New York Times bestselling author Georgia Hunter returns to the podcast to discuss ONE GOOD THING, a stunning and deeply meaningful story of hardship and hope that follows one young woman’s journey through war-torn Italy during the Holocaust. Georgia reflects on her connection to Italy, her family’s history, and the extensive research that shaped this novel—including a trip through the towns where her story unfolds. She also touches on the novel’s themes of friendship and resilience, the impossible choices made in times of war, and the emotional weight of writing about the past.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome back, Georgia. On Totally Booked with Zibby.

I am delighted to have you back to talk about one good thing, your amazing novel that is so captivating and oh my gosh, I feel like I've traveled the world having read this. So congrats. 

Georgia: Oh thank you. Thanks so much for having me back. I'm really excited to chat today. Sure. I should have been more specific.

Zibby: I feel like I've traveled all over Italy and I would say top to bottom, but I have no sense of geography. So I shouldn't say that. Okay. Talk about Why the novel, why here? I loved the picture in the end of you in Rome at age three, by the way, but just the backstory and the story. 

Georgia: Absolutely. Yeah.

Thank you so much for having me back on. 

Zibby: Of course. 

Georgia: It was such a pleasure chatting with you about, we were the lucky ones. So my first novel was so deeply ingrained in my personal history. So as it was based on my grandfather's holocaust survival story and his family. And it took me almost a decade to unearth and record it.

And and then I got to do it again and it was, turned into a series. So I spent like 16 years of my life with this project. And so when my editor Pam over at Penguin said, Hey, what's next? I had to really think hard about where I wanted to a lot in my head space and my heart space and because when you write a book and you know this, like you, you live in that space for a very long time and hopefully you get to keep talking about it for a long time too.

And I was drawn to, I kept coming back to Europe and to the Holocaust and to these untold stories that were waiting to be discovered. And I liked the idea of trying to tell Italy's Holocaust story in particular because it felt the details of that history felt relatively unknown to me.

I feel like it's not something we typically learn about in school. I could name a few big names, mussolini, I, but that was about it. I didn't know much about the history and I thought it would be really interesting to dive in and try to tell that history through the eyes of a, kind of an ordinary young woman.

I'm also really drawn to Italy. You mentioned the picture with my father. I just posted that to my Instagram yesterday. Italy is the place where my parents first met. So they are both American. They were both living there in the seventies. My mom was running a clothing store and my dad was actually acting and spaghetti Westerns and directing films and plays and writing.

And they met through the expat community and fell in love and stayed for a combined 17 years. And so I was born back in the States once I settled back into Massachusetts. But I remember growing up and hearing stories upon stories about life in Italy and the culture and the people and the food.

And so I think this sort of fascination and love of Italy was baked into my DNA. And I took my first trip when I was a toddler. And it's, I have a major wanderlust. I have a bucket list a mile long and I love to travel and explore. But Italy is, has been one of those places I just keep coming back to over and over again.

And I think it's just, it feels like a second home in some way. So it holds a very special place in my heart. So between sort of the unknown Holocaust history past, and then just feeling so connected with this place where my parents spent so much of their time, I felt very drawn to that as a setting.

Zibby: I'm glad you said that you also did not know that much about Italian Holocaust history because I was like, wait, that happened, the part with Mussolini and then he was in jail and then got out of jail and he was in power one day and like all these twists and turns which the country is going through and as the reader were going through, I was like, who who knew this?

I didn't know. So thank you. 

Georgia: Oh, absolutely. And it was very confusing. In the history of Eastern Europe, it was very black and white. And especially if you were Jewish at the time, with occupation, your life was at risk. And so Italy was much more of a slow build and that you had these laws called the racial laws that were little by little similar to the Nuremberg laws chipping away at the rights of Italy's Jews.

But Life went on until the Germans came and occupied the North and then the Allies started coming up through the South and then all of a sudden, if you were Jewish and you found yourself in the North, you were in a lot of trouble. Your life was at risk. But in the meantime, it was just, yes, twists, turns, left and right, Mussolini in power, in jail, broken out of jail, back in, out of power, in power, partisan groups, resistant groups, civil war.

