After publishing over fifty works of fiction for both adults and children, I decided to tell my mother’s story in the form of a memoir. My father wrote his own memoir (Stay of Execution) and books and plays have been written about him and Joseph Alsop, his famous older brother. But nobody ever asked my mother about her life. A decoding agent in World War II London, this pregnant British war bride crossed the North Atlantic at the age of 18 in a convoy dodging U-boats in December of 1944. To the outside world, she appeared to step easily into the role of dutiful wife and devoted Catholic mother, but in truth, she grew daily more frustrated at the confines of her life in 1950s America. Years later as she slipped away into dementia, I was determined to get her story down while she could tell it. In the drawn-out process of writing Daughter of Spies, I learned that the memories that stuck with me and with her were the ones that helped me best get at the truth of human nature.
Longlisted for the 2022 Memoir Magazine Book Awards
2022 Bronze Medal Winner, Memoir Category, Living Now Awards
2022, Runner Up, Memoir Category, New England Book Festival
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Praise for Daughter of Spies
“Daughter of Spies is a fascinating trip to a country—and a capital—that no longer exists. Part memoir, part elegiac tribute to the author’s mother, it is also the story of an extraordinary family that had a powerful influence upon the political and social life of postwar Washington, D.C. In Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop’s book, the Georgetown set comes back to life.”
-Gregg Herken, author of The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington
“Exercising meticulous espionage, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop gives us a revelatory memoir of the marriage between her famous columnist father and her British mother, who transcribed and interpreted enemy code as a girl. Read Daughter of Spies not only for a surprising angle on Vietnam era Georgetown, but as an acute and heart-wrenching self- portrait of a daughter who insistently loves a difficult mother without breaking her pledge to her own autonomy.”
-Honor Moore, author of Our Revolution, a Mother and Daughter at Midcentury
“Tish Alsop was a charming, beautiful, well-born war bride of a handsome, dashing, brainy war hero-turned-famous-journalist. They lived together at the center of an elite social group, the ‘Georgetown set,’ at a time when Washington basically ran the world. But Tish, while brave and stoic, was often lonely and sad and, at times, silently, secretly, desperate. Her daughter, Elizabeth, has written a moving memoir, at once chilling and loving, of her lifelong search for her mother.”
-Evan Thomas, author of The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA
“A beautifully written, deeply honest, memoir. The tales of London during the blitz, and the inside look at the author’s family life when her parents lived at the center of power in Cold War Washington are both compelling and revealing. Most of all, Winthrop illuminates her mother’s life with poignancy, sympathy and understanding while chronicling with clarity their often complicated relationship.”
-Stephen Schlesinger, author of Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
“It is an extraordinary challenge for anyone to write a compelling, emotionally honest, personal memoir. To write one in parallel with the public life of a nation that unspools alongside—in this case, much of the 20th-century history of our country—is almost unimaginably difficult. Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, in Daughter of Spies, a recounting of her parents’ long marriage as well as her family’s prominent role in the affairs of postwar America, has managed this brilliantly, and has done so with perception, wit, humor and enormous compassion. This is the story of a family through the lens of history. Intensely moving, and beautifully done.”
-Geoffrey Douglas, author of Class: The Wreckage of an American Family
“As a fellow Washingtonian and the offspring of an FBI agent and a CIA librarian, I found that Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop captures perfectly the sinister atmosphere of Cold War Washington. This multilayered memoir takes us on a rich, cinematic journey of great depth and power.”
–Tim Gunn author of Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making it Work
“This is a fine, tautly controlled memoir of a daughter’s wrestling with her ambivalence about her glamorous parents’ problems and deceptions. The writer’s a child of an English mother who works for MI5 and a dashing yet distant OSS American father who, in World War II, parachutes into France to fight behind the lines with the Resistance. Growing up in a teeming Washington D.C. house filled with a maze of secrets, Elizabeth Winthrop’s candid, graceful choreography brings the reader to an inspiring emotional conclusion—it is possible to appreciate, even love our parents’ flaws as well as their virtues.”
