The Street That Held Two Centuries: A Guest Post by Paula McLain
The parallel lives of two women are explored in this grand story of resilience, hope and bravery that takes place centuries apart. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Paula McLain on writing Skylark.
Hardcover
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Skylark (GMA Book Club Pick)
Skylark (GMA Book Club Pick)
By Paula McLain
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$27.00
$30.00
The New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife weaves a mesmerizing tale of Paris above and below—where a woman’s quest for artistic freedom in 1664 intertwines with a doctor’s dangerous mission during the German occupation in the 1940s, revealing a story of courage and resistance that transcends time.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife weaves a mesmerizing tale of Paris above and below—where a woman’s quest for artistic freedom in 1664 intertwines with a doctor’s dangerous mission during the German occupation in the 1940s, revealing a story of courage and resistance that transcends time.
I never know what will start a book for me—only that, once it starts, it doesn’t let go. Years ago, I read an entry from Thich Nhat Hanh’s journal in which he talked about reaching for a book in a library and noticing something quiet and uncanny: only two people had checked it out before him. For a moment, he felt their presence in the object itself and realized that lives can be connected not only through time, but through space: through what we touch, where we stand, what we carry forward without knowing it.
That story stayed with me. It became a kind of instruction.
When I began to imagine Skylark, I didn’t start with a sweeping view of Paris. I started with a decision to drill down—to choose one neighborhood, one street, and let two disparate centuries inhabit it. I wanted the connection between my characters to feel elemental, as if the city itself were the braid.
I chose the 13th arrondissement because it holds a particular truth about Paris: its working-class roots, its history of hardship and labor, and its physical underworld. This was an area deeply undermined for limestone—quarries and tunnels running beneath the surface—and it was also shaped by the Bièvre river, the stubborn little waterway that once powered the city’s dyeworks, tanneries, and laundries. The Bièvre made certain kinds of beauty possible: it helped to set world-renowned color into cloth. But it also carried a darker truth. It was where waste went. Where the city’s desires—especially the desires of the wealthy—flowed downstream, staining the lives of those who had the least power to refuse them. Over time, the Bièvre became so fouled by industry that it was gradually buried in the early twentieth century—yet it still runs there, invisible but present, a hidden current beneath the city.
It was the river that ultimately brought me Alouette: a dyer’s daughter, fiercely alive to color in a world determined to crush and erase her. To survive, she clings to beauty and the will to create, turning both into a form of resistance. As proof that her inner life still belongs to her.
Once I understood the moral shape of that first story—how power redraws the boundaries of a life—I knew I needed another character in the same place, hundreds of years later, confronting a different machinery of control. In 1942, in that same neighborhood, Kristof is a young doctor whose world has narrowed under the Nazi occupation—through surveillance, complicity, fear, and the bureaucratic weaponizing of identity. He finds a very different invitation into resistance: not through the private, sustaining act of making, but through the dangerous, public act of choosing—again and again—to help others survive.
My research for this book was both archival and visceral: diaries and testimonies, maps and street plans, medical histories, and the paper trail of power—how a life can be renamed, categorized, and made smaller. I traced the working world of the Bièvre, where craft and commerce flourished alongside waste and harm, and I followed the hidden Paris beneath it, including a clandestine cataphile-led tour of the quarry tunnels beneath the city. Down there, I saw carvings that had survived for centuries—small marks left behind by people searching for a way out.
In the end, this novel became my way of honoring what that library moment suggested. That places remember. That people leave one another signs. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you find one in time.