Jillian Cantor explains what drew her to the women in history, Margot Frank and Ethel Rosenberg, that she wrote her two novels on. Cantor is intrigued by women in history whose stories are lost or forgotten, and uses her writing to tell their stories:
…I began to think about what it might’ve been like to a be a wife and mother in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as well as what it might have been like for Ethel to be arrested, jailed, and executed for a crime I came to believe she was innocent of. I began to imagine motherhood, female friendship, and love in the time of the Cold War and McCarthyism, and my fictional story emerged.
