Splintered Shadows:
Recovering a French Résistante
What secrets would you uncover if you searched for the truth about your mother’s past?
After the war, Andrée—a Frenchwoman with a mysterious past—married an American serviceman and left her homeland behind, taking her secrets to the grave. Decades later, her adoptive daughter, Marilyn Moriarty, embarks on a journey to uncover the truth. Armed with a single clue—a name scrawled on a photograph from 1945—Moriarty discovers a startling tale of courage, betrayal, and deception. As layers of her mother’s double life in Nazi-occupied France are revealed, Moriarty must confront the shadows of war and the fractured identity of a woman she thought she knew.
Marilyn F. Moriarty
Marilyn Moriarty is an award-winning writer and professor whose work spans creative nonfiction, fiction, and literary scholarship. Winner of the AWP Prize and the Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal, her writing appears in The Kenyon Review and Creative Nonfiction. Her forthcoming memoir, Splintered Shadows: Recapturing a French Résistante, explores hidden histories of World War II with vivid, evocative prose.
Books
Critical Architecture and Contemporary Culture (University of California Humanities Research Institute Series) Hardcover –
February 17, 1994
by William J. Lillyman (Editor), Marilyn F. Moriarty (Editor), David J. Neuman (Editor)
The third volume in the University of California Humanities Research Institute Series, this book brings together prominent literary theorists and architects to offer a variety of perspectives on the relation between postmodernism and architecture. The contributors include such luminaries from the forefront of literary studies as J. Hillis Miller, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard; the architects Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and Robert Stern offer their perspectives on the critical role of architecture and contemporary culture. The high caliber of the discourse and the variety of approaches included will draw a scholarly audience from a wide range of disciplines.
Biographies
D-Day In the Eyes of a Boy Paperback – March 15, 2020
by Bernard L. Marie (Author), Marilyn F. Moriarty Ph.D. (Editor)
Bernard L. Marie was five years old when the Allies stormed D-Day. He recalls his life in France under the Nazi occupation and the many joys brought to him with the Allies. Freedom . Father. And chocolate!
Moses Unchained Marilyn F. Moriarty
Winner of AWP Creative Nonfiction Award
Moses Unchained is the moving true story of a modern outlaw’s struggle with faith, betrayal, and the accidental nature of life. Zack Rosen was a simple man, but one with many contrasts. An urban Jew from New Jersey who moved south and converted to fundamentalist Christianity, he was not a philosopher or theologian but a man’s man, a tattooed truck driver who built a classic Harley-Davidson from spare parts. Zack met and married Shelley, another converted Jew, but their happiness was brief. Secrets from Shelley’s past came back to haunt them, and her sudden death from pneumon/ia revealed that she had AIDS and she had given the virus to Zack.
Suddenly faced with the loss of his family, his job, his income, and eventually, his own life, Zack became an itinerant evangelist. He introduced himself to author Marilyn F. Moriarty in 1993 with the words, “I got an honorable testimony.” She listened to this story and became his friend and caregiver. At his request, she has told his story here.
Memoirs
World War II Letters of Veale F. Moriarty Paperback – May 6, 2020
by Veale F. Moriarty (Author), Marilyn F. Moriarty (Editor)
In 1944, 25-year-old Veale F. Moriarty boards a ship bound for war, leaving behind the glamour of New York City for the stark reality of military life. As he embarks, mispronounced by an official and crammed into a crowded cabin, he reflects on his journey—crossing the English Channel after D-Day, fighting across Europe, and earning both the Iron Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. Amid the war, he writes weekly letters to his mother in Florida, finds comfort in pets and fleeting romances, and ultimately meets Andrée Boziére in Paris—the woman who would change his life—with a simple request: to care for her dog.
Splintered Shadows: Recovering a French Résistante
Author Marilyn Moriarty
ISBN 978-1-959203-15-5
Print Version $24.99 (available fall 2026)
Excerpt:"In Paris, I walked home from the Museum at the end of the day through shadows cast by streetlights, like sundials measuring encroaching night. Two kinds of shadows then, those projected by the artificial light of light poles and those made from the sun’s slanted rays at this liminal time of day. The strange duality between the natural and artificial light made shadows cast from two angles. If a person looked only at the shadows, they would be confused -- unless they followed the shadow to its base and found where the light originated. That was what I was trying to do with my mother’s past—follow the shadows to the base, look up for the source of light. Every shadow was as substantial as the light that cast it."
