Zibby speaks with award-winning author Rebecca Sanford about her heart-wrenching new drama, THE DISAPPEARED. Rebecca shares that the novel, a dual-timeline work of historical fiction, revolves around the 1970s Argentine military dictatorship and is inspired by the real-life "Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo," who searched for their missing children and grandchildren. Rebecca shares how her graduate studies in international relations led her to this dark period in history and reflects on the emotional impact of her research and writing process, as well as the continued importance of raising awareness of historical atrocities. The conversation touches on motherhood, memory, activism, and the resilience of women across generations.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Rebecca. Thank you so much for coming on Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss The Disappeared. Congratulations. 

Rebecca: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby, and thank you for everything that you do for writers. It's such a wonderful community that you've created, so I really appreciate it, and I appreciate being a part of it, so thanks for all your support.

Zibby: My pleasure, my pleasure. I really can't, I can't stop thinking about your book. You know, it's really stayed with me, and then I saw in the newspaper the other day that one of the grandmothers. You know, one of them, the moms, moms, grandmothers, I don't know, had just, their 

Rebecca: mother and their grandmothers. The book is inspired by grandmothers specifically, 

Zibby: but the one in the New York Times, do you know what I'm even talking about?

Rebecca: Yes. Yes. Yes. Sadly. Yeah. They've, we've lost some. Yeah. So that's part of the, the reason that this was so inspirational to me was just kind of to carry on this message and the awareness. I guess I'll just share with you a little bit about the book. 

Zibby: Yeah. Yeah. Tell it, tell listeners what the book is about and how you developed an interest in, in covering this.

Rebecca: Yes, and it is a great book if you love grandmothers. Grandmothers are a very big part of this story. So the book is called The Disappeared. It's my first novel. It's historical fiction, and it's a dual timeline story that is set partially in Argentina in the late 1970s, and it follows the story of a young mother, Lorena, who has some dangerous secrets as the military dictatorship is beginning to thrive.

And in the middle of the night, one night she and her husband are taken from their home by the paramilitary and they leave behind their two year old son with Lorena's mother, the boy's grandmother, Esme. And there's no record of the arrest, which was not uncommon during that time. And so Esme is left to care for her grandson and search for her daughter and son in law.

And she doesn't have a lot of options. And she somewhat reluctantly joins together with other mothers who are in a similar predicament. And their story unfolds from there. And the contemporary timeline is about three decades later. And it's the story of a young woman, Rachel, who was adopted as a baby in the United States.

And she is confronted with the possibility that she may have a biological brother in a country that she has never visited. And in order to explore that possibility, which she very much wants to do through taking a DNA test, she also would have to potentially confront some devastating truths about not only her own past and identity, but her adoptive parents.

So, the two storylines intertwine in somewhat unexpected ways, but The story itself is inspired by a group of grandmothers called the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who are a non governmental organization that have been around since 1977. And I had the great privilege of working with them when I was in graduate school, studying international relations.

And, I was just so impacted and inspired by their work, you know, that's going on 20 years ago now that this became sort of a character exploration and I wrote my master's thesis on their work, but then I just kind of couldn't let this story go. And so that's how the book came to be. So it comes out on July 30th and it's completely inspired by the grandmothers.

Zibby: Oh, that's amazing. And had you written any novels before or was this your first, go at it. 

Rebecca: Well, I, I've always written since I was a little girl, I've loved writing stories and poems and I studied creative writing and French in college, but had never really thought that I would do it professionally. I just sort of always did it as a calling, kind of on the side.

I journal a lot and just sort of loved doing it as a hobby, I guess. So this is the first time that it's come to be. This story just stuck with me. 

Zibby: I'm impressed. I mean, most people have, like, a couple novels under their belt. So, you know, this is impressive. 

Rebecca: Well, now that, now that I've done it, I have something that I think and hope will become another novel, but we'll see, we'll see what happens.

It's, it's kind of, for me, it's always been about the writing and the, the book wasn't really the point, but it's a great joy now to see it come out, especially this particular story, because it was so important to me. 

Zibby: Wait, what, just to jump forward, what is the next one that you're working on? 

Rebecca: Ah, no, it's too much, it's too much of a baby to be able to share to the world.

Yeah. I think it's like, you know, I just read Yellow Face, which is such an incredible novel. And she made reference to this analogy, sort of making fun of it. But I, I think it's, it's true for me, which is like, it feels like you're pregnant with something creative and some type of story, and you just don't want to expose it yet until it's totally ready.