It was all happening. Honestly I have a cheat sheet to try to keep track of it. It was very confusing for me. And I had to remind myself that confusion was also a part of Lily as my main character, part of her worldview. So she was trying to keep up with this history as it was unfolding.

And to be honest, there's still debate today, like about the role, what happened and who, the how and the why, and also the role of the Italian people in protecting the Jews, the role of the church in protecting the Jews. So there's still controversial today, which is also, I find interesting.

So I, really didn't want to pick one side. I really wanted to try to tell all sides of that story through Lily's perspective. So I hope I accomplished that. 

Zibby: The goal, I fell into the story because of the characters, but I also learned based on everything that was happening with them.

So that was like an added bonus. But of course it's really a story of two best friends and how they. Became good friends, like what they filled in the voids that they filled in each other, which so many friends can like understand oh, this person gives me that. And this person gives me that.

And how one of them was inspired by Helena a little bit. And which I loved because I can't get enough of your family characters as characters, which is like a creepy thing to say, I'm sure. But it's, the lengths we'll go to for the friends that we love so much. And, Lily goes to the nth degree, right?

She'll, yeah, tell me about the two of them and the friendship and all of it. 

Georgia: Yeah, it was really, it was, the first book was based so much on my family. And there were friendships within the family, but it was really, that was the theme, was the family. And it was really fun for me in many ways to lean into the theme of friendship in this novel.

And there was still motherhood and survival and all, all these decisions that Lily was facing. Which, which paralleled in many ways. the decisions that my family faced in the Holocaust. But it was really beautiful to draw upon my own, friendships and that bond that I share with my dearest girlfriends and to try to imagine myself in Lily's shoes.

And they really are opposites, right? Lily is like shy and introverted and bookish and very much like a rule follower, which is. It's totally me. And then Esti, who you compared to Helena, who's my great aunt, who's this big, bold personality, defiant to a fault, right? And won't take no for an answer.

And so you have their their very opposite in many ways, but they share this incredible bond. And in the beginning of the story that actually the book opens with Esti's child being born, the birth of her son, Theo. And so he ends up playing this significant role too, when Lily finds that suddenly, disaster strikes when they're hide in hiding in Florence and suddenly Lily is tasked with keeping Theo safe.

Esty says, I can't leave this place, but you can, you go and try to keep my son safe, please. And so Lily has to like step into this role of caretaker and mother and she's a couple years younger, Esty's like the woman, in every way, and older, the looks, the confidence, and Lily really has to, it's, it's a coming of age for her, she has to step into her courage and her confidence that needs to build for her to even herself believe that she can take care of this child and kind of go on the run with him on this epic journey south, you're right, along the length of Italy trying to find safety. 

Yeah, the theme of friendship was, it was a really beautiful one for me to explore and I think something hopefully readers can relate to and it's love at the core, right? Like I think. That's one of the best takeaways from early readers that I've gotten is you mentioned Italy.

Sometimes people say like this book, even though set to this pretty horrible backdrop of the Holocaust and the war makes me want to go to Italy. So that I love that though, because I feel like I hopefully painted this picture of what Italy was like and is still like this. It's like almost like a character in the book, but I feel yeah through Lily's story we get introduced to the theme of love and that's with Estie her best friend.

That's with this her father yeah, I love that. You know built that so much on my relationship with my own father with Theo this little boy And she becomes her son. And then with, and then it was fun also to, to build in a romance with a young American soldier who she meets on the streets of Rome. And that character as well was really built around and inspired by, by my late father and by my husband who are like these two very Southern gentlemen and the kindest, most big hearted men I know.

So even though I say like this book was very different in that it was, it was not my family history. I wasn't unearthing it and trying to just do my family story justice. I was definitely inspired by my dear friends, my two little boys, my father, my husband. I don't know how to do it any other way.

I'm still new to this writing world, but to be inspired by real people I find so much joy and I draw so much from the people and the places and the experiences I've had in my life. So that's how I know to do it. 

