Contemporary Authors

• The Unquiet Daughter Piscataqua Press (Portsmouth, NH), 2016

• Boston Globe - https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2016/09/11/search-her-biological-dad-brings-flood-emotions/16W0QFCZTviyzhomOKtlzJ/story.html

  A search for her biological dad brings a flood of emotions

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  PRINTDanielle Flood at her home in in Ogunquit, Maine.
  KEITH BEDFORD/GLOBE STAFF

  Danielle Flood at her home in in Ogunquit, Maine.

  By James Sullivan GLOBE CORRESPONDENT SEPTEMBER 12, 2016
  OGUNQUIT, Maine — There was no doubt. She knew instantly that the man in the photograph was her father.

  That was three decades ago. Danielle Flood is now in her 60s. Yet that reeling sensation — of finally identifying the man she’d spent her whole life trying to find — still feels physically immediate today.

  “There was this pain in my lower abdomen that flashed through me and out my head,” she recalls, doubling over, then raising her hands skyward, to demonstrate. “It was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me.

  “How do you recognize somebody you never saw before?”

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  She stands on the second-floor deck of the bungalow-style home she shares with her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Jim Morin. She looks out at the ocean. It’s a postcard day; she’s wearing a gauze dress of pure white. The lingering grief in her eyes reflects the facial features her long-lost father passed down to her.

  Some years after she first saw that photograph, mailed to her upon her request by a retired British military man, Flood heard from an aunt who had come across something of interest. It was in a biography of the English author Graham Greene, who wrote such celebrated novels as “The Power and the Glory” and “Our Man in Havana.”

  In his 1955 classic “The Quiet American,” Greene described a complicated love triangle involving a young, impossibly beautiful French-Vietnamese mistress, her British lover, and the idealistic American who steals her away and marries her, to do the right thing. Norman Sherry, in his three-volume “Life of Graham Greene,” traced those characters to a real-life trio whose lives had come to Greene’s attention in Saigon during the fraught years leading to Vietnam’s independence in 1954.

  According to Sherry’s account, the three people who inspired Greene’s novel were the young Vietnamese mistress, known in “The Quiet American” as Phuong ; an unnamed Royal Air Force officer, working as an attache for the British government, who fathered a child with her; and Danielle Flood’s stepfather, Jim Flood, an American who was in Vietnam on an aide mission.

  For much of her life, ever since her mother let on that her namesake was not her real dad, Flood had been consumed with uncovering the identity of her biological father.

  Now, it appeared, all three of the people she considered her parents had been immortalized in fiction by a master of the form.

  She still wakes up every day trying to make sense of it all.

  She was born in Vietnam but grew up in America in the 1960s, alone with her difficult mother Suzy Jullien. When Jim Flood left Suzy after she requested a divorce, he took the two daughters they’d conceived during the marriage — Danielle’s younger half-sisters. Danielle, the eldest, was the only one born out of wedlock, to another man, and says her mother resented her for it. She begged for information about her biological father, but her mother refused.

  Bouncing from Baltimore to New York and elsewhere, her mother, who had cut such a glamorous figure in Saigon, was sometimes reduced to exotic dancing to make ends meet. When she had another illegitimate child with a new man, she made Danielle — still a child herself — care for the infant. Danielle found work as an au pair, and her mother took the money. Eventually, when she was still in high school, her mother cast her out.

  With the long-distance emotional support of her stepfather, she put herself through college at Fordham, then went to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia. There, she was taught that a good reporter never makes herself part of the story. She worked for years for the Associated Press and newspapers from New York to Florida, where she met Morin. They had two kids of their own, both now grown.

  ‘History is not always what we think it is. It gets mixed up in novels and inaccuracies. Sometimes it takes 50 or 100 years to find the truth, and by then it’s too late.’

  Quote Icon
  Despite strict adherence to her journalistic training, Flood always knew she would come around to telling her own story. She thinks she knew as far back as age 9, when her mother forced her to lie at her feet and beg forgiveness for perceived slights.

  “She made me so sad, I said to myself I’d never do that to anyone else,” she says. “That’s when I knew I’d become a writer.”

  She knew it for sure one afternoon 25 years ago when she sat in the waiting room of a car repair shop in Miami. The young boy on a TV screen was saying that he only knew his father as number such-and-such from a particular sperm bank.

  “If you’re out there, please call me,” the boy said into the camera.

  “I got so upset,” Flood remembers. “It’s not all right to not have your father in your life.”