So I, I kind of, you know, I'm working with that metaphor right now in terms of the second one. 

Zibby: I totally get it. I will not rain on your pregnancy. So back to the disappeared. For those people who don't know, because I actually, this is embarrassing. I mean, I took history. I took a lot of classes. And I just did not know about this particular thing and how terrible it was.

And now that I learned about it from you, I'm seeing it a lot more places, but I hadn't noticed it or been taught it or anything. So tell me,.. 

Rebecca: You know, I'm glad that you said that because that's part of the reason, I think that's part of what kept me going with this story was I felt the same way. I was 25 years old.

I had lived abroad. I studied in France as a foreign exchange student when I was in high school. And then I went back and lived again. And I was in an international relations program at a graduate level. And I was like, why have I not known about this history, you know, when I was there? And so, you know, I guess just for context.

So, um, in 1976, there was a military coup in Argentina and military government took hold and a military dictatorship ensued until 1983 when Argentina became a democracy again. And during that time, there was a national campaign, a national reorganization process that was essentially a war on subversion.

So any activity that was considered uprising or, you know, and really quite a bit of like, political factions and guerrilla activity leading up to that point where it was the impetus for this, but there was significant overreach during that time. So between 1976 and 1983, it's estimated that approximately 30, 000 people disappeared, quote unquote disappeared in Argentina.

And They were primarily men and women in their 20s and early 30s. They were members of political organizations, mostly leftist political organizations and militants and activists, but they were also journalists, teachers, artists, trade unionists. And all of this was part of a U. S. backed military operation called Operation Condor, which was a coordination of intelligence efforts between among other things, between a group of South American countries, including Argentina.

And because people were disappearing, which in reality meant they were being captured, they were oftentimes held in clandestine prisons, they were oftentimes subject to torture, and they were almost all killed. There was systemic denial of their whereabouts during that period. So for the families of people who went missing, there was no closure, no answer, no recourse, and it created this.

tremendous state of fear. And it was in that climate of fear and terror that a group of mothers sort of came out and rose up and demanded answers as to the whereabouts of their children. And because of the demographic of the disappeared, many of them were young parents, some of them were pregnant women.

And for the mothers whose daughters or daughter in laws were pregnant at the time. The babies were born in clandestine prisons and then given up for adoption, sometimes to friends and family of the military, sometimes in good faith, but raised largely with no knowledge of their biological identity. And so this group of grandmothers in particular, which is a separate organization from the mothers, Now, for close to 50 years, have been evolving their campaigns, and there are about 500 cases of known babies that were born in captivity and given up for adoption.

As of today, 137 have been found and identified. So there's still hundreds of people that are all generation X. They were all born between 1976 and 1983 raised, you know, without knowing who their biological parents are in the most extreme cases raised by people who were not only systemically involved in the disappearance of their biological parents, but maybe even directly involved.

And so it's just kind of like. You don't really have a playbook for this. Like it didn't really exist in any other, you know, and so the grandmother's. I can't even begin to speak to the real story of the grandmothers. I think that's the true story that I hope people will seek out. They have made breakthrough advancements in genetic testing.

I mean, they were navigating this landscape in the early eighties when paternity testing with blood was like just mainstream, you know, and you had to have the parents in most cases to get those tests. So. They worked with geneticists, a geneticist, American geneticist from Stanford called Mary Claire King, who helped them create this test where they could use, they could prove a relationship between a grandchild and their maternal relatives, which was brand new genetic testing.

And then, of course, they had to navigate the legal. landscape to be able to get samples from adopted children who were with their adoptive parents, which was kind of like a PR nightmare. They helped to create a national commission for the right to identity and a national bank of genetic data in Argentina that still exists for anyone that doubts their identity so that they can go and have genetic testing to find out if their parents were, were quote unquote disappeared.

They helped to repeal amnesty laws that protected members of the military from their war crimes because they found loopholes that involved kidnapping, and they were able to exploit that. So, these were women that were just mothers, and then, you know, learned that they were grandmothers, and they just, you know, did all of these tremendous things over the course of history and have had such tenacity and still are going.

You know, they've been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times, the UNESCO Peace Prize, and are just so inspiring and incredible. And I hope that my, my little historical fiction story can be more of like a gateway read to the real history because I did write it with, with people in mind who weren't aware of this history.

You know, my, my father was a Vietnam veteran. He was drafted and he fought for 15 months when he was 19. And so I thought I had some level of understanding of U. S. military history around, you know, in the 70s and, and before that, but I, I wasn't aware of Operation Condor. I didn't really know much about the quote unquote dirty war as it's referred to.

