(5 Tips for Figuring Out the Structure of Your Memoir.)

Moving up the family tree and to a shelf above my desk, another box file contains material generated by my father, but recorded by his mother, my Russian Jewish grandmother Anna Gendel. Anna’s handwritten account of growing up in the shtetl of Kurnitz near Minsk, and her life as an immigrant to New York was recorded at Milton’s request in the late 1950s and then typed up by my mother, the British aristocrat Judy Montagu. It is vibrant and spirited, a highlight being the account of Anna’s arrest after defending demonstrators on the picket line of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Strike in 1911.

A sideways shift to Judy whose service in the British Army as an officer in the anti-aircraft batteries can be traced through the lively correspondence between 20-year-old Captain Montagu on the front line of World War II and her mother, Venetia. One of the most remarkable letters sees Judy sipping a cup of tea in Reading when a German airplane, a Junkers drops a “Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!” Her actions in helping the shocked and wounded led to her commendation for bravery.

Venetia, whose maiden name was Stanley, has earned a place in the history books and bestseller lists for her own letter exchange with Prime Minister H.H. Asquith during the First War. At the height of their affair Asquith would write to my grandmother several times a day, from cabinet meetings often revealing state secrets. These indiscrete and fascinating missives are now kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, but my family archive still contains papers relating to this historic exchange of letters, some as recently as 2024 when Robert Harris wrote about the relationship in his novel Precipice, one of 10 million books sold by this master of historical fiction.

Over the last few years the archive has been central to the publication of my mother Judy Montagu’s Greyhound Diary (Zulieka Books, 2025). The diary itself was the first part of my own archive, handed over by my father in 2000, in the same format as was typed up during Judy’s three-month, 9,000-mile tour of the US in 1949. To make the most of the diary, itself a well-written, often hilarious account of adventures such as riding in a Texan rodeo, tea with Mary Pickford in Hollywood, or the love affair with Governor Adlai Stevenson which started at the end of her journey, it needed an introduction and footnotes. Filed at home under ‘Stevenson, Adlai’ were letters of such tenderness that the romance was clear. A visit to Springfield, Illinois, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library where Governor Stevenson’s papers are held confirmed what my home archive had suggested.

Any treasured document of family history, given the right presentation, the correct context, is valuable. All it takes is research to discover the relationships a letter might describe, and the historical and geographical situation of its time. Even if the material you have is not hugely exciting, you can make it so by the way you present it and the narrative arc you conceive. This will be based on the highs and lows of your family’s life, the life-changing events that we all enjoy or endure. Moreover, databases such as Ancestry’s can support your own archive with public records to enhance a story about military service or a disputed legacy, or the birth of longed-for children.

The first step is to file your material so that you know where to find it. Depending on how many documents you have this may also be the moment to scan them; digitalized material is searchable. The most problematic issue in publishing may be gaining the agreement of family members if you have delicate or private material. Much of my archive will have to be kept sealed for some years to protect familial sensitivities. Here you will have to employ your greatest diplomatic skills to imply rather than reveal. Last of all, the physical qualities of old cards, photographs, old-fashioned handwriting can be compelling, and can make for fascinating illustrations to the way you write up your family history.

Check out Judy Montagu’s The Greyhound Diary here:

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(Writing What I Know and Feel.)

At home, I contacted my sister and some of my remaining aunts and uncles for their memories. I discovered smatterings, and of course, there were conflicting accounts. When an aunt died a few years later, her eulogy claimed that the orphanage event was due to the Depression and tight finances. But I learned from census records, years later, that my grandfather never lost his railroad job.

I put all of this in one document to see if there really was a fleshed-out story to be told. I gathered all the facts and suppositions I had about my grandparents into a nine-page essay. This work, with an occasional addition, sat in a file in my desk for over a decade. After publishing my second book, I tackled this family saga.

I thought, Is anyone going to be upset by my doing this? Maybe. Is there anyone who might sue me? Maybe. I learned from another author that if all the characters are dead, the family might come after me, but with no legal ground. To be on the slightly safer side, I changed the last name of the family. The real surname was German and began with “W.” “Wolff” jumped out at me. There was some infidelity on the part of several people in the story, so I thought, Ooh, perfect. I wanted to use an actual wedding picture of my grandparents on the cover. It’s so divulging of their dynamic. She’s clearly excited about the prospect of marriage to this handsome, hard-working man, and he’s sitting ramrod straight, unsmiling.