  By the time she heard from her Aunt Sue about the information in the Graham Greene biography, she knew without question that she would write her own book. Reading “The Quiet American” for the first time — she’d owned a copy for years but hadn’t read it — she recognized her mother and stepfather, but objected to the characterizations. For one thing, she says, her stepfather was “too smart to get murdered.” (As, in fact, he wasn’t, in real life.)

  In “The Quiet American,” there is a love triangle but no baby.

  “I am a sequel he never wrote,” she says.

  Several years ago, she cut a deal to write a memoir for a major publishing house. The deal fell through, but she kept digging for the truth about her lineage. She tracked down intelligence officers and other colleagues who knew both her father and her stepfather during their time in Vietnam.

  To a man, they confirmed that the international community in Saigon was well aware of her father’s affair with her mother, and Jim Flood’s proposal of marriage.

  Through his life, Greene always insisted that his characters were not based on the lives of real people. Rather, they were “amalgams of bits of real people,” he said. “Real people are too limiting.”

  “I know what he was doing as a writer,” says Danielle Flood. “I don’t see him as an evil guy, necessarily, but he was quite ruthless.”

  Literary scholars have suggested that Greene, in his Vietnam novel, foreshadowed the quagmire that was to come for America there. Flood scoffs at the idea.

  “People think ‘The Quiet American’ was symbolic,” she says. “But it was impossible for Graham Greene to know that the American war was going to come, and that we were going to lose that war. It’s a coincidence, like interpreting a poem.

  “They say the foreign correspondents all used to carry ‘The Quiet American’ in their backpacks. It’s ridiculous. It’s just a story.”

  For her, the real story is her own – the troubled mother, the stepfather who gave her a name and legitimized her, and the mysterious figure who turned out to be her birth father. She prefers not to provide any spoilers about her search.

  “History is not always what we think it is,” she says, tugging from a menthol vape pen. (She quit smoking and drinking, both, a few years back.) “It gets mixed up in novels and inaccuracies. Sometimes it takes 50 or 100 years to find the truth, and by then it’s too late.”

  For a time, she despaired that she’d never get to set her story straight. Then she came across a little sign in the window at RiverRun, a bookstore in Portsmouth, N.H. “We Publish Books,” it read.

  Piscataqua Press, a little publishing house operated by RiverRun owner Tom Holbrook, has just shipped its first edition of Flood’s book. In it, she describes the whole saga, from her mother’s affairs in Vietnam to her long agonizing search for her father.

  They’ve titled it “The Unquiet Daughter.”

  James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.

• Danielle Flood - http://www.danielleflood.com/id5.html

  About Danielle Flood
  AUTHOR

  THE UNQUIET DAUGHTER, A MEMOIR OF BETRAYAL AND LOVE -- is the veritable sequel to Graham Greene's novel, THE QUIET AMERICAN. In THE UNQUIET DAUGHTER a journalist born of the wartime love triangel that inspired the one in Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN searches for her father after surviving a bizarre youth of privilege, poverty, estrangement and cruelty. As she years for her father's love and presence, Danielle's beautiful French and Vietnamese mother leaves her in burlesque house dressing rooms in the American Midwest, in convent schools in Long Island and Dublin and with strangers in New York City. Meanwhile she lies to Danielle about their past for decades in this sometime-humorous near-tragic love story between a daughter and a mother and more. In the end we learn if Flood's journey through the truth of what happened between her parents in early 1950's Saigon satisfies her life-long quest for who she is.

  JOURNALISM EXPERIENCE:

  Danielle Flood is a contributor to THE DAILY BEAST and THE NEW YORK TIMES.

  She was:

  a staff writer for THE ASSOCIATED PRESS at its World Headquarters at Rockefeller Plaza, New York City;

  a staff writer covering arts and education at THE DAILY NEWS, Tarrytown, N.Y.;

  a staff writer covering education and city hall at THE STANDARD-STAR, New Rochelle, N.Y.;

  a staff writer covering county government and features at THE EVENING SUN, Baltimore, N.Y.;

  a staff writer covering general assignment features at THE CLEARWATER SUN;

  a staff writer covering general assignment features at THE MIAMI NEWS.

  She has published articles in many publications including six sections of THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE DAILY BEAST, THE (NEW YORK) DAILY NEWS SUNDAY MAGAZINE, NEW YORK magazine, SUNSHINE magazine (FORT LAUDERDALE), and MIAMI magazine.

  EDUCATION

  She has an M.S. from the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University and a B.A. from Fordham.

  She lives in Southern Maine with her husband, Jim Morin, the artist and editorial cartoonist who has won two Pulitzer Prizes.

