Helen Button

Carol Roh Spaulding

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Winner of the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts.

Daughter of a Collaborationist. Housekeeper to Gertrude Stein. An ordinary woman lives through extraordinary times.

In this dual timeline narrative, a young French housekeeper lives out the years of World War II near Vichy France with her famous employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Decades later, she returns to France from the United States, finding that a fateful decision she made as a young woman echoes in the present in unexpected ways.

In the years leading to Nazi occupation, young siblings Hélène and Guillaume Bouton, reluctant newcomers to the village of Bilignin, France happen upon new friends-their eccentric neighbors Gertrude Stein, and her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas. Dubbed "Helen Button" by Stein because she is half-American, Hélène-the stepdaughter of a French Vichy officer-grows up in a tense climate of advancing war. In 1939, war begins. To escape her fretful alcoholic mother and oppressive household, Hélène takes a position as a bonne femme (housekeeper) for Stein and Toklas. When a careless remark by Stein seems to doom a young Jewish boy, Isaiah, brought into safety by the Resistance, Hélène's friendship with the couple becomes strained. Increasingly distressed by Gertrude's unusual political affiliations, Hélène and her lover, Resistance fighter Milo Fourche, begin to spy on the writer through her work. One night near the war's end, Milo learns the Gestapo plan a brutal attack on a nearby safe house for Jewish children. Hélène has the chance to intercept, which could save Isaiah's life, as well. Instead, the consequences of that fateful night will take Hélène a lifetime to face down.

Praise for Helen Button

In Spaulding's intricate debut novel Helen Button, she deftly weaves a dual narrative timeline echoing between dangerous Vichy France during WWII and political upheaval in modern day Paris to tell an atmospheric tale of love and loss, war and death, across multiple generations. A tour de force of extraordinary historical detail, fresh perspectives on well-known figures like Gertrude Stein, and exquisite, lyrical writing, Helen Button is a beautiful examination of fate, survival, and how harrowing moral choices in wartime can have far-reaching effects. The story of Hélène Bouton will stay with me for a long time.

Kali White VanBaale, author of The Monsters We Make and The Good Divide

Helen Button is a carefully crafted, compelling narrative that illuminates little known aspects of World War Two while also drawing parallels with political crises in postcolonial France. Told through the point of view of Hélène, the imagined French-American housekeeper of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the narrative focuses on the plight of children during wartime as well as during times of social and political unrest. In both cases, whether the children are Jewish victims of the Holocaust or Algerian immigrant youth in the impoverished Parisian suburbs in 2005, children are criminalized for merely being who they are. At the same time, the novel forces the reader to examine the ambivalent roles of Stein and Toklas, who were Jewish lesbians and avant-garde artists, in Vichy France when French authorities collaborated with their Nazi occupiers. As readers, we are left wondering why Stein wrote articles that appear to promote the collaborators, even though she is remembered as a supporter of the French Resistance. And we also question whether Stein inadvertently effected the death of 44 Jewish children who were taken to Auschwitz.

359 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 5, 2024