So I'm glad that you said that because that was all part of my inspiration for writing the book. 

Zibby: Did your dad talk to you about his experience? 

Rebecca: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes. He's, I mean, he's tremendous. He's, you know, emotionally and physically, you know, well and thriving. But when I was in graduate school around that time, I did actually more of a formal interview with him to learn about that.

And there's, you know, it's, it's so complex, the history and, and military history, which has become really interesting to me too. And the experience of soldiers and, and things like that, which comes into play a little bit in the novel. 

Zibby: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when I, when I picture the hostages situation now and like the tunnels and whatever, I am picturing your scenes from your book of like what that must feel like because I feel like you wrote that in such a way where I was like, I, I, obviously, I don't know what that feels like, but somehow you made it with all the sensory details and description.

Like I felt so much that I was being held captive in this book because of reading this book that I felt like now I can imagine more, which I guess is the point, right? Fiction and historical fiction is so you can have that level of empathy and not. Anyway, uh, I mean, there is, there are a lot of parallels, I feel like, to what is going on in part, although on such a, now it feels like such a small scale when you say 30, 000.

I mean, it's like ridiculous that that even happened and, you know. 

Rebecca: That, that's it. And so much of it, too, is like, you know, the language used around the dirty war and just disappeared in general, which, of course, is, you know. Not possible, you know, it's, it's really like erasing identity and a lot of the work, you know, when I was in Argentina, I was again, 25, I was essentially an intern, you know, kind of had the privilege of sitting in these rooms and listening to interviews with all different types of incredible people. And part of the work that was being done was this identity archiving, where it was preserving memory, which in general, just kind of panning out is very much sometimes like a matriarchal thing that happens.

You know, you think about your grandmothers that are just the bedrock of the family and, you know, society. But I think in this case, it really was, you know, archiving the human side of people who had disappeared for the purposes of providing context for their adult children, if they were ever to be found, which was inherently a hopeful task, but it was also really emotional because a lot of people in the family hadn't talked about these memories since their loved ones had gone missing.

And so, you know, it was just seeing that recreated. It was like very beautiful, very emotional, very, you know, there's just like an ache through the whole thing. So that really impacted me. 

Zibby: You know, it's really amazing how moms lead some of these social movements. Moms demand action. Moms against gun violence.

Moms, you know, sometimes you just have to pick up and do it, right? And this is like one of those early examples where, you know, like if it's not happening, we just have to do it. 

Rebecca: That's it. It's like, and carry on. And it's so pragmatic, but it's also, there's such a fortitude about it. And, I, I think it's just so like, it's something that happens quietly in an understated way and it's so like undervalued, which is part of what, when I was writing my thesis, that was sort of what it was about, you know, the role of women on an international stage in these like post conflict healing moments and things like that.

And I do, I see, I mean, you see it all the time with moms and it's even writing this story and just telling mom friends about it. It's like. Well, yeah, of course, that's what you would do. You know, as a mom, there's nothing else you could do. You just, you know, you don't have to. So, yeah, it's really, really amazing.

Zibby: So, what do we do with this level of knowledge? Do you know what I mean? Like, it's horrible. How do we, like, prevent things from happening again, now that we know some of the history? What do we do? 

Rebecca: Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know if I can answer that, but I think for this story, you know, my, my hope was to kind of raise awareness about this moment in history and the grandmothers are still, you know, every day working and looking for their grandchildren.

And so they have, you know, their website, which is abuelas. org. ar. Anyone can go to it in the whole wide world. And, you know, if they don't know who they are, if they have any doubts about their identity or think that they might be, um, a child of. parents who disappeared. So that's my hope for it. I think there's a bigger question there that unfortunately, I don't know if I have the answer to, but you know, I think it's, it's trying to, and you mentioned it too with fiction, but it's, you know, it's empathy and trying to kind of understand that full experience.

Instead of just, you know, creating this, like, category where it blocks off the human part of it. So, I hope we can learn from that. 

Zibby: Yes, I hope so too. I feel like we need, like, the Schindler's List of the disappeared. Like, I feel like we don't have a blockbuster, really instructive way, and maybe your book could become that.

Rebecca: I love that you said that, and there have been some, and I actually will put, the book comes out on July 30th, and I specifically put a list of recommended reading, but also film because there have been some tremendous documentaries done about the disappeared and about the work of the mothers and the grandmothers.