• The Daily Beast - http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/24/when-graham-greene-lied-about-my-mom.html

  LITERARY BADDIES
  When Graham Greene Lied About My Mom
  In The Quiet American, Graham Greene lied about the author’s parents and other innocents in much the same way people now twist the tragedy of Benghazi for their own purposes.
  DANIELLE FLOOD
  07.23.16 9:01 PM ET
  I had to know the risks my mother and her lover—my father—were taking in Saigon: laughing together in a jeep with balloons, living together though the Foreign Office forbade it, making love with an armed guard posted outside his official residence—as there were at so many such residences at the time, in 1950-53. I had to know how much violence they faced, as a measure of how much they wanted to be together there. And I had to know for sure that I had come from love.
  Graham Greene’s authorized biographer had insulted the memory of my mother, my father, that of the young man who would become my beloved stepfather—Jim Flood—and me. Norman Sherry had written in his biography of the late English writer that my father “paid” my mother $300 when she became pregnant by him and that he then returned to his wife in England—the truth of which is questionable and far from the whole not-simple and intensely romantic story. Then when I asked Sherry in an email why he used the word “paid,” he didn’t answer me. So I was, in fury, turning many files inside out at the National Archives in Maryland. Four elderly CIA officers and many Foreign Service Officers who worked at the American Legation/Embassy in Saigon with Flood, and their wives, helped me; some said they were proud that I was making the record accurate. That’s how I found out about how Jeanne Skewes and Lydia James died, and later that Greene had used the poor women’s deaths for personal political gain.
  I think of them all—my three parents, and Skewes and James—every time I hear about the attack on Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his staff at Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. This means I have been thinking of them plenty, too much, especially in recent months, and sometimes, recent weeks, coinciding with the impending publication of my book, The Unquiet Daughter: A Memoir of Betrayal and Love. In it, a New York journalist, born of the true wartime love triangle that inspired the one in Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American, searches for her father after barely surviving a bizarre youth of privilege, bewilderment, estrangement, and cruelty. Michael Shelden, the Graham Greene expert, multiple biographer, and Pulitzer prize finalist, says: “Danielle Flood is the child of an affair so much like the one described in the love triangle of Greene’s novel that she is perfectly right to make her startling claim: ‘I am a sequel he never wrote.’”
  ***
  Somehow Lydia Ruth James, 30, and Jeanne R. Skewes, 32, lost their shoes when they were shot in the back of the head at close range just outside Saigon on March 7, 1948. But Skewes, a divorcee, was still wearing her platinum and diamond ring when their bodies were found in their U.S. Information Service jeep. She was then acting USIS chief at the consulate where James deciphered coded messages. The authorities at the time, the French Surete, said the women told their servants, when they left their home in northwest Saigon at about 6 p.m., to make dinner and seat their friends—a reporter from the Associated Press, another from United Press, and a vice consul—who had been invited to arrive at 7:15 p.m. A report from the Surete stated investigators did not believe the bullet holes in the jeep coincided with those in the bodies. So it appears it was some work to put the bodies back in the jeep, tear the American flag off the front of it, pour their jerry can of gasoline over it and set it afire in a field off the bamboo-thicket-lined road in the area between northeast Saigon and Tan-Son-Nhut airport.
  ***

