sliding-doors moment, the consequences of which, Lili realizes, will shift the course of her journey, the odds of her survival, her ability to honor the promise she’d made to her best friend Esti: to keep her young son, Theo, safe.
I think of Lili often as I navigate my days. I’m lucky. My life is not at stake. My children are safe. But I can’t help but feel like our world today is closing in around us. The future feels unstable, steeped in uncertainty. And when that uncertainty starts to climb up into my chest and threaten to paralyze me, I find myself leaning on Lili, for inspiration. Her story is a reminder that there’s power in choosing a path that feels right, even when we don’t know exactly where it will lead. And that, amidst the headlines and the chaos, it’s okay — imperative, even — to be fueled not by fear but by intuition, courage, and love.
One Good Thing by Georgia Hunter
When Georgia Hunter was fifteen years old, she discovered that she came from a family of Holocaust survivors. Years later, she embarked on a journey of intensive research, determined to unearth and record her family’s remarkable story. The result is the New York Times best seller, We Were the Lucky Ones, which has been published in over 20 languages and adapted for television by Hulu as a highly acclaimed limited series. One Good Thing is Georgia’s second novel. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two sons.
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