But I agree with you. I feel like I want to just trumpet the story to the whole wide world and, and, you know, tell everyone about it to, for that purpose so that, you know, it doesn't happen again. And so that identities are known and hopefully people are found and if they want to be reunited with their biological families.

Zibby: So, as a former French major and having lived in France, how much are you using French these days? Like, is that all worth it? My kids are like, I think I should take Spanish or like, you know, you know, it's French and I'm like, why? 

Rebecca: I hope you travel there often. I try to travel there often and it did help to forge those friendships early in life because now some of my close friends that live in France and they have children and you know, my daughter has gotten to know they're children so that sort of keeps an ongoing relationship. I do have a cousin who lives, who's lived in France for decades and so I try to visit her when I can and I speak French to my daughter and whenever I find someone who speaks French I try to, try to speak French. But you're right, I mean it's definitely not, especially here in Florida we use much more Spanish.

And how did you end up living in Florida? I moved, so I was in New York City for 11 years. I moved there on September 1st, 2001 for my graduate program in international affairs, which was, um, you know, better than anyone. It was kind of like, The world ended, but it didn't end and you kind of had to go on.

And so I stayed there, got married, bought my first home with my husband, um, on 34th street, and we had a wonderful time. And then soon as we had my daughter, we brought her home from Lenox Hill hospital to our 750 square feet, square foot apartment on, on 34th street. And we knew we were going to have to make a lifestyle change.

So my parents are retired down here. My brother and sister in law and their family are down here as well for, for work and so we came down to Florida and made, made a bit of a lifestyle change back in 2012. So we were early adopters of the New York to Florida migration. I'm here now, so we're enjoying it.

Zibby: That's amazing. So what do you like to read when you're not, continuing to dig deep in topics that are historically relevant to you. 

Rebecca: So yeah, similar. I mean, you know, it was, it was a joy to be part of the group of authors that, that I met with for the summer series and, uh, you know, mostly fiction. I love literary fiction.

Uh, I just, I just broke open a book that I, that I grabbed, uh, last week and it was, it's tremendous. It's coming out in January and literary fiction I love, I, yeah, I would say that's, that's my favorite. Um, but I read all kinds of fiction for the most part, more historical literary, not so much thriller romance.

So women's fiction. 

Zibby: What advice would you have for aspiring authors? 

Rebecca: Oh gosh, I'm 47 years old and this is my first book so I don't really have like this wealth of experience and success to draw from and I think there's a lot of advice out there for writers as it is. I would say stay true to yourself and your story and that's pretty much it. 

Zibby: What do you think, Esme, if, if timelines aligned and she was here and alive and wandering about, can you picture her sort of going about her life? Where would she be living? And like put her in America somewhere, give us like a, an Americanized grandmother, Esme character.

Rebecca: Oh my gosh. That's really hard. That's like a parlor trick. I think the thing about Esme that hopefully will resonate. You know, she had no interest in being like involved in politics. She's not an activist. This was a place that she found herself in because. of her family. You know, she loves, she loves her family and that's the most important thing to her and she just wanted her family back together and you know, she, she just did and I, I think in some ways would continue to do what she needed to do to keep her family together.

But I think that attribute about her, you know, that she's kind of reluctant about even engaging in any type of activism. She's just doing it because she is a mom and she, you know, she more than anything wants her daughter back and wants her grandchildren. So. 

Zibby: I love it. Oh my gosh. Well, Rebecca, thank you.

I mean, it was so good. I, as I said, and I read it a while ago and I'm, it's just like, it just, it's a story that stays with you and I want everybody else to experience it the way I did from reading it and to know about this time in history. To know, it makes me want to go get a DNA test myself, but I know like where I come from and it's been pretty, you know, I have no doubt, but still, you're like, you just never know, you know, did you go take a DNA test after this?

I bet, I bet you want to. 

Rebecca: Yes, that's a legendary history. It's so much, you can do so much now, you know, and so in no time, so it's. It's so easy to find out. But thank you sincerely, Zibby, for everything that you've done for the book and for the writing community. It's just so wonderful and I just adore the platform that you've created and the community that you've created.

So thank you so much. 

Zibby: Oh, thank you. Well, hopefully this is only the beginning. 

Rebecca: I hope so. I hope so. That's perfect. 

Zibby: Okay. 

All right. Bye everybody. 

Rebecca: Thanks so much. 

Zibby: Okay. Bye. Thank you. Have a great weekend.