  ADVERTISING

  inRead invented by Teads

  Such assassinations affect some of us who are related to Foreign Service Officers, especially when they are working overseas, more than it does others. It has touched me to the core. You hear about Benghazi, or Skewes and James, and you think: Mom was there, in Saigon, a 20-year-old specialist equivalent to a sergeant, for four months when this happened to those women. It could have been her; maybe. Although she was born in Annam, and was part Vietnamese, her father was French, so as a French National she joined the French women’s army corps—des Auxiliaires Féminins de l’armée de Terre. But she abhorred violence; her youngest brother, Guy, repeated to me in an extensive interview, in French, that she did not want a career in les militaires. So why was she staying in Saigon?
  It was still horrendously dangerous when her lover, the man who would become my father, arrived, almost a year later. I have thought hundreds of times of him—and her—in Saigon then as I read and wrote about: a French publisher being assassinated in his car on his way home for lunch; the riot where 4,000 students and workers protested the two U.S. destroyers docked downtown, the turning over of 15 trucks or buses, the tearing down of U.S. and French flags; the grenades rolling down the aisles in the cinema, or blowing up outside a casino or hotel, in sidewalk cafes, in cars and on the rue Catinat. When I was in utero, there was a double-assassination suicide bombing just outside Saigon that was considered, in a 2003 U.S. study, a terrorism classic.
  And then Jim Flood, the young Foreign Service Officer who my mother did marry, who I thought was my father for many years and always think of as “Dad,” came to Saigon in early 1951. He was a Saigon Legation/Embassy information officer and some 20 years later the U.S. Consul in Madras. In between, while I was going to school stateside, he worked in other dangerous places, including, in the ’60s, Seoul, where my little sister said she watched two fighter planes in a dogfight in the sky from her schoolroom window.
  You worry. Yes, Foreign Service Officers get paid extra to work in places that are most dangerous, but for us who love them, the money means nothing. The fretting is a suffering. It can be a torment. Every time you hear of an FSO killing, you think it could have been that someone you love. When Benghazi happened, I asked an elderly foreign service officer who had been a colleague of Dad’s in Saigon if it was my imagination or what, that I felt injured by what happened to Ambassador Stevens, as if we were all physically connected somehow as State Department family members, even though Dad is dead. In college, when I worked for Associated Press photos, I saw many gory images but was never affected like I was by the one of Stevens dying as he was carried to a Benghazi hospital in his pieta-like stance. Dad’s colleague said he felt it, too.
  ***
  For the deaths of Skewes and James, the French Surete blamed a local band of five Viet Minh, which, the American Consul General told the U.S. Secretary of State in a now declassified letter, fit in “suspiciously well with French desires…” Seven months later, an American missionary came forth to a U.S. Vice Consul with a report relayed by an old Annamese man who witnessed the killings. He said Skewes, driving the jeep, hadn’t stopped when the French military shouted to do so. Shots were fired from the military post. One of the women screamed. Shortly after that, the old man heard more shooting. The prostitutes who frequented the post said the soldiers who had been posted there were transferred, and the military post, one of those tower-like structures near the perimeter of Tan-Son-Nhut airport, was pulled own. In February 2008, an elderly retired CIA officer told me that just before he was posted to Saigon in 1951 as a young recruit from Princeton, he had learned about Skewes and James and that the identity of their killers was termed “murky.”
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  ***
  I hope I speak for other relatives of Foreign Service Officers, dead and alive, when I say how revolting it has been to see the Benghazi State Department staff deaths played with as political toys. The use of the dead—especially the assassinated, the executed—as political silly putty is to disrespect, mock, and disallow all that is sacred in death, life, and the passing on to another realm. It derides the spiritual world that’s all around and within us. It is uncivilized.
  I had wondered if there was some other-worldly reason for my finding out about Skewes and James, who had no children. The State Department said there was no budget for their hearses or a headstone for Skewes, who was buried in the European cemetery in Saigon. James’s parents had her remains shipped home, where she was laid to rest near the Hillsdale, Indiana, farm where she grew up. Poor James. A week before she died, some 150 French and Vietnamese in a convoy outside of Saigon were killed; she had asked for a transfer. It took a while, but then I learned that Skewes and James’s deaths, too, had not escaped being played with for political purposes.
  It was the English author Graham Greene, who very much disliked Americans, who did this. In February 1952, in Saigon, he became “visibly angry,” U.S. Vice-Consul Tom Peck said, because Peck had shortened Greene’s U.S. visa from a year to a month, per the attorney general’s edict—because Greene was a communist. It has been rumored that Greene wrote The Quiet American, his anti-American novel, in retaliation for his visa problems with the U.S.
  CIA officer Charles Baker said, shortly before he died in 2005, that Greene was especially keen to spend time at length in the U.S. then because he had business and a lot of money there. Greene brought up his American Legation visa problems in Saigon repeatedly in communications to his lover, Catherine Walston; he wrote to her on Feb. 4, 1952, after telling her of complaining of his visa problems to the press, and that on that date, he “thought today of a new novel.” His authorized biographer said Greene began work on The Quiet American in March. These visa problems occurred in the wake of a significant two-car bombing on Jan. 9, 1952—one of the most destructive explosions in Saigon to that date.
  The big two-car bombing, burning 13 cars, killed at least 12 persons, including two small children, and wounded some 25. Body parts were seen in the trees, and car parts were blown a block away from this downtown vicinity where the daughter of the British minister and more than half a dozen U.S. Legation wives, one with a 2-year-old, and employees were shopping or working.
  Greene said he based the single-car bombing in The Quiet American on that double bombing, but in his fiction, he upped the casualties to 50 dead and blamed its central character, young Foreign Service Officer Alden Pyle, for making it happen.
  Vietnam scholar Joseph Buttinger in 1967 wrote that Greene used his novel, taught in college classes on and off for decades, to accuse the Americans in Saigon of fomenting the bombing. Newsweek, in its 1956 review of The Quiet American, indicated Greene had created this anti-American work due to his American visa problems. In his New Yorker review, A.J. Liebling called the book “Greene’s nasty little plastic bomb” and said Greene was calling the Americans in Saigon “murderers.” In reality, French and American sources suspected the bombing was the work of renegades and terrorists (many of the 10-15 Vietnamese political factions were suspected to be involved in terrorist activities in Saigon at the time) led by the self-appointed General Trinh Minh The.
  While I was working on my book, I was reading this and thinking: Americans in Saigon; that would be Dad. (It took a while to sink in, it was so in-your-face.) Dad involved in a bombing? His sister, Sue Flood, in Pittsburgh, had found in Graham Greene’s authorized biography Norman Sherry’s description of Dad, my mother, and my birth father—the love triangle in Saigon—and Sherry’s comparison of Dad to the Quiet American character, Pyle, as she took post-retirement courses at Carnegie Mellon. She had written to me, saying the similarity between what happened between my three parents and the narrative in The Quiet American was “amazing.” So I spent a lot of time combing through everything I could find about how Greene used fact in his fiction. I had to know the truth. That’s how I came upon this:
  Though Greene even quotes some of his Vietnam diary notes verbatim in The Quiet American, he never mentions Skewes and James or anyone like them in it. But some 25 years later, in his nonfiction book commenting on some of his writing, Ways of Escape, Greene asks who supplied the bombing material to the suspect, General The. “There was certainly evidence of contacts between American services and General The. A jeep with the bodies of two American women was found by a French rubber planter on the route to the Holy Mountain—presumably they had been killed by the Viet Minh, but what were they doing on the plantation? The bodies were promptly collected by the American Embassy and nothing more was heard of the incident. Not a word appeared in the press.”
  Greene is not accurate about this. The women, Skewes and James, were not found by a rubber planter: declassified State Department communiqués say their bodies were collected by the French military.
  There is no rubber plantation on the aerial photograph of the site of their execution, which took place in the area—about 20 minutes away from the women’s home in northeast Saigon—off an extension of what was then called the rue Eyriaud des Vergnes, a secondary road to Tan Son Nhut airport. Official reports stated that their bodies were in a field or rice paddy.
  The Holy Mountain, to which Greene refers, is seven miles northeast of Tay Ninh, home of the CaoDai military religious sect, and about 6o miles from Saigon. The self-proclaimed “General” The had defected from the CaoDai army in the summer of 1951 and, according to U.S. Minister Donald Heath (soon to be the first ambassador to Vietnam), “took to bush.”
  The Associated Press story of the deaths of Skewes and James was published March 9, 1948 in The New York Times, in many U.S. newspapers including Stars and Stripes, and in Populaire, a local Saigon newspaper; and there was a long letter to the editor about it published in The Bangkok Post, reportedly from the Vietminh.
  Last but not least, the women died in 1948, almost four years before the car bombings in question.
  Rest in peace, ladies.
  This essay was adapted from reportage in Danielle Flood’s memoir-cum-journalism, The Unquiet Daughter: A Memoir of Betrayal and Love, to be published by Piscataqua Press on Sept. 1.