When I mentioned to some of my cousins that I was turning this story into a book, one of them sent me a census record from the relevant orphanage in 1930. My aunt had said, “It was someplace in Arkansas,” so I was surprised to see that it was in Kansas. Looking at a map, I saw that the home was near to Arkansas City, Kansas. As a little girl, my aunt would have remembered just bits about where she’d been. I found a picture of the orphanage and contacted the library and historical society there to get more information about the children’s home, assisting me to set up chapters about the orphanage.

Once I got started, I realized that I had two aims I hadn’t originally recognized. I wanted to vindicate my grandmother, who died when I was two, and who was blamed and shunned by some family members for the choices she made, especially by her first daughter, my mother. I made up a personality I thought went with the experiences I knew she had and the things I’d heard about her. Having been through a difficult marriage myself, I knew the angst she probably felt regarding her relationship and its failure, not to mention the sorrow of having her children sent away.

I also wanted to narrate my mother’s childhood and youthful vignettes. Mom and I had a sorry relationship; there was love but not a lot of deep understanding for each other. I tried to show in the novel how her upbringing could have made her the strict disciplinarian and intolerant person my sister and I knew. She lived in self-pity and regret; afraid she was bound for hell.

When researching the family of a woman who ran a boarding house, with whom my grandfather reputedly had an affair, I found her residence in the census. My grandfather was living there without his children. I found a picture of the boarding house, which still stands. Photos of the interior of the house hinted at the former grandeur of the place, and I compared it to my grandparents’ shabby home, which I’d seen.

I loved researching which songs and movies were current for the chronological chapters and slogged through one of Wallace Stegner’s novels to get a sense of how people in Utah and western states spoke one hundred years ago. I looked up what railroad engineers were paid in those days, and prices, to determine if they could have afforded a car (no) or a vacuum (probably not, more likely a carpet sweeper). I also now knew that the boarding house matron could have bought an electric refrigerator, unlike the ice box my mother described in her childhood home.

Putting this all together was satisfying; creating situations that may have happened, based on where people were, who was in their households, and how they may have met. I let the reader know in the first chapter that Mr. Wolff had dropped some of his children in an orphanage, and then in the second chapter went back 11 years and recounted their domestic life and what led to his decision. I labored to create unexpected reveals of the shocking parts, so that the reader would be as stunned as I had been. I appear in the epilogue, because I remember the day my grandfather died, and my mother’s reaction. Coincidentally, this leads into my memoir, almost like a prequel, although I hadn’t seen that as a possibility until the novel was finished.

My Author’s Notes state that A Wolff in the Family is based on truth and that I made suppositions based on fact. I don’t think any of my cousins will sue me, and I suspect they will enjoy the book; some of them know nothing about the skeletons I brought out of the closet. 

Check out Francine Falk-Allen’s A Wolff in the Family here:

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Shoving new ideas aside for that long made the idea-generator in my mind go rusty. Instead of ranging far and wide, brainstorming what to write next, I picked my second book topic quickly. I write historical fiction, and with all the research each book requires, I figured fast commitment was more important than exploring my options.

But then the pandemic hit. Despite the chaos, lockdowns, and store closures, my debut The German Heiress did well. But I was starting to realize how fragile a publishing career can be. Events far outside my control can derail a book and undermine years of sweat and perseverence. The only thing I control is my writing and the choice of what to write. But I had forgotten how to make that choice.

Once I finished my second novel, I faced a void. For the first time, I didn’t know what I was writing next. During the lockdowns in Europe, where I live, most of my time was spent homeschooling my kids and worrying about family members in the US. Existential angst isn’t the best environment for creativity, at least not for me. I couldn’t escape into my writing because I didn’t know what to write about. I started to get panicky. Maybe I was done. Maybe I would never write another book again.

