Are the 1990s Historical Fiction Now?

Plus a Giveaway!!!

Hi from the flight to Milwaukee where we will be kicking off the launch of The Parisian Heist with Boswell’s Books on Sunday. You can RSVP for that here and check out the rest of The Parisian Heist tour here.

And remember, when you order The Parisian Heist in the next ten days (from anywhere at all) you will get a paid subscription to this Substack for one year for FREE. Just sign up here. We do book giveaways twice a week for paid subscribers and have so many winners.

For our 2,000 newscomers here The Parisian Heist is a dual-timeline mystery that tells the unsung story of Jo van Gogh, the woman who made Vincent famous AND a modern day all-woman art heist in Paris. It’s delicious.

This week I’m giving away Courtney Maum’s ALLEN OPTS OUT. This one is an absolute delight. Comment I OPT OUT below to be entered to win (US ONLY).

And before we get into the nineties (God I loved the nineties) I have to tell you that I cried this morning reading this piece from my friend Grace Atwood about the joy of making a new friend as an adult (spoiler the new friend is ME).

The Joy of Making a New Friend

I adore Grace and I’m in the process of writing a piece about our wonderfully wandering day around Zagreb. This piece would have hit me hard even if I weren’t in it. Especially these lines:

“When you actually make a new friend, you get this joyful rush. It’s almost like a really good first date, but it’s different. A first date feels like butterflies and stress and, “Oh my gosh, I hope we’ll see each other again,” whereas a new friend feels warm and cozy and you know you’ll see each other again.”

OK now onto the nineties. Like I said earlier, Parisian Heist is a dual timeline novel. I wrote about how I create and edit dual timelines here for She Writes if you’re interested.

In the modern timeline we have three young struggling women artists joining up with the widow of the world’s largest art dealing family (insane billionaires) to pull off a glorious heist. In the past timeline we have the unsung and unchampioned story of Jo van Gogh, the widow who made Vincent van Gogh famous.

The modern timeline takes place in 1996. I keep saying modern timeline because I realized I can’t actually say present day. Even though 1996 feels like yesterday to me it was actually 30 years ago.

So maybe it’s historical fiction even though it’s a decade I lived through with full consciousness and an intense memory of the exact smell of Gap Dream perfume and St. Ives Apricot face scrub that took off an entire layer of your skin.

I chose 1996 because writing a heist and a mystery without cell phones, Google and AI felt like a lot more fun. I think we all miss the world when we didn’t have all of the world’s information at our fingertips. And guess what readers? It was so much fun. I loved living in this timeline. And it was a hell of a lot easier to write because my characters actually had to do things and find things and move around in the real world instead of tapping away at a screen to get all the answers. GLORIOUS!

I fell deep into a beautiful soup of nostalgia involving playlists filled with Barbie Girl and Wonderwall and Criminal (and then I watched hours of Fiona Apple videos). I got to dress my characters in slip dresses and Doc Martens. Smoky nightclub encounters in Paris involved Madonna, Liam Gallagher and Naomi Campbell (fun fact I once hung out in a Parisian nightclub with Naomi Campbell and it was as fun as you think it would be. We trash talked about some catty girls in the bathroom while doing our hair).

Even though I lived through 1996, I still had to do research. When exactly did the euro replace the franc? (Not yet in 1996, my characters are counting francs.) What did museum security actually look like before everything was networked? Thankfully I had Anthony Amore, head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and author of The Rembrandt Heist, on speed dial. Mid-nineties museum security was a different universe. Cameras recorded to actual tape that got reused, guards did rounds with keys, alarm systems phoned a landline somewhere. It was a world held together by human attention, and humans get bored, and humans take smoke breaks and get high, and that is exactly the kind of gap a clever woman can walk through and steal a painting.

Could you even get a cell phone in Paris in 1996 and if you could, who had one? (annoying rich people). I found an actual Paris guidebook published in 1996 which was very helpful and also so lovely to thumb through. I’m still a sucker for an analog travel guide.

How did you research a stranger before meeting them? You didn't unless they were famous.

Nobody in this book is doom scrolling. When my characters go into a museum they don’t need to dodge hordes of influencers the way I did when I went to the Louvre and the Orsay.

When my characters are together in a room, they are fully present, except for maybe being a little tipsy. They don’t plot out their heists with ChatGPT. They have to chat and strategize and go do their own research.

Writing the nineties felt like the antidote to the world right now and I think you’ll feel that when you’re reading it.

Right now, Parisian Heist is the closest thing I can offer you to a vacation from your phone, and you don't even need to buy a plane ticket to take it.

Also drop your favorite nineties memories in the chat below. I want to see if I included everything :)

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