• Shelf Awareness - http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2831#m33731

  Deeper Understanding

  Robert Gray: After The Unquiet Daughter Found Me

  I am the sequel he never wrote. --Danielle Flood, The Unquiet Daughter

  When I find the right book, or when the right book finds me, it's cause for celebration. There should be a ceremony. Maybe that's what this column is.

  The Unquiet Daughter: A Memoir of Betrayal and Love by Danielle Flood was released yesterday by Piscataqua Press, which is run by Tom Holbrook, owner of RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, N.H.

  Flood was a staff writer for the Associated Press and five newspapers, has freelanced for many publications and is currently working on three novels. She managed to earn a U.S. Coast Guard fishing boat captain's license along the way, and is a self-described "proud Mom" who lives with her husband, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, in Ogunquit, Maine. But (and herein lies an amazing tale), she was also the daughter of a complex (woefully inadequate word in this case) French/Vietnamese woman who was part of a wartime love triangle that inspired the one in Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American.

  That was the initial hook I stumbled upon earlier this summer, and how the book found me. I'd read Greene's novel many times over the years, and was intrigued to know more about the story behind The Unquiet Daughter. While the Greene connection may have lured me in, it was Flood's compelling "sequel" that kept me riveted as she chronicled her often harrowing childhood, an intensive search for her real father, and finally the unraveling of impossibly fine threads woven between her parents' lives and Greene's fiction. Journalist and storyteller are in perfect sync in these pages.

  Danielle Flood
  I was also fascinated by the story of how The Unquiet Daughter had found its way to Piscataqua Press. So I asked both Flood and Holbrook to share that tale.