A chance comment by my agent put me back on track. During lockdown, I had mentioned how much I missed my former home, Chicago, and she suggested I set my next book there. I liked the idea, but had no idea where to start. With an open mind, I browsed a volume of old photographs of Chicago that I had brought with me to Europe. That’s where I found the spark that would become my third book, Sinners of Starlight City.

It was a photo of the 1933 World’s Fair. The moment I saw it, my mind woke up. A World’s Fair encompasses so much of what I love and missed in the pandemic: crowds of strangers, fun and optimism, the respect for science, international travel. I began to research the Fair, ordered books, scoured the web. I knew I had the setting of my next book. I was back on track.

Except that a book isn’t setting, it’s characters. I wasn’t sure who would populate the story, or what they would do in it. Bits and pieces of ideas were scattered in my mind. I was fascinated by the premature babies put on display at the Fair, and by the fact that the European doctor who oversaw the incubators refused to segregate babies according to the US color line. Early in story development, I decided there would be a baby of mixed heritage, and that her family would form the core of the story.

Family. That was the last piece of the puzzle. I’m Black American on my father’s side, Sicilian American on my mother’s. It was soon clear the baby was going to have the same family background as me, but a hundred years in the past. I was now looking at a story that adressed intolerance and love within mixed families in an age when mixtures were not tolerated.

On video calls and email, I began to ask my family detailed questions. I learned about my Black family’s farm in Louisiana over a century ago. I learned about the emmigration of my mom’s family from Sicily to America. Late in the pandemic, I flew to Sicily to meet my family and explore where my great grandparents came from.

I poured all of this into the story, and what came out was my most personal novel so far. It’s not uncommon for historical fiction to encompass family stories of the author, but when it happens, there’s a special mix of deeply authentic personal history transformed by the creative license of fiction. The Mancuso, Gallo, and Dupre families featured in Sinners of Starlight City aren’t my family, but they borrow elements and issues that are true to my family history.

Order Anika Scott’s Sinners of Starlight City today. 

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As far as I’ve been told, none of my direct Sicilian relatives were in the mafia, but that didn’t stop me from weaving that intriguing line into the story. As I was writing, I got to escape the limitations and challenges of pandemic life and romp through the summer nights at the Chicago World’s Fair almost a century ago. The book was true escape, but also a true return to my roots.

Not every book I write is going to have such direct personal links, but now I know what kind of stories activate me in the most profound ways. When looking for ideas, I know not to write what I think I should be writing, but to write what brings me back to life.

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It tells the story of my heroine Reeva Mehta, who is forced to spend two weeks with her sisters (sisters she isn’t speaking to) after it is revealed their dad didn’t die when they were young—he’s only just died and his last wishes were for all three of his daughters to complete the Hindu death rituals for him.

There are plenty of scenes of tension between the siblings—they were actually the most fun for me to write—so here are my thoughts on how best to do it.

Know your characters well.

If you’re writing about siblings—or any family members really—you need to know exactly who they are. How would they react in any given situation? What would they think and what would they say? How would they feel?

Knowing the characters inside-out means you can explain how they feel through the slightest action/thought/comment—‘Reeva raised an eyebrow at her sister’s outfit, but decided not to say anything’—without necessarily needing a dramatic scene.

Use the setting.

My novel centers around the fact that the three sisters are forced to spend two weeks together at their dead dad’s house, sorting out his things and going to prayers every night. It means they can’t escape from each other—cue lots of stressful scenes, snapping at each other over breakfast, and walking in on each other in the bathroom.

Thinking about where your characters are—and why—can be really useful in upping the tension. Are they at a café where one of them once humiliated the other but has since forgotten? Are they forced together at a wedding? Or are they about to ruin Christmas at their family home?

Save your reveals.

Often, there is tension between siblings because of some past drama. But what if they don’t know the full story? And they find out the rest of it along with the reader…

For example, my heroine Reeva isn’t speaking to her youngest sister Jaya, because she stole Reeva’s boyfriend, and now she’s marrying him. Reeva eventually manages to accept this—but then she finds out the situation is even worse than she realized. By eking out the reveals, the tension rises, and the characters have even higher stakes to overcome.

Order I Wish We Weren’t Related by Radhika Sanghani today. 

