The daughter of a famous journalist and his young British bride looks backward at her parents’ storied love affair in London during World War II. In exploring their memories of that long-ago time through her father’s writings and her mother’s stories, she discovers that their wartime secret-keeping became a habit that undermined the peacetime marriage.

As a child, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, along with her five brothers, was raised to revere the tribal legends of the Alsop and Roosevelt families. Her parents’ marriage, lived in the spotlight of 1950s Washington where the author’s father, journalist Stewart Alsop, grew increasingly famous, was not what either of her parents had imagined it would be. Her mother's strict Catholicism and her father's restless ambition collided to create a strangely muted and ominous world, one that mirrored the whispered conversations in the living room as the power brokers of Washington came and went through their side door. Through it all, her mother, trained to keep secrets as a decoding agent with MI5, said very little. In this brave memoir, the author explores who her mother was, why alcohol played such an important role in her mother’s life, and why her mother held herself apart from all her children, especially her only daughter. In the author’s journey to understand her parents, particularly her mother, she comes to realize that the secrets parents keep are the ones that reverberate most powerfully in the lives of their children.

In this special event, Alsop converses with Tim Gunn who, as the son of an FBI agent and a CIA librarian, grew up in the same strangely muted and ominous world that was cold war Washington.

Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop is the author of over sixty works of fiction for all ages, including the novels Island Justice and In My Mother’s House. Robert Stone selected her short story “The Golden Darters,” for Best American Short Stories. Her fantasy novels for children, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle, are considered classics of the genre. Daughter of Spies is her first memoir.

Tim Gunn is the Emmy Award winning co-host of the global fashion competition Making the Cut, an Amazon original series that premiered in 2020 on Prime Video. He is the former co-host of the first 16 seasons of Project Runway, which began airing in 2004. A New York Times bestselling author, his 4th book, The Natty Professor, was released in 2015 and chronicles his 29 years as an educator. Gunn spent 24 of those years as a teacher and administrator at Parsons School of Design, the last seven of which he served as chair of the department of fashion design. Author photo by Scott McDermott