Searching for Armando

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Plot Summary

wedding photo of Noelle Sickel's parents

SEARCHING FOR ARMANDO examines three real lives and how they intersected. One reviewer called it “a remarkable creation, encompassing a dazzling range of genres: memoir, biography, cultural history, mystery, and detective story.”

In 1945, a young wife awaits the return of her high school sweetheart from the battlefields of World War II. When he arrives, she will face him with the severest test of their marriage. Because in his years-long absence, she has fallen in love with another man. This classic situation takes on its own particular trappings, and the decision of the young couple reverberates through their decades together and through the lives of their children, especially the first-born, who is the author of SEARCHING FOR ARMANDO.

There are facts in this book, and there are truths. There are guesses and opinions and memories. It’s a story of secrets --- secrets harbored privately in individual hearts; secrets kept tightly within families; secrets unearthed or still stubbornly elusive. Intentionally or not, clues were left behind. SEARCHING FOR ARMANDO follows the trail of those clues, at times to surprising conclusions.

Hatching the Idea

My husband is fond of saying that I’ve been writing this story for 30 years. I always bristle when he says that because it makes me sound like the world’s slowest writer, but metaphorically, he’s right. The writing of the book was concentrated in the few years before its publication in 2016, but the first stirrings began in 1976, and the story I eventually uncovered stretches back years before then.

In 1976, my marriage was in trouble. When I wrote to my mother about it, she responded with a surprising confession: early in her own marriage, with my father overseas during World War II, she’d had an affair that eventually forced her to choose between her young husband and her man-of-the-world lover.

cases of 13 “respectable” French and English women from the 1840’s to the 1890’s who had been accused of murder. I soon found myself intrigued by one particular woman, Adelaide Bartlett, and her sensational trial in 1886 London.

Fine, I thought, I’ll take some of the facts of Adelaide’s case, move the story into modern times and onto American soil, and I’ll be all set. But as I fiddled with the idea of a present-day setting, I kept coming back to the fact that what really interested me about the story was the light it shed on the lives of ordinary people at the turn of the twentieth century, which was a time of tremendous social change in the United States. There were organized forces for change like the women’s rights movement and the beginnings of labor unions. But change also grew out of seemingly neutral events like the invention of the typewriter, which allowed middle-class women to enter the work force for the first time, and, in turn, led to the simplification of women’s clothing; or the bicycle, which let adventurous young couples literally escape the watchful eyes of their elders. So I decided to stick with 1886, and Adelaide Bartlett became Isabelle Martin, the discontented wife of a prosperous Philadelphia shopkeeper. Or, rather, Adelaide was the seed that sprouted Isabelle, a distinct personality in her own right.

Though I’d set out to write a mystery, I had no interest in inventing a detective. But I needed a narrator. Aha, I thought: a maid! Servants always know a great deal about the personal lives of their employers. True to the era, my maid would be a country girl come into the city to work. With these two characters in hand, I began writing. Lo and behold, within a few pages, the maid, Hanna Willer, insisted on taking center stage, and THE SHOPKEEPER'S WIFE turned out to be as much Hanna’s story as Isabelle’s, if not more. Not only that, despite my original commercial intentions, the story quickly veered away from the neighborhood of the supermarket racks. Themes of friendship, gender, secrets, and silences engaged my attention. At one point, I was dismayed to realize that I was on Chapter 17, and my murder victim was still alive! But one reviewer later called THE SHOPKEEPER'S WIFE a “strong and finely crafted psychological novel” and “a quiet thriller,” so I guess I did all right in the end.