How could anyone not be inspired by this woman?

But I also knew that I couldn’t write her life story. Some terrible things happened to Lee Miller in her life, not the least of which was that a family friend raped her when she was just seven years old, infecting her with gonorrhea. It was a tragedy that I wasn’t sure I was equipped to write about; what could I possibly know about how that affected Lee throughout her life? Also, I wanted to write another dual narrative like my previous book, The Paris Seamstress, and I couldn’t do that by sticking to the facts of a person’s life. So I decided to use Lee as the inspiration for the character of Jess.

My story begins with Jess’s modeling career hitting a major hurdle when an image of her is sold to Kotex to use in an advertisement. This actually happened to Lee Miller, although at a slightly earlier time than I have used in the book. It’s hard for us to imagine how shocking appearing in a sanitary product advertisement was at the time and how it could possibly ruin someone’s career, but it was and it did. Miller gave up modeling after that as nobody wanted to see the “Kotex girl” in photographs designed to show off evening gowns. Condé Nast did discover Lee Miller, as he discovers Jess in this book, and Miller was one of his favorite models; his influence was instrumental in her successful modeling career. The pictures Toni Frissell is taking of Jess in the opening scene are based on pictures Frissell took for the cover of Vogue in 1942.

My descriptions of Italy when Jess arrives there in 1943 are based on Martha Gellhorn’s piece “Visit Italy,” published by Collier’s in February 1944, and Margaret Bourke-White’s pieces “Salt of the Earth” and “Fifth Army Field Hospital,” taken from They Called It Purple Heart Valley, published in 1944, and from her piece “Evacuation Hospital,” published in Life in February 1944. The scene set during the Easter service in Italy is based on “Easter in Italy: Americans Pray within Earshot of German Lines” by correspondent Sonia Tomara, published in the New York Herald Tribune in April 1944.

Martha Gellhorn tells Jess that a photograph of a naked woman painted in camouflage colors is used during lectures. This is true; Roland Penrose, a photographer and Miller’s lover—later husband—lectured in camouflage during the war and he used this image of Lee Miller as his “startle slide” to make sure everyone was paying attention.

The letter that Warren Stone reads to Jess about the “inherent difficulties” of having women in the war is taken from The Woman War Correspondent, the U.S. Military, and the Press by Carolyn M. Edy. The other letter Warren Stone quotes to Jess, from a major in the Surgeon General’s office, about the supposedly devastating effects on the “female apparatus” from parachute training is taken from Never a Shot in Anger, the memoir of Public Relations Officer Colonel Barney Oldfield, as is the anecdote about Capa et al. missing their parachute training school places because of a drunken party the night before.