“Family patters—like family secrets—repeat themselves.” ~ Iyanla Vanzant
There has been a rash of books lately on the topic of family secrets. Why? Your guess is as good as mine, but I’m sure part of it has to do with the fact that children weren’t included in a lot of family news when I was growing up. There was a Chinese Wall between children and their parents then, suggesting adults thought kids were invading their privacy and didn’t ‘need to know’. That left the potential for surprises in later life, often threatening the foundation of family structures when the truth, or at the very least revelations came out. The epidemic of memoirs over the past decade has certainly served to expose many of those secrets, from the personal to the political, but I always felt a bit left out, as it seems there was very little I didn’t know about my family. Being the last of five girls, I sense my parents gave up the effort to hide anything from me, probably accepting what they didn’t tell me, my sisters surely would.
And thus, it was shocking when I recently had a family secret revealed via the internet. It was my husband’s family, but someone I was close to from my early twenties, and so all the more confounded by the length of time the secret remained hidden. I suppose something like that could only have happened in the age of social media, which was how I was found by the writer tracking down information on my relative-by-marriage. My talk with him eventually clarified much for us both and led to a plan on my part to turn the long-hidden events into a narrative aided by the connection of fiction. And so, that is what I have started to work with, an amalgam of truth and imagination to bring this woman from the turn-of-the-century back to life. I couldn’t do it without the help of the hidden secret recently revealed by someone I never knew.
I hope you’ll check back to find out how this reveal is progressing during the coming year. After all, what good is a secret if you can’t share it with somebody? This one was hiding in plain sight, and I look forward to disclosing it step by step in my next novel. Have a happy New Year, and I look forward to connecting with you in 2025. After all, reading and writing are the best ways to share our thoughts, so I look forward to doing that with you.
Your friend,
The Unblocked! Writer