List of Publications
BOOKS
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Splintered Shadows: Recovering a French Résistante, memoir. University of North Georgia Press. Forthcoming 2026.
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Moses Unchained, memoir. University of Georgia Press. March 1998. AWP award for Creative Nonfiction.
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Writing Science through Critical Thinking. Jones and Bartlett Publishers. Preliminary editions 1995, 1996; final edition June 1997.
EDITIONS
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Editor, World War II Letters of Veale F. Moriarty. Veale F. Moriarty. May 2020.
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Editor, D-Day In the Eyes of a Boy. Bernard L. Marie. March 2020.
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Co-Editor, Critical Architecture and Contemporary Culture. With William Lillyman and David Neuman. Oxford University Press, New York. November 1994. Collection of essays by architects and theorists, including Ann Bergren, Frank Gehry, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, J. Hillis Miller, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Robert A.M. Stern, Paul Zajfen and Michael Wilford.
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“The Search for Common Ground.” Introduction to Critical Architecture and Contemporary Culture. Edited by William Lillyman, Marilyn Moriarty, and David Neuman. Oxford University Press, New York. November, 1994: 3-11.
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Editor, Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Twelve Plays for Theatre, ed. Robert Cohen. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1994: 75-148. Compiled and annotated play text.
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Editor, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in Eight Plays for Theatre, ed. Robert Cohen. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1988: 75-150. Compiled and annotated play text.
CREATIVE
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“Bone Lab,” Dappled Things, October 2023. selected for the 2024 anthology BEST SPIRITUAL LITERATURE, Orison Books, Vol 9, 2024.
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“The Ass of Otranto,” story, Among Animals 3: The Lives of Humans and Animals in Contemporary Short Fiction. Ashland Creek Press. 2022. Reprinted from J-Journal: New Writings on Justice. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Issue 21. Spring, 2019.
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“A Beautiful Mess: Paris, 1945,” memoir excerpt, War, Literature, and the Arts. Volume 33, 2021.
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“Bent Necessity,” short story, The New Haven Review. Vol 24. Spring, 2020.
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“Road-Rage Jane in Torino,” essay on the Shroud of Turin. Raritan: A Quarterly Review, journal of Rutgers University. Volume XXXIX, Number 1. Summer 2019.
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“Cut By Tearing,” essay, The Chattahoochee Review, December 2018.
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“Romancing the Bird,” essay, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. Vol. 19 No. 1, Fall 2017. The propagation and training of a peregrine-prairie falcon hybrid, falconry practices, past and present; Shakespeare’s Othello and Taming of the Shrew.
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“Territorial Imperative in Planaria,” essay, Creative Nonfiction, Spring, 2015.
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“Swerves,” Faulkner Society. Gold medal for the essay. Anthologized in Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Mother Land, edited by Jane Satterfield and Laurie Kruk. Demeter Press, 2016. Recorded for NPR January 21, 2015. Air date not yet determined.
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“Reservoir,” essay, About Place. Online journal. Voices of the Human Spirit issue.
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The Taking of Dead Horse Hollow: Eminent Domain Abuse,” essay, Antioch Review. Spring, 2013
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“Bladed Lady,” Honorable Mention. Winning Writers Sports Prose contest. November, 2012.
"Moses Unchained is less a book about the tragic things that happen to Zack Rosen than it is a book about the courageous way Rosen deals with tragedy.... While not avoiding the meanness and ugliness of his experi- ence, Moriarty allows us also to see its courage and beauty. Moses Unchained is an impressive accomplishment."
The Hollins Critic
Praise for Moses Unchained
"Moriarty has given us a book of great courage and faith by negotiating a voice for Zack Rosen."
Roanoke Times
"A moving testimony to the human need for spirituality and a significant contribution to the growing body of literature about AIDS."
Tampa Tribune Times