  "For the last three years, Piscataqua Press has been doing what I tend to call 'assisted self-publishing,' and it's safe to say that our publishing endeavor has been instrumental in keeping the bookstore going," Holbrook said. "As we've been doing this, we've been keeping our eye out for books that we could produce as a regular publisher; books that we thought had the merit to be published by the big publishers but just never made it there. As a longtime bookseller, I've always secretly wanted to publish a book that was a commercial success. Danielle Flood has had a long career as a professional journalist, and I believe spent some time shopping the book through an agent before coming to us. I recognized right away that not only was the quality of the book a cut above, but that Dani had the ambition and drive to make sure that the book found readers."

  Flood told me that she'd had an offer six years ago from one of the then Big Six publishers, "but 'something happened' and I don't talk about it because it wasn't the fault of the executive editor involved and I don't want her publicly embarrassed. As far as I'm concerned her strong actions in support The Unquiet Daughter were something that kept me fueled emotionally until publication." Two other big publishers had the manuscript for a month each, but Flood said her "disappointment when all fell apart caused me to be unable to try and sell the book again and unable to work on it for about four years." She left her agent when he declined to seek out independent and university presses.

  Tom Holbrook
  Eventually, however, the story took an unexpected turn: "RiverRun and I decided upon each other after I discovered it while looking in its bookstore window. I saw a charming little sign that said: 'We Publish Books.' Tom Holbrook does help some authors get self-published, but this is not a self-published book; I don't need to self-publish a book, though I thought about it. Tom is publishing me and I find it kind of lovely that his little publishing house and my book support his independent bookstore. There's some kind of symphony there, it seems. And, what a breath of crisp, new air: I am treated nicely with respect, politeness; after the struggle, it's a delight."

  The Graham Greene connection was not the primary reason for Holbrook being drawn to The Unquiet Daughter. "I was more interested in the mommy dearest type childhood, and the way Dani was able to portray that story through the eyes of her younger self," he recalled. "There are things going on that the reader understands but that young Dani doesn't understand--and this is a tough trick to pull off. There was a point in the book where somebody she was counting on actually came through for her, and I heard myself exhale because I had been so tense waiting for the next terrible thing to happen."

  Flood said she is "excited about release day because I know in my heart that my book will help a lot of people and they will finally get to experience it. I wrote The Unquiet Daughter so that the fatherless feel less alone and in hopes that some young men and women would see how much it mattered to someone to have a father and that they might hang in there and stay together for a child, or at least stay in touch with their child. Just because plenty of people don't have fathers in their lives doesn't mean it's okay. It's not okay."

  And now, a gifted author and a dedicated indie bookseller/publisher are just looking for some readers.

  "I love, love stories and I love David and Goliath stories," Flood observed. "I am in favor of the thriving of all bookstores, but especially the smaller independent bookstores that in their spunk to stay alive sing of their identities and struggle to prevail. I say: bravo and bravissima. The independent bookstore is and can forever be a strong community force and book reading the best form of entertainment I can imagine."

  Holbrook added: "We've found a side business that takes a lot of work, but is very rewarding and deeply tied to our mission, so much more fun than selling socks or coffee mugs or other sidelines. And who knows? We might find the next big thing--stranger things have happened."

  Booksellers with questions about wholesale pricing or author events for The Unquiet Daughter can contact Holbrook directly at info@riverrunbookstore.com.

  I'm glad The Unquiet Daughter found me this summer. That in itself is a story with a happy ending.

  --Robert Gray, contributing editor (Column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)

• Seacoast Online - http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/20160920/unquiet-daughter-of-graham-greenes-fiction-tells-her-own-truth

  ‘Unquiet daughter’ of Graham Greene’s fiction tells her own truth

  Tuesday
  Posted Sep 20, 2016 at 2:01 AM
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  By Bob Keyes
  Ogunquit writer Danielle Flood will talk about her decades-long search for her biological father and the self-doubt and self-discovery associated with her quest when she reads from her new book, “The Unquiet Daughter: A Memoir of Betrayal and Love,” at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 21, at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth.

  Flood learned when she was 12 that the man she knew and loved as her father growing up wasn’t her father. A journalist now 64, she used her investigative-reporting skills to solve her life’s biggest mystery. Her story involves a real-life love triangle that became the basis of British novelist Graham Greene’s classic “The Quiet American.”

  Greene’s 1955 novel describes British and French colonialism in Vietnam in the 1950s, and the upheaval caused by American involvement. In Greene’s book, the love interests are a Vietnamese woman, her British lover and the American who marries her.

  In real life, those are Flood’s parents: her biological mother, of French and Vietnamese descent, her biological British father, whom she tracked for years, and the man she knew as her father, an American named Jim Flood.

