How to Make Ghosts Come Alive: Writing Real-Life Characters When Almost Nothing Is Known About Them

While penning 'The Art Spy,' Michelle Young learned how to meticulously research subjects who are no longer alive and stories that are not widely known. Here, she shares tips on how you can do it too.

Rose Valland in her 20s, in her apartment in Paris. (Photo courtesy Camille Garapont family collection)

For the last four years, I’ve been working on the narrative nonfiction book The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, which comes out today. It’s about a lesbian Resistance spy and art historian in France during World War II who helped take down the Nazis’ art looting operation.

The book is based entirely on historical facts, and while working on it, I faced several primary challenges: Rose was long gone so I couldn’t speak to her firsthand, and the best spies never reveal much about themselves. Rose did leave behind hundreds of thousands of documents, reports and personal papers, which I was fortunate to be given access to. In them, though, she rarely expressed her emotions or personal reactions to the events unfolding around her. She was, first and foremost, an academic and civil servant, and given her spy work and closeted sexuality — she wasn’t out to anyone but her closest friends and family — her reticence is not surprising.

But when you want to make someone come alive in narrative nonfiction books — which are intended to read like fiction thrillers — you have to be relentless in your research. This means casting a very large net for information in order to gather enough details to convey someone’s personality and innermost thoughts. Most of the people who knew Rose, however, were dead or near death, along with most of the eyewitnesses from World War II. (One woman who agreed to an interview had a pulmonary embolism the day I was supposed to meet her!) And sadly, the ones who were alive, both Rose’s family members and those of her lifelong partner, Joyce Heer, a half-German British citizen, told me they did not know either of the women very well.

Some of the stories about them, including one about Joyce being imprisoned by the Germans and getting broken out by the Resistance, seemed more family lore than established fact, and as a journalist, I knew I had to take them with a grain of salt. I was also informed that earlier generations of Rose’s family burned most of the letters between the two women, which would have given us more of a window into their intimate relationship, and as a result, our heroine.

So, I scoured what little I could find of Rose’s handwritten scribbles, and carefully read and re-read what was left of her writings and letters — including drafts of her dry, academic memoir, Le Front de l’Art — for clues to construct her personality and allow her to tell her story in her own words. While I was able to piece together a bit about Rose’s upbringing and her Resistance work, I found little when it came to Joyce. I was only able to put together the briefest outline of her life. Nobody I spoke to knew where or when she and Rose had met, when they began living together, or what Joyce’s experience during WWII was. Joyce was not a public figure and Rose had purposefully kept her out of the public eye, given how conservative the French ruling class was.

I decided to approach this mystery like a missing person’s investigation, inspired by the work of historian Philippa Langley (The Princes in the Tower), and I dedicated months to this quest. I was armed with just one clue: Joyce had worked as a secretary and translator for the U.S. Embassy in Paris at some point, and I pulled on this thread.

Using the digitized files of the U.S. National Archives, I scoured the log of every communication that went in and out of the embassy during the war in the hopes of finding references to Joyce. Excitedly, I found a handful, and many referred to her disappearance and internment by the Germans. I went down to the National Archives in Maryland to see the original paper documents, which turned out to be a treasure trove of material.

Takeaway #1: Cast a wide net for information in order to paint a rich picture of the person or people you’re writing about. This could mean scouring journals, letters or books. If you can’t find much, take what little information you do have and peel it back as far as you can, using archives, embassies and whatever else you can to learn even more. Pro tip: Stay open-minded. The smoking guns are often not where you expect them to be.

I learned that in December 1940, Joyce was imprisoned as an “enemy alien.” The files indicated exactly where — Besançon, France — the dates of her internment, and even the cell block and room she was held in. By locating many unpublished and out-of-print memoirs of other women who were imprisoned at Besançon, I was able to bring to life Joyce’s experience at the prison, even though neither she nor Rose ever spoke about it.

Takeaway #2: Even if your subject never spoke about a particular event, you can research that event and piece together what it would have been like for them, vividly bringing their story to life.

One myth that the files in the U.S. Archives helped debunk was that Joyce had been broken out of the internment camp by the Resistance, something her family told me they had heard. The new research I uncovered showed that, in fact, a U.S. diplomat in Paris had requested her release directly with his German counterpart.

What these new documents did not reveal was how Rose and Joyce met, so my next goal was to access the Paris police files, now located in the French National Archives. While I initially surmised this trove of documents might reveal more about Joyce’s arrest in 1940, instead, I found many applications for her identification cards and work permits. In an ID card application from 1936, she listed the address 1 ter Rue de Navarre in Paris, where I already knew Rose had lived. This was a big discovery because it was evidence of at least one point in time in which the two had cohabitated.

Takeaway #3: Track down anything you can find about your subject, including the most mundane documents — ID cards and job applications, health records and immigration files — they can often give you a surprising amount of insight into how they lived.

Photo of Joyce Heer found in the U.S. State Department files. (Courtesy of the U.S. State Department)

The next step was to locate Joyce’s employment files with the U.S. State Department. My hunch was that job applications would include addresses and other personal information. I may have been the first person to ever request Joyce’s file, and it was a rich stockpile: I came upon Joyce’s job applications, pay history from her work at the embassy as a secretary and stenographer, a photo of her and employee reviews.

Rising from the yellowed documents was a stunningly beautiful, highly educated young woman. The job applications detailed her education and work experience, so I was able to put together a timeline of her life and her career. She had arrived in Paris in 1928 to attend a finishing school, which also gave her the opportunity to get a degree at the Sorbonne. But was that where she met Rose, who also studied at the Sorbonne at the same time? There was no definitive document indicating so.

Then came the smoking gun, from a completely different source. The president of the Association la Mémoire de Rose Valland, Jacqueline Barthalay, whom I had been working with closely throughout the process of writing this book, sent me a photo of a document she found in the archive at the Musée de la Résistance in Grenoble. This is where Rose’s personal papers had recently been donated by her family. I had been through these files before but missed this one document, tucked inside a folded piece of paper. The letter certified that Rose Valland had worked at the Collège Féminin de Bouffemont as a French language teacher from 1924 to at least 1930. This was the finishing school that Joyce had attended in Paris! Ding, ding, ding! Rose must have been Joyce’s French language teacher, and this is where they met.

Takeaway #4: Again, keep pulling on those threads. For me, the next step was to request one of my subject’s employment files with the U.S. State Department, which uncovered a slew of pertinent info — for you, that might look different. But the important part is to keep learning about your subject from whatever documents you can find, wherever you can find them. Pro tip: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Do your own research, but if you can, work with others, too. They might help you find something you wouldn’t on your own.

In many ways, my work mirrored that of Rose Valland herself, while she spied and gathered what initially seemed like endless pieces of haphazard information and data. Eventually, though, in her case, the clues led to a general picture of what the Nazis were doing, allowing her to track down looted art and stop it from being stolen. At times, a mundane document left around the office where she worked undercover would be a critical clue to a significant operation about to take place. Upon her death, Rose left behind an overwhelming amount of important documents, which were then divided between numerous archives all over France.

For much of the process of writing The Art Spy, I felt that she had held onto everything in the hopes that someone might come along one day to piece together the breadcrumbs. I hope I have done just that, and that by sharing a bit about my process, you can do something similar, too. Most importantly, I hope that through so many late nights and archival trips, I returned both heart and soul to Rose and her partner, Joyce. They deserve it.

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Michelle Young is an author, journalist and professor of architecture at Columbia University. She writes about lost and looted art, architecture, urbanism and French history. Her most recent book, The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, is out today, May 13, 2025.