Zibby: There is no right or wrong to creativity, right? And who knows what happens in our brains, but it has to come from somewhere, right?

Exactly. Strangers, you might as well take it from people, and right. But no, the theme of love is so powerful. And also how many. I was so struck because they went to so many places, they made so many choices, and to think that they were doing all this, it sounds so obvious, but it's not like they could check the news on their phone, it's not like they could check maps, they were just out there and trusting, this person at this church and, This neighborhood and this guy who says this is okay.

And okay, let's go this way. And all those, that's throughout all of Holocaust history. That is like one thing that always stands out to me is the split second decisions were all life and death in the end. 

Georgia: Absolutely. It's amazing. And with my family story, all those decisions ended up playing out for them where they absolutely.

May not have there could have been 100 of those little decisions and big decisions and last, like you said, split second decisions that ended differently for them. They got very lucky and for Lily and Esty, I thought long and hard about how their story should end and I won't give it away.

But I just feel like the making those decisions amidst so much uncertainty. Just like again, when I put myself in Lily's shoes, that was almost the hardest part. It's like sliding doors moments left and right. You're like, if I choose this, my life goes that way. If I choose this, my life goes that way.

And in the worst case scenario is you're caught and shipped to a camp, so it was the worst case scenario that was, if you chose wrong. So I'm trying to make informed decisions. I'm at so much uncertainty and trying to figure out who to trust where to put, where to put that trust.

I can only imagine how hard that was for so many millions of people experiencing it. 

Zibby: And the love you mentioned with her dad, I found that to be such a poignant element of the story. And, even when you say how the dad had gotten sort of frailer and, during it at one transition, I won't give things away either, but just as he's gotten older.

And what it's like to watch your parents getting older, which, you don't have to be in the Holocaust to see this as a natural passage of time, but just the love for each other and wanting each other to be happy and all of that. It was just so real. 

Georgia: Thank you. A lot to hear that. And I really I think you, amidst all the darkness and that uncertainty, I think we cling to those.

Things are real and like your love for your family is real or maybe the conversation you're having across the table with a stranger who happened to let you into her house is real. Whatever's in front of you at that moment. But I do feel like Lily and she loses touch with everyone and everyone she knows.

It's like he has nobody for a long time. And I also thought about. You learn right away that her mother has passed, like her mother passed at university. She doesn't have, when she loses touch with ST, it's really her father who she leans on for that kind of support. And at one point, she's even having a conversation with her late mother in her head, wishing she had that presence. So you're just like so many dynamics. It was really interesting to play around with in her narrative. And I had the freedom to do that, which was, again, in the first book, and we were the lucky ones. Like I took no creative license there. I had to a little bit try to imagine their dialogue and All the entire history was based on what was passed down to me through my research in oral histories.

And here I really had the luxury of deciding where she would go and what would happen to my main characters which was equal parts very freeing and also terrifying. 

Zibby: It would be neat if you could. Which is like impossible. If you could organize tours, because I feel like this is a geographic journey as well as emotional and it would be so neat to go and retrace Lily's steps and where she went and all these small towns and villages like I would love to do that.

Not that I have time, but. 

Georgia: Yeah, they love that. And that was my, one of my favorite parts of my research. My mom and I went over and traveled together throughout the length of Italy and stopping in all the places where Lily stopped and imagining it through her eyes was really beautiful. Italy, it's got these the big cities that we've all seen and pictures or been lucky enough to visit it.

But sometimes it's these tiny little towns that are little specks on the map. And so exploring those places and they're very small. So everybody knows everybody. And if Lily lands in one of these little towns, like people are going to talk and do they pose as Aryan or do they not, they have to make all these decisions, but you just also like walking around them and.

And also knowing that there was this whole network of underground workers, people, Christians, Catholics, Jews alike, working together to try to protect the Jews who are in hiding in that little town. I remember reading about a town called Assisi where there's there's a gentleman helping to print false IDs secretly from the back of his shop and this tiny little town was hiding over 300 Jews.