  “I adored him. He was a tall, handsome man,” she said. “We lived like normal people, in a split-level house in Silver Spring, Maryland, in the suburbs. We walked to school. We went to Sunday school, and had a normal life, except for the glamour embassy parties that were happening all the time.”

  The embassy parties were remnants of her parents’ life in Vietnam. In the early 1950s, Jim Flood worked as an American foreign officer in what would become the first U.S. Embassy in Saigon. She suspects, but cannot prove, that he worked for the C.I.A. Her mother, a woman of French and Vietnamese descent, came to America as his bride with her daughter, Danielle, born out of wedlock in Vietnam.

  Her parents divorced, and Jim Flood took the two daughters he conceived during the marriage — Danielle’s younger half-sisters — leaving Danielle to grow up with her mother in the 1960s.

  She was 12 when her mom told Danielle that Jim Flood was not her father. “I was crushed,” Flood said. “She said I had another father, who was a British intelligent officer in Saigon. She didn’t know where he was.”

  When Flood pressed for information, her mother resisted or changed the story. “I realized she didn’t want me to find him. There was some secret she didn’t want me to know,” Flood said.

  She and her mother had a difficult relationship. Flood left home in high school, eventually reconnecting with her stepfather. She went to college, studied journalism and spent her professional life working for newspapers and wire services on the East Coast. She and her husband moved to the south coast of Maine three years ago.

  All the while, she kept unpeeling layers of her own story. Several things happened that spurred her forward to tell it. In 1994, Greene’s authorized biographer, Norman Sherry, published the second of his three Greene biographies. In it, he described the genesis of the characters in “The Quiet American,” and sometimes in unsavory terms. Sherry suggested Flood’s mother had been paid to sleep with the British officer. When Flood read the book, she was upset and wanted to portray the character of her parents more accurately.

  MORE VIDEO: MEMORIES OF STATE STREET SALOON FROM A FORMER WORKER
  Another impetus was sympathy. Years ago, while waiting to get her car fixed, Flood watched a boy on a waiting-room TV plead to learn the identity of his biological father. The only thing the boy knew about his father was his sperm-donor ID number.

  Flood could relate. “It just broke my heart,” she said. “But the reality is, a lot of people are growing up with no father. This happens naturally sometimes. A father dies, there is a divorce. Kids grow up without their fathers. But just because it happens all the time, that doesn’t mean it’s right.”

  And then 9/11 happened, and the prospect of European travel became more difficult. Flood had uncles in France, her mother’s brothers who were part Vietnamese and part French. She had to interview them to get the complete story. Suddenly, her quest became urgent.

  There were only about 40 English-speaking people in Saigon in 1951. Flood had a finite number of people to interview to find the truth. She used her journalism skills and knowledge of public records to research her history. “I had to turn to investigative reporting to find out what happened in Saigon when I was conceived: Who, what, where, when, how and why?”

  She tells the result of her effort in “The Unquiet Daughter” — published by RiverRun’s own Piscataqua Press — which she calls a real-life mystery and an accurate sequel to Greene’s “The Quiet American.”

  Flood said the biggest challenge she’s faced not knowing her father for so long — and having to reconcile her step-father and his role in her life — is insecurity. She often wonders if she is good enough and worries “that maybe there is something wrong with me. Why did you go away? Was I not good enough?

  “Am I good enough as a friend? Am I good enough as a wife? Am I good enough as a mother? Am I good enough as a writer? Have I done enough as a citizen?”

  She wrote the book because she feared that if she said nothing, then she would have not done enough. “And that would bother me.”

  Writing this book gives her peace of mind, satisfaction and confidence in her identity.

The Unquiet Daughter: A Memoir of
Betrayal and Love
Publishers Weekly.
263.30 (July 25, 2016): p67.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Unquiet Daughter: A Memoir of Betrayal and Love
Danielle Flood. Piscataqua, $19.95 trade paper (380p) ISBN 978­1­944393­18­2
Journalist and first­time author Flood's powerful memoir of her life with a dysfunctional mother and her
decades­long search for her biological father is a gripping story of self­doubt and self­discovery. Flood's
parents may seem familiar to readers­­a Vietnamese woman, pregnant with a British officer's baby, who
marries an American foreign officer­since their lives were the basis for the main characters in Graham
Greene's novel The Quiet American. For Flood, this book is the "sequel" Greene never wrote, and her story
has some compelling moments of its own. After the family moves to America, Flood's stepfather
mysteriously leaves her with her mother, who "thrives on mental fireworks," begins a career as a burlesque
dancer, has numerous affairs, and often leaves the young Flood to fend for herself in a variety of schools in
New York City.
Flood finds peace of mind while searching for answers about what her mother "did and did not do and what
she did and did not tell me," which leads her happily to discover and reunite with her biological father in
England. Flood's descriptions of her early life are truly heartbreaking: teenage years spent working her way
through high school, being abandoned by her mother, and realizing that "to try and understand why Mom
had done so many things was pointless." (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Unquiet Daughter: A Memoir of Betrayal and Love." Publishers Weekly, 25 July 2016, p. 67. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285553&it=r&asid=815f360aba34a9bff0a18ae3ed21a281.
Accessed 10 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285553

