Writing Duo Audrey Blake Bases 'The Woman With No Name' on Real Resistance Heroine

The writing duo of Jaima Fixsen and Regina Sirois, who write under the pen name Audrey Blake, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss their latest historical novel, The Woman With No Name. Set in England in the 1940’s and based on a true story, the novel is about Yvonne Rudellat, a French woman in her mid-40’s who’s estranged from her husband and has a grown daughter, and has just lost everything after her house was bombed in London. Sirois elaborated, “…we had been discussing several different women that we might write about, and what captured me is when Jaima said, ‘There’s a middle-aged woman… she lived all alone in a flat with her cat in London and then during the London bombings, her apartment is flattened and she loses everything including her cat. She makes it out with a suitcase with a few belongings that she gets from the rubble,’ and when she said that this woman lost even her cat… and then she is, somehow, a year later, recruited as the first undercover agent to create a resistance network in France, I thought, whatever that story is we need to tell it because how does one go from where she was on that London street to the middle of France trying to defeat the Nazis? Fixsen added, “…we came across a mention of Yvonne Rudellat in, kind of, a broader survey history of the resistance movement and the agents who were trained by SOE and deployed to France, in particular, and she was maybe a paragraph in that book, but that paragraph was so steamy. We just wanted to know more about her!”

So, how did Fixsen and Sirois come together to write under their alter ego, Audrey Blake? According to Sirois, it was a marketing decision by Sourcebooks to make it easier for readers to remember their name. “Neither of us have easy names to pronounce or spell or remember, so… my oldest daughter, her name is Audrey, and Jaima’s oldest son is named Blake, and so we combined our children and came up with our pen name.” Initially, the two were placed together when they were both finalists of a writing contest, and while The Woman With No Name is their third published book, there are still compromises they both need to make in order to create a successful book. Sirois explained, “So, we have a joint document, and what happens is we’ll discuss what needs to be written next in the story and just divvy it up according to interest… and we both just dive in and write, and then if I write a scene, she’ll come in the next day and look it over and she’ll just go through and make all of the changes that she would make, and then I’ll go through it again and just polish it up.” As far as disagreements, they first discuss the ideas that support each of their sides. “If we still disagree after that… then it comes down to who cares the most, so if I don’t like that idea, but it’s not life changing to me and Jaima feels very strongly about it, we’ll do it Jaima’s way, and vice versa.”