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Let it be messy.

My favorite thing about writing families is that nothing is simple. Black and white doesn’t really exist—instead it’s all grey. Siblings rarely just hate each other without any love, or argue all the time—often there’s moments of hilarity too. Extremes can co-exist, especially in families, so use them.

Let your siblings have moments of ease and laughter and familial love—but then have one of them say the exact wrong thing in the wrong moment. What happens now? Mixing up the drama with relaxed moments just makes the tension even more palpable—and very real.

Have fun with it.

I love writing scenes with siblings because they can cross boundaries with each other that friends just wouldn’t. One of my favorite scenes in my novel is where Jaya and Sita keep pushing Reeva’s buttons—‘What, did you want me to share every little emotion with you?’ asked Reeva. ‘Yes!’ cried Jaya. ‘Like an actual sister!’—until Reeva finally explodes—‘Okay, so you want me to share. Fine, I’ll share!’—and tells them exactly what she thinks of them.

As well as oversharing about her recent sexual experience. It’s uncomfortably tense and silent—until her sisters start laughing hysterically.

I believe that when a writer enjoys what they’re writing, it comes through. So my best advice is to have as much fun with these scenes as you can—because then chances are that your reader will too.

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Whether the mother/daughter relationship is key to your current story arc, a horrifying backstory that compels the action, or merely provides a story-adjacent angst, here are a few important tips to deepen your characters and their interactions.

(8 Tips To Make an Unlikable Character Likable)

1. A Whole Lotta Mother Love

Let’s start with the good stuff: Mothers and daughters often share fierce love, profound understanding, and a mutual perspective on the world. A mother is capable of doing just about anything when it comes to protecting her child, and daughters are typically the first to step up when mothers need help. Mother and daughter can be best friends, supportive, and nurturing of each other—but of course that closeness can also get out of hand, causing problems in other intimate relationships and pushing others away.

A mother often sees aspects of herself in her daughter, for better or worse. Does the mother see her daughter as the best part of oneself? Or could the daughter represent another chance to go out into the world as a woman, without one’s current baggage? Might the mother be jealous of her daughter for her youth, her looks, her many possibilities? Or does the mother fear that her daughter will be subject to the sexism and brutality that the mother has endured, or has always dreaded? Might those concerns make a mother tighten her grip on her daughter, leading the daughter to rebel—or could the daughter be compelled to cling to home too much, like Laura Wingfield in Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, living only through her fragile glass animals?

Before becoming a mother, I never realized how much of the role can be infused with uncomfortable emotions such as guilt, resentment, and fear. There is never enough time, and because of societal, religious, and traditional expectations mothers tend to feel guilty. A lot. Resentment also rears its head, as motherhood implies a certain loss of control over one’s schedule, one’s own needs, and often of one’s sense of self altogether. Finally, mothers who adore their children beyond all reason come to realize how much they have to lose, leading to the possibility of fear coloring one’s actions and decisions.

A mother’s love for her daughter can create a rock-solid foundation of unconditional love; it can also foster a codependent, maladaptive relationship featuring overwhelming elements of competition, manipulation, and frustration.

2. Or Maybe Not So Much Love…

Every year when Mother’s Day rolls around I am reminded that mothers and their children are “supposed to be” close, or at least get along, and that expectation goes double for mothers and daughters. Of course, there are intense emotions on both sides, from mother-to-daughter and daughter-to-mother, but those emotions can drive them apart as well as bring them together. And precisely because it is so expected that they like each other, the actors involved might blame themselves for not doing so—deciding that something is wrong with them, or with the other.

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Rippling below much mother/daughter conflict is the denial of women’s needs. No one lives in a vacuum, and the women and girls in any family are subject to broader social mores which can set them up for conflict. Unrealized career goals, pressure within the home, the expectation that women should sacrifice their own needs to fulfill the caregiving role … It is common for a daughter to fail to see her mother as a three-dimensional person, and to recognize that motherhood might have been difficult. Familial strife might be stoked by the daughter’s rejection of her mother’s acceptance (or rejection) of societal norms, especially traditional gender roles.