–Robert Seidman, author of Moments Captured
“While deftly evoking the glamour of high society, both in London and in Washington DC, and the tight-lipped secrecy born of war-time espionage – MI 5 and CIA are almost household entities in this family – Elizabeth Winthrop tells how her mother Tish Alsop, having married her American sweetheart at eighteen, had to cope with twelve—twelve!—successive pregnancies and how she struggled with loneliness and addiction, yet maintained her ironic humor to the end. As a daughter, Winthrop is compassionate and clear-eyed; as a writer, she is elegant, even-handed, witty, and incisive, showing that no amount of privilege can protect a woman from misery, and that a stiff upper lip is no solution to pain. The last pages are almost unbearably poignant. Among the chronicles of mother-daughter relationships, this fine memoir gives a fierce lesson in empathy.”
-Rosalind Brackenbury, author of Without Her and Becoming George Sand
“Winthrop is a charming writer, and the pages fly by in this profound history of an American family. It starts as a WWII spy story and becomes an intimate portrait of the Washington, D.C. elite in the 1950s and 60s—but throughout it is also an exploration of a relationship with an aging and troubled parent. Daughter of Spies is funny, heartbreaking, and beautifully honest.”
-Adam Gidwitz, award-winning author of The Inquisitor’s Tale
“What a superb storyteller Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop is. Daughter of Spies is not only a revealing biography of powerful Washington journalist Stewart Alsop and his troubled wife, Tish. It is also a poignant memoir of a daughter emotionally abandoned by her parents. The story—so evocative—will make you both sad and angry, but you’ll keep turning pages.”
-Douglas Waller, author of Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage
I was lucky enough to know Elizabeth Winthrop’s parents, Stewart and Tish Alsop. They were close friends of my parents and quite vivid figures to me. (I know the author, but not at all well).
So I pre-ordered this book and started reading when it arrived on my Kindle yesterday. To my astonishment, I stopped reading when I finished the book late last night.
Daughter of Spies is a masterpiece. Everything about the Alsops comes to life; their families, their houses, their children, their time. Elizabeth somehow imagines–convincingly–what Stew and Tish were like in their teens and twenties, when he was sent into France to link up with the Maquis and she was a code clerk for the British Secret Service.
They were remarkable people–and as I could see at a distance, remote from their children. This is the hard part, and it does not get easier in Ms. Winthrop’s story. I admire her enormously, and I recommend this book to any reader.
-Donald E. Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post
A deeply moving memoir that shows how lonely it can be to grow up surrounded by the famous—both the rich and the political. The author’s voice reverberates in every line as she describes how much the small cruelties of life hurt a child struggling to be noticed, to be loved. Born into a large, complicated family and raised by parents who were emotionally absent even when they were physically present, she was swept along on an assembly line from birth to boarding school, then out of the house as soon as she graduated from college into an unhappy marriage. It’s only through researching this memoir that the author comes to truly understand her mother.
-Virginia Carry
I was deeply moved by this splendid book. The author’s mother came through as a loving but deeply flawed parent who wrestled with her own demons as best she could. Alsop’s honesty came through on every page, and we saw the good and the bad, the yang and the yin, the positive and the negative, of her life growing up in a very complicated household. I came away with an appreciation for the author’s mother (and father) that was profoundly moving. I think Alsop’s decision to end with her mother’s speech was the perfect coda.
-Charles Dew, Ephraim Williams Professor of American History, Emeritus, Williams College
In this compelling, remarkably evenhanded account, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop both recovers her own rambunctious, emotionally turbulent childhood and comes to see her distant parents in full. Romantic and feckless, they generated a large family while condemning her mother to helpless isolation. As Annie Ernaux has written, “Family narrative and social narrative are one and the same.” We come to understand that being born into not one, but two historic American families isn’t necessarily a privilege. A lone girl with five brothers, a famous, always busy elsewhere father and a mother more protective of her bottles than of her daughter, Alsop developed keen powers of curiosity and observation. Daughter of spies, indeed. Even as a little girl she was determined to unravel the secrets festering in the household. Eventually, she would collect and probe her mother’s memories in order to write this book and come to terms with who her parents really were and how she came into her own as a woman and a writer.
The book is set in Washington, the seat of power during World War II, Vietnam and afterward – no distant background because Alsop’s father and uncle were not only major reporters of events, they and family friends were making them happen. We get to witness those times anew, through Elizabeth’s eyes.
It’s a great read, on personal and historic levels.
-Emily Arnold McCully
HAD to read right through this author’s story of her close relationships with her brothers, her talented father and, front and center, her complicated struggling mother. A very forgiving memoir that speaks a world about the little girl who was trying to handle a role meant for an adult. It deals with loss and loneliness, and it’s also an instructional map on growing old. A lovely memoir.
-Jane Geniesse
