Interview with an Author: Kate Moore

This month, we spoke to Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls, a non-fiction account of the lives of the dial painters girls who were directly exposed to radium and its devastating effects on the human body, and took on the companies who employed them despite knowing the dangers it posed to their health and lives.

What got you into writing?

I have always loved writing, ever since I was a little girl. I love the imagination, empathy and escape involved, as well as the craft of conjuring a striking sentence. I maintained my passion throughout adulthood, too, so that when I worked in publishing as an editor, I would volunteer to write books whenever the opportunity arose – such as gift and humour books. To my delight, when I went freelance in 2014 – initially thinking that most of my work would come from freelance editing – in fact I was able to support myself as a writer. My books now tend to focus on helping people to have a voice, whether that’s ghostwriting for people with extraordinary stories or capturing forgotten stories from the past and putting them front and centre again.

What inspired you to write The Radium Girls? Why was it a story that you needed to tell?

I first discovered the story of the radium girls through directing a play about them. As I conducted historic research for my theatre production – which I did indepth, because I knew the play was based on a true story and I wanted to do justice to the real people we were portraying onstage – I realised no book existed which focused on the women themselves. I thought that was shocking, because these women were so important and sacrificed so much. I wanted to read a book that celebrated and honoured them, but it did not exist. In the end, I thought: if no-one else has done it, why don’t I? I felt passionately about championing these women – so strong, so courageous, so special – and ensuring their memory survived.

How did you go about writing it - and how long did the research take (as there was so much of it!)?

For me, the research always comes first before I write a word of any book. For The Radium Girls, that involved an amazing research trip to the United States. I wanted to walk the same streets the women had and to visit their homes and graves, and the sites of the dial-painting studios, so that I could bring them vividly to life for my readers. I was also searching for first-person accounts – and I found them. Through letters, diaries, newspaper interviews and courtroom evidence, the radium girls had left their own record behind, telling me in their own words what had happened to them. If you read the book, you will hear from the women themselves because those intimate accounts are threaded throughout. I also interviewed family members of the women – sisters, sons, daughters, nieces, nephews and grandchildren – who shared personal memories to enable me truly to get to know my heroines. I spent a month in America, but months longer at home in London going through the thousands of pages of research I had unearthed. As to how I wrote it, the book is non-fiction, but written in a highly novelistic way, so that readers can walk in step with the women on their journey and get to know them as friends. People have told me it’s a page-turner, and also a very emotional book. I cried many times while writing it as this is such a tragic true story.

The girls’ stories are so tragic, especially considering what we know now – which girl’s story touched you the most or found the most inspiring?

That is such a hard question to answer! I was moved many times by the stories I uncovered – the radium girl who suffered miscarriages and stillbirths; the husband who was stopped for speeding on his way to see his wife in hospital and therefore got there too late to see her before she died. However, two women stand out in particular: Grace Fryer, who led the women on their legal fight, being determined to hold to account the companies that had killed them, and Catherine Donohue, who gave evidence on her deathbed, literally using her last breaths to make a difference in the world.

What message do you think people will take from reading The Radium Girls?

I hope they will be inspired by the women’s courage and shocked by the companies’ greed and callous commercialism. Sadly, too often we see history repeating itself. I hope the radium girls’ story also makes people think again about the parallels still happening in our own time too.

As this issue is all about conservation – a question we’re asking all our contributors is what does conservation mean to you?

I think primarily of wildlife conservation when I think about conservation – something that could not be more important at the moment, when scientists estimate that wildlife populations have decreased by more than two-thirds in less than 50 years. Believe it or not, a shocking one million species are currently under threat of extinction. The global pandemic shows how closely the human and animal worlds are connected – and how we all need to do more to address the impact we humans are having on our planet.

By Grace Balfour-Harle