300 people, like, where were they? I walked down these tiny little side streets and you could walk the village from start to finish in five minutes. Like, where were they? So just, yeah, it would be very cool to I recommend going to some of these places in this, in the book, even if it's not a tour.

Yeah, exactly. Listeners, email me. I'll happily give you some tips on where to go. But yes, just the whole imagining it then and now was just wild. It's wild. 

Zibby: When I watched, we were the lucky ones. There was a scene where the Nazis come into their neighborhood and they all run to the window and of their like beautiful apartment and they're looking down and the Nazis are like right there.

Do you remember, you know what I'm talking about? 

Georgia: Yeah. 

Zibby: And that scene like totally stayed with me. And then, and I was trying to imagine it, right? I was like sitting on the couch here oh my gosh, can you imagine if they were like right there? And then like fast forward not too long, And there were protesters like right out my window and we had the same thing of going to the window and my kids were here and like calling and facetiming and I was like, oh my gosh, I thought this was just In a book or a movie or whatever and now here we are, so I'm just wondering how you feel about where we are today in relation to this, especially with all the antisemitism publishing world and all of that too.

Georgia: I know. First, obviously with We're the Lucky Ones, I think it was 2008 when I set off to start interviewing relatives and I never. ever would have thought that the book and the themes and the story in their lives, what they faced would feel so relevant today. That was just impossible in my mind.

But here we are, it does. It's crazy. It feels like the world's moving backwards and the statistics when you start to read them are horrifying. Not only about antisemitism, which is just Rampant, but with how little younger generations even know about the Holocaust. And so for me, it's just, and also it's, I feel this urgency because we're 80 years out, right?

It was just Holocaust Remembrance Day and we celebrated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. So the survivors are fewer and I feel an urgency now more than ever to tell their story for that reason. And also just because if we can find ways to reach younger audiences, especially.

I just feel like often the stem of antisemitism is lack of knowledge, and if we can at least try to share a bit of history in a way that doesn't feel like we're forcing it down people's throats or that doesn't feel like we're painting it in statistics, but that just feels human. It's just a human story about what it was like to be there.

Perhaps we can raise awareness and not only that, but find ways that as readers or watchers, or if you're going to see the play, whatever medium it is that you can relate, but they feel it can relate to the story that we can empathize, and then the conversations can be had, and then the world can inch its way toward a better place.

Do you know what I mean? We just need. More empathy and when you don't know about something or you have a very narrow minded view on it there's just no there's no path toward relating and toward empathy Oh, I know I just it's heartbreaking and it's scary where we are right now but I'm trying to draw hope from stories like Lily's from stories like my own families that I'm very lucky enough to still be talking about today and actually like talking a lot in schools today.

So I'm getting invited to a lot of middle schools, high schools, colleges to talk about it and we're developing a curriculum even around it. So that brings me so much hope that like the conversations are being had and popular culture is a way for us to decide as a society what's important like what should we be talking about.

So if I can just keep telling these stories in ways that feel colorful and modern and relevant, then how I feel. I, I, it's how I sleep at night. 

Zibby: No, that's great. I feel the same way. If you really put yourself in someone's shoes, how can you just blatantly hate them? So, that's an oversimplification, but we have to create more empathy.

I 100 percent agree. Have you felt like you have been a victim of any antisemitism as a result of writing these books or anything like that. 

Georgia: I have not. Thank goodness. I have not. I feel, and I feel very lucky about that. How about you? I feel like, have you, I'm sure. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Georgia: Your book just came out that was literally called On Being Jewish, right?

Zibby: Yeah. I think one of the biggest, most blatant thing is all the stores who are unwilling to take it. And we've had a lot of bookstores who don't want to take any books I publish because I'm Jewish, which is crazy because even the authors are not Jewish. Some of, yeah, we've had. 

Georgia: It's real.

Zibby: It's real. It's very real and very open. People will literally say we're not going to carry your books anymore. I'm like, yeah,.. 

Georgia: I can review your book or yeah. 

Zibby: Yeah. Oh, not to mention all of that. And yeah. 

