156. Georgia Jeffries | The Younger Girl: Writing historical fiction, and true crime close to home

Arts Calling

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Hi there,

Today I am delighted to be arts calling award-winning writer Georgia Jeffries! georgiajeffries.com

ABOUT OUR GUEST: Georgia Jeffries is a writer of Emmy Award winning drama and critically acclaimed noir fiction. Honored with multiple Writers Guild Awards, Golden Globes and the Humanitas Prize, her work in film has been praised by the Los Angeles Times as “standing ovation television.” The Los Angeles Review of Books described her short stories in the national anthologies, Odd Partners and The Last Resort, as “firecracker tales” and “domestic tragedy brilliantly segueing into comic farce.” She has also written biographical profiles for HuffPost and UC Press, including “The Last Gun of Tibercio Vasquez,” which can be viewed on the KCET-TV website, Artbound. Born in the Illinois heartland, she worked as a journalist for American Film before writing and producing ground-breaking female-driven dramas, Cagney & Lacey, China Beach and Sisters. Her screenwriting career has been distinguished by extensive field research, from patrolling the mean streets of Rampart with the LAPD to crashing a Vegas bounty hunters’ convention to reporting from a Walter Reed Army Hospital surgical bay, each investigation the basis for one of her many docudramas and series pilots for CBS, ABC, NBC, HBO and Showtime. A cum laude UCLA graduate, Jeffries is a professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where she created the first undergraduate screenwriting thesis program at an American university.

ABOUT THE YOUNGER GIRL: Based on a true crime, The Younger Girl, (Mission Point Press, October 22, 2024) a debut novel by trailblazing, award-winning writer Georgia Jeffries, combines fiction and supernatural suspense to unravel a thrilling tale of family betrayal and redemption. On March 2, 1933, Chicago tabloids trumpeted the death of 20-year-old "town belle" Aldine Younger: "HEIRESS SLAIN, MARRIED MAN HELD." The son of the mayor of Pontiac, a rich farming community south of Chicago, was convicted of manslaughter. But the dead girl's baby brother, Owen, grew up in a broken family and suspected his beloved sister’s killing was orchestrated by their wealthy uncle. In 1996 Owen is an old man desperate to make peace with the tragedy of Aldine’s death. His daughter, Joanna, takes her still grieving father back home to claim his share of his sister's lost inheritance. Together, they are caught in a dark labyrinth of family betrayal crossing three generations. Owen is found raving during a violent thunderstorm and now believes his daughter is his sister, Aldine, returning to him. Joanna races against time to save her father and unearths damning secrets that threaten her own life. The guilty will be exposed at the psychic bridge linking past, present and future. But at what cost? And who will survive the revelations?

“True-crime stories are difficult, and far more so, when the true crime is in your own family. Georgia Jeffries’s triumphant novel tells the story of her aunt Aldine Younger’s killing in 1933—a violent death that has cast a long and complex shadow over the family, the community, and far beyond. Viewing these events through the lens of fiction, Jeffries deploys clear-eyed research and lucid, evocative prose to craft a novel that will haunt long after the book is closed.”

—Howard Rodman, novelist/screenwriter Professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts Vice President, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Georgia! All the best!

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Much love,

j