• Miami Art Zine
  http://www.miamiartzine.com/Features.php?op=Article_The+Unquiet+Daughter+Dazzles
  Word count: 879

  'The Unquiet Daughter' Dazzles
  A Memoir of Betrayal and Love Richly Riveting
  2
  Thursday, September 8, 2016
  Jo Manning
  Danielle Flood, Piscataqua Press, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2016

  As a published author, I have been approached many times to ghostwrite memoirs.

  One aspiring memoirist’s claim to fame was that she’d been Aristotle Onassis’s mistress before he’d met Maria Callas … whoopdy-doo! The other’s was that she was a secretary who’d married her rich boss … wow, that’s unusual! I declined both offers.

  But there’s very good money in it, and thus more prevalent than most would imagine. I, however, prefer life stories written by those whose life stories these actually might be, however unpolished the writing.

  "The Unquiet Daughter" is very polished writing; it's honest and true, even brutally so, to the core. It took a long time for national and local journalist Danielle Flood to put pen to paper and tell the unflinchingly honest story of her life in this brilliant piece of work. It takes a good deal of courage to write the truth about one’s life, and I applaud her for doing so. In the doing, she’s also done a service to others, showing that the journey of discovering who one is, is a necessary step to self-fulfillment.

  Flood is an accomplished journalist (you list the newspapers and she has written for all of them, including The New York Times, The New York Daily News, The Miami News, Miami Magazine, et cetera) and is a graduate of Fordham University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

  Unquiet Daughter.
  Unquiet Daughter.
  Born in Saigon of a French/Vietnamese mother and an unknown father, her life has been a long search to find that biological father. A CIA agent who fell in love and married her stunningly beautiful mother took them both to America, to Washington, D.C., where she grew up. She did not know that her father was actually her stepfather. He abandoned her and her mother when she was a young child, taking with him the two daughters he’d sired with her mother. Poof! They were gone, just like that, her father and sisters, the only family she’d ever known.

  Her good-looking mother was a difficult woman, prone to ill-temper and volatile behavior. Life with her – especially when she decided to become an exotic dancer – was never easy. When Danielle was not being babysat backstage by burlesque queens on the circuit, she was a student at various boarding schools in the U.S. and abroad, subject to being removed summarily at any time. And, always, the question: who is my father? Her mother would tell her various versions of who he might be, to quell her persistent inquiries, but never the truth, which she finally only learned when she was in her thirties.

  Along the way on this trying life’s journey, her mother takes up with another man with whom she has yet another daughter, and now she is the one who abandons Danielle, leaving her utterly alone, a vulnerable teenager in New York City, no money, no home. What is she to do? (Reading this section absolutely shattered me.)

  What she does is remarkable, and, as she continues on her journey of self-discovery and truth, she will come upon the astonishing story of the love triangle that involved her mother, her stepfather, and her biological father in the very dangerous city of Saigon during the Vietnamese war. She discovers that this trio were the true-life, actual people who inspired the novelist Graham Greene’s "The Quiet American." (A book that has had two film versions produced, the last starring Michael Caine.) Her investigative journalistic skills were put to the test as she set about interviewing the people who were there, then, when all this happened, pursuing all leads, reading numerous documents and news reports, and querying Greene’s biographer as well. (This insight into Greene sheds important light on how he worked.)

  It is rare to come upon a fascinating and well written memoir, as I noted in the beginning of this review – there are too many out there and most of them are hardly what I would call good reads – but "The Unquiet Daughter," the true sequel to "The Quiet American" (Danielle Flood says that she is the sequel Graham Greene never wrote) is one of them, perhaps the best this reviewer has ever read. Highly recommended on many levels, not only for the enthralling mystery of the biological father but also for the strength of faith and hope that drove this memoirist to seek the truth and make peace with her past. It will move you, I guarantee that. Highly recommended.

  I end with this quote from the author: “I wrote The Unquiet Daughter so that the fatherless feel less alone and in hopes that some young men and women would see how much it mattered to someone to have a father and that they might hang in there and stay together for a child, or at least stay in touch with their child.”