Georgia: I can't, I'm certain that's happening. I haven't personally felt it and I know I'm glad I'm,.. 

Zibby: I don't want Jewish author, cause a lot of people are now scared.

A lot of other Jewish authors are scared to even dip their toes in the water cause they're afraid. And so it's great to have experiences that are untarnished. So that's good. 

Georgia: Yes. Yeah, for sure. I feel very lucky. 

Zibby: What are you working on now? Are you working on another book or you just, are you going to not just promote, all of that?

Georgia: We're ramping up. I'm a month away from launch here. So there's a lot happening and I'm actually heading out to LA tomorrow for the Critics Choice Awards. We got, we're lucky enough to get a couple of nominations there. So I'm really still. Balancing both projects the series, the book of the first one, and then now one good thing.

And I'll be traveling a bunch in March for a book tour. And I have ideas circulating for a third book. I'm not sure yet. I'm not ready to put a stake in the ground, but my kids are sweet. My boys are 13 and seven, and they really want me to write a children's book. And they want to write it with me. So perhaps I laughed it off for the first few times that they suggested it.

And when they stuck with it I was like, maybe there's something there. So I have some ideas that perhaps might lead to a children's book or a young adult or we'll see. But again, I think I keep coming back to that audience. I don't know. There's just such such a pivotal age for I can see it in my son and for I remember from when I was that age.

So finding a way to reach that audience would be pretty, pretty neat. 

Zibby: I have written children's books and I'm now doing a graphic novel with different, various kids of mine. And it is, I highly recommend it. Whether or not anything happens with the projects, but my, like my daughter, who's 11, we've been working on this really fun graphic novel and we're, we got it colored and illustrated it's been the greatest thing to work on something with her and to have her ideas in there.

I would recommend doing any projects with the kids, because at the end of the day, what are we going to remember? The drawer, the novel I have in a drawer that I never want anyone to see, or, this manuscript. 

Georgia: In the time that we've spent working on it together, that is probably exactly the nudge that I need.

Thank you. 

Zibby: You're welcome. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors, especially in historical fiction and your genre? Yeah. Yeah. 

Georgia: Yeah, I think, when something piques your interest or your curiosity, follow your nose and see where it takes you. For me, Lily's story actually started very differently in my mind of where she would go, where she would begin and end and how the story would unfold.

And so I think also be open minded to, as you get into the nitty gritty, just see what feels right. Work with them, work with a good team too, if you have, if you happen to have an agent, amazing. If not, find a book. A writing group or someone who you trust and love to read your work and share some feedback.

But I think it's important, to pick a subject or a theme that means something to you. So don't try to write for anybody. Don't try to, pick a subject that's relevant today because trust me, by the time your book comes out, it's probably not going to be relevant. The whole process is so long and you're going to live with it for a long time.

So pick something that settles in your heart that you feel like, wow, I wouldn't mind spending time with this, or I really feel like I need to get this out and then take the time and do the research and do the writing and read Lamott if you're new to this, because she will hold your hand and tell you it's to write like really ugly first drafts.

He uses a better word than that, but, and talk you through the process and then just have the faith that if we keep going and see where it, and maybe it'll be a book or maybe it'll be a podcast or maybe it'll be a play. Like maybe it'll be a series. There's so many ways that content can come to life now that it's it's exciting time to be creating it because I feel like there are so many different outlets.

So again, trusting your heart to see what feels right there. But surround yourself with people as you start asking the questions, as you start sharing your work, who love you and who support you. And I think that, and then let things bubble up from there. 

Zibby: Love it. Good luck at the Critics Choice Awards.

Georgia: Thank you. 

Zibby: I hope to televise. I will definitely watch. I am like, show junkie. 

Georgia: It's fun to be at the table and just, there was so much hard work put into that show, so I'm just proud to have that recognized. 

Zibby: Aw it's well deserved. So good and so powerful, like all your stuff, so congratulations and thanks for coming on.

Georgia: Thanks for having me. 

Zibby: My pleasure. Okay. Bye, Georgia. Thank you.