Further complicating the situation is that women and girls often do not feel free to give voice to their needs and concerns. This silencing can result in feeling unseen, which in turn might lead to manipulation or neediness. On the other hand, even very young daughters are often skilled at reading their mothers’ unspoken and unacknowledged needs and desires, resulting in increased empathy and sensitivity.

Tip #3 Missing Love

When a mother is not around, her very absence can become, in a very real sense, a story’s main character. As evidenced by innumerable Disney movies, fables, and fairytales, a missing mother is a gripping dramatic gambit. In my novels The Paris Key, Letters from Paris, and The Lost Carousel of Provence the protagonist’s mother was absent, whether partially or altogether, and yet the yearning for Mother—and sorrow over her real or imagined loss—helped compel the narratives forward.

Conversely, a mother who is present and accounted for isn’t always a good thing. In Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, though Lizzie is not close to her mother, their relationship is fundamental to the story. It is by observing her own mother that Lizzie learns who, and what, she does NOT want to become. Negative maternal figures abound in literature: the alcoholic mother, the cold mother, the neglectful mother. All of which compel the daughter to decide whether she wants to follow in her mother’s footsteps or create her own reality.

And finally, a mother who walks away from or abuses her child is often labeled as “unnatural” within and without the family. That’s a hefty label, and a very hard character to portray with sympathy. On the other hand, if you can pull it off, you will have written a compelling story!

Conclusion

Our most intimate relationships are, by definition, multifaceted and complicated. They are a big part of what makes us human, and those complexities make stories compelling. The challenge for writers is how to realistically, and eloquently, and emotionally, portray those multidimensional interactions on the page.

The mother-daughter dynamic can be tricky, and yet it speaks volumes when the complex relationship—in all its nuanced yearnings and love, guilt and resentment—is captured on the page. In my most recent novel, The Paris Showroom, I explore the relationship of a mother and daughter who are estranged, forced to face the violence of a war, and eventually manage to find their way back to each other.

We might want to blame our mothers for everything, but whatever you do, stick some love in there. Whether unconditional or unrequited, tender or twisted, the mother/daughter dynamic is propelled by it—or by the lack of it.

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Lynne Reeves Griffin is an internationally recognized family counselor, public speaker, teacher, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Parents, Psychology Today, Solstice Literary Magazine, Chautauqua Journal, Brain, Child, and more. Writing as Lynne Reeves, her novel of domestic suspense, The Dangers of an Ordinary Night has been called “uncommonly assured” (Kirkus Reviews) and “shatteringly original…written with a tender eloquence that will break your heart” (Hank Phillippi Ryan).

Both women write about the impact of addiction on the family dynamic in their latest books.

Lynne Reeves Griffin: I write about education and parenting, and some personal essay too, but there’s a good deal of my family life growing up that I leave off limits. I may get there some day, and be able to disclose certain things, but I wonder how did you decide to write so openly about your experience with addiction alongside your quest to find answers to what teed up your children’s risk?

Jessica Lahey: At this point, I’ve been writing about myself and my family for a while, so there’s hardly anything that’s off-limits for me. As a journalist, that’s what I’ve always written. From my first piece that was published in The Atlantic that went viral and led to The Gift of Failure. Everything I write comes from a place of, ‘What am I curious about? Here’s what I’m seeing happening in my school, and how do I fix that? Here’s what I’m seeing with my children, and how do I fix that?’

I can only write about what I’m interested in. For me, the intersection of memoir and nonfiction is also my favorite place to read. I think the most interesting stories have to be attached to people, which is why we end up caring about them.

Lynne: Absolutely. A few years ago, I became enamored with the HBO documentary, “Heroin: Cape Cod USA.” I still had so many questions after watching it that I reached out to some of the mothers who participated in those support groups. A number of them really wanted to talk to me about what puts children at risk for addiction. At the time, I was toying with whether or not to write a nonfiction book about predictive risk, but it turns out the novelist in me decided to go the fictional route.

When I read your book, I thought, ‘Okay, Jess took the memoir plus parenting self-help path.’ You used story as a vehicle for content, but the story is you, which makes it more emotionally resonant to readers.

(A Conversation With Cai Emmons About Her Novel, Sinking Islands)

Jessica: I think that’s where the best journalism comes from. That’s where we connect—through stories. That’s why Dopesick by Beth Macy was such a fantastic book, because it relates to that story. Here’s how this relates to being human. Or Mill Town by Kerri Arsenault. The angle on writing my book was to be as helpful to kids and their parents as possible. This book was about trying to end intergenerational substance abuse. And that is something we talk about a lot in this house.

Lynne: I wondered what conversations you and your husband had about how much of your story to disclose to your sons, how candid to be with them. And how to navigate those relationship dilemmas in the book.

Jessica: My husband is also a writer. Tim writes mostly about medical ethics and infectious disease. We have a lot of conversations about how you tell stories, especially medical stories, without breaking confidentiality. Still, it’s a tough line to walk, and the question always becomes, ‘Is this my story to tell or someone else’s story to tell? And if it’s someone else’s story to tell, then I have to get permission or give a pseudonym.’

When it comes to my kids, who are older now, (18 and 22), we have a lot of conversations about what’s cool with them and what’s not. They have permission to say no to things. Which means as a writer, there are a lot of stories in my head that I really, really want to tell and I cannot.

Lynne: That’s often why I choose to write fiction. Particularly where addiction risk is concerned, I’ve found it hard to convince parents and teachers that the predictive evidence is there as early as infancy and early childhood. Which means prevention programs that don’t begin until middle school and high school, are too little, too late.

That’s also why I was excited when I read your book. You delve right into that evidence, and the effective prevention that’s rooted in social emotional learning (SEL), which can start really early.

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Jessica: Absolutely. And understanding that stress—like the adverse childhood experiences Nadine Burke Harris talks about in her book The Deepest Well—is not just being hit as a child. It’s intergenerational addiction. It’s systemic racism. It’s all of these other experiences that turn our genes on and off and make us more susceptible to things like substance abuse and mental illnesses.

Lynne: And yet with all this research, we’re still dealing with the stigma of it. We still have great difficulty talking about it the same way we talk about having pneumonia or heart disease. Why is the secrecy still so insidious?

Jessica: It’s shame; it’s guilt. I think that’s the real problem with the secrecy. How family members pretend everything is fine, when what kids are perceiving they’re told they aren’t perceiving. That’s been one of the most harmful things in terms of dealing with addiction in my family. And so the one thing I knew, was that not talking about it was never going to be possible for me.

In my book, I mention Susan Cheever’s quote about the elephant in the room. A lot of people are trying to silently move around an elephant to not talk about the problem. And that’s just really disturbing for kids.

Lynne: It’s one of the things I try to examine in my book. Secrecy around addiction has an impact, even if the children look like they’re doing well.

Jessica: My husband who’s vigilant and a physician, and who knows what to look for, had no idea of the scope of my problem. Which is so common. People are living with you and they’re just not seeing it. It actually feeds the secrecy piece as well. It keeps it going.

Lynne: Which allows the addiction to creep up on you. Which I see a lot with women who struggle with anxiety. It starts to escalate as different demands on their system mount. Even though they might have had a handle on their drinking before.

Jessica: Yeah, mine actually peaked when I was writing full-time. And I was teaching full-time in middle school and I had all the usual teacher duties. I had a young child and a kid in middle school. I was always working on a piece. I had all these feelings of obligation about what I was supposed to be doing in my life. It was a lot. I thought I was handling all of that okay. And clearly I wasn’t.

Lynne: It’s how women are socialized. They think, ‘If I can do all that, I must be fine.’ But the real question is, ‘Is the addiction messing with my life? Or is it enough for me to stop?’

Jessica: That’s the reason I’m out there talking about it so much. The minute I talk about my experience, it frees someone else up to talk about it too. That’s the best thing ever. They think, ‘If she could be an alcoholic then what does that say about me?’ It’s what might prompt people to question their drinking.

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And I have to add, I’m allowed to talk about it. I get, “Oh, you’re so brave.” But it’s my job. My duty to talk about it, so that other people may be able to who maybe can’t right now. For another woman, with so much stacked against her, if she goes out there and says publicly that she’s also an addict or an alcoholic, it could be another strike against her and she might lose her children.

Lynne: I hear what you’re saying and I agree. And still I think you’re brave, because like you, I have family stories to tell, but I don’t feel emotionally safe enough to tell them yet. So I write novels. I’m still plagued by certain life experiences and want to continue to revisit them, but I need more psychic distance to be able to do so.

I think any way we can get encouraging messages like yours out there is really, really important. No one single approach to addiction education will work, especially if it’s our goal to try and disseminate all that is knowable. And there’s a lot in this topic that is knowable.

Jessica: My thinking always is, since we know that the prevention programs that work are really glorified social emotional learning (SEL) programs with health components, I always ask: would this be in a good SEL program? Okay, then, I’m using it. The ability to take perspective and engage in deep listening and empathy is really hard for kids, but if you can make that part of everyday learning, all the better.

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As a child, I was an avid reader and often settled in with a Nancy Drew mystery or a Baby-Sitters Club adventure. And while my bookshelves might have offered a couple of fun breaks from the toxic family dynamics that narrated my childhood, profound escapism was fleeting. Children’s books of the 1980s and 1990s simply did not contain young characters who were forced to navigate the grim realities of being born to emotionally unstable families, and this dearth of literary representation remains true of today’s children’s book publishing industry.

Had this pandemic occurred 30 years ago, I would have been a child stuck in a tense and emotionally volatile home without much opportunity for a reprieve and without any hope of seeing myself reflected in the literature I read. As I continue to gorge on my steady diet of popular children’s literature (I’m insatiable in this regard), it’s clear to me that not much has changed.

An emotionally unstable home life can often be difficult—if not impossible—to identify, especially for the children experiencing it. I wasn’t beaten or starved. I had food to eat, clothes on my back, and a roof over my head. I wasn’t locked inside a room or made to eat dinner out of the garbage after protesting the contents of a meal. Such examples of child abuse are straightforward and easy to identify. As a former middle school teacher, making calls to our state’s version of Child Protective Services was sometimes as much a part of my job as grading and planning. It’s thanks to mainstream notions of what child abuse is and looks like that I never struggled to explain the reason for my phone calls.

I would, however, struggle for nearly 40 years to define why my own childhood seemed so “off.” Unable to navigate my crumbling mental health on my own, I eventually landed into trauma-based therapy. It was in therapy that I’d learn how, while all of my physical needs were met, I was emotionally manipulated and held responsible from a young age for mitigating my parents’ adult emotions and behaviors, much of which were toxic and unstable. To imagine a child being consumed by her parents’ emotional instability because school closed down during a pandemic seems unthinkable. To have no way out of this dynamic adds a layer onto “shelter-in-place” that children from healthy and loving families do not have to contend with.

As we all emerge from the pandemic a bit weary and bleary eyed, many of us battling worsened mental health, I’m forced to consider the children who are growing up as I had and the kinds of stories that might have helped to pass the time: stories that encourage them to feel normal under abnormal conditions. As a child, I’d read Roald Dahl’s Matilda and delighted in the minor forms of revenge that the protagonist had taken against her toxic parents. Years later, I’d read that story with my students. But had a student asked for another book recommendation where children their age deal with difficult family dynamics, I’d have come up empty. Decades earlier, had I’d asked the same of my own teachers, I’m sure they’d have come up empty.

It’s because of this dearth that I’ve fallen headfirst into the project of writing books that showcase children who struggle with an unremarkable and deceptively common type of family: one in which siblings are at war with each other, and parents too wrapped up in meeting their own emotional needs to be concerned with whether their children are getting along or adjusting well to the world around them. In my books, kids and teens are the scapegoats for all that goes wrong in the home and parents are unwilling to accept accountability for their deteriorating family, preferring instead to offload that job onto their children. There’s nothing unique or extraordinary about such families, and I remain puzzled by the relative literary silences about them.

(We’re a Nation of a Billion Indians, and Yet, I Hardly See Myself in Children’s Books)

In sum, the characters I create are tasked with saving themselves. They turn out better than OK in the end—no thanks to most of the adults who occupy their small worlds. Such stories reflect real-world experience for many children, an issue brought to bear by last year’s lockdown. With my own books, I hope to follow in the footsteps of Shannon Doleski’s popular debut, Mary Underwater, about a child scientist forced to contend with her violent father and enabling mother. The toxic family dynamics featured in this book are not subtle, glossed over, or delivered as an after-thought—they are as much a part of the storyline as the main character’s desire to build a submarine for a school project. I first read this book during the pandemic and remain in awe of the author’s brave and masterful attention to the cruel realities that many children face. We need more books like this, and we need them now.

It took more than three decades for me to see my life as a scapegoated daughter reflected in the books I read. Self-help texts and adult memoirs are replete with imagery of outcast children, and with these books (and therapy) I’ve finally been given language to understand my childhood experiences. But how nice it would have been, to have accessed a story or two about a child who had everything she needed—but for her family’s love, sobriety, impulse control, psychological stability, and emotional availability.

If mean, enraged and emotionally absent parents remain the domain of self-help and adult memoirs, there is a large swath of children for whom a sense of belonging—a fundamental belief that they are enough, worthy, and normal—will remain elusive. This dearth sends a real message to all readers: That only a certain kind of child with a certain kind of story matters and is worthy of being told. That all other life stories are too taboo to make it to print. This is a harmful misstep that requires course correction, stat.

My wish, as a teacher and writer of children’s literature, is a modest one: We have untold lessons to learn from this pandemic. May one of them be a fuller understanding of the young audiences that our nation’s publishing industry and teacher’s bookshelves have yet to serve. An entire generation of mental health outcomes relies, in part, on this knowledge.

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The post Where Are the Toxic Families in Children’s Books? appeared first on Writer's Digest.

In this post, Dave explains how her family inspired her to write her novel What a Happy Family, why she holds revising work in such high regard, and much more!

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Name: Saumya Dave
Literary agent: Jessica Watterson
Book title: What a Happy Family
Publisher: Berkley
Release date: June 22, 2021
Genre: Women’s fiction
Elevator pitch for the book: After a scandal, a family learns that sometimes you have to fall apart in order to come stronger than before.
Previous titles by the author: Well-Behaved Indian Women

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What prompted you to write this book?

I always wanted to write a story that explored mental health through different members of a family. Growing up, I often saw mental health as something that carried stigma and silence with it. My work as a psychiatrist has shown me the various ways it can shape an individual, family, and community.

Throughout 2020, my husband, son, and I lived with four generations of my family. Learning their stories, reflecting on memories we shared, and seeing everyone as adults all inspired the book. I was fascinated with how we can sometimes keep the people we love in certain roles and how it can be difficult to take them out of those roles when we are back together.

(Telling Our Family Stories: 4 Reasons Why It’s More Important Than Ever to Write Our Family Narratives)

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? 

The process took around a year and a half. I initially wanted to write a story about a psychiatric resident navigating her job. But as I kept revising, I realized I was really trying to write about family bonds. For me, writing is rewriting. I’ve learned over time that that truly is my favorite part of the process: learning that I’m really trying to say something I didn’t expect, something that can only be uncovered by rewriting.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title? 

There were so many learning moments! At first, the novel had the perspectives of two sisters. Over time, it included chapters from each of the family members. My wonderful editor could see the story I was trying to write and knew that was the change I needed to make to help it get there. This shift also led to a change in the title. I wanted one that reflected the theme of the novel and was surprised my mind jumped to a moment at a close friend’s wedding. My close friend and her family were arguing on the altar and the photographer said, “Smile! When we see this picture years from now, we want to think, ‘Oh, what a happy family!’” Immediately, everyone changed (and by that, I mean grinned and pretended everything was great). When I thought back to that time, I realized What a Happy Family was the perfect title.

(On Mining Humor From Family Dynamics in Your Writing)

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book? 

I didn’t expect certain parts of my own residency training to inform the book. Learning individual and family therapy, understanding intergenerational trauma, and listening to people’s stories were all skills I focused on in residency and all ended up helping me understand the characters better.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope that readers feel comforted and less alone. I hope they are reminded that it’s okay to struggle, not know where you’re going in life, and also understand that we often don’t know what others are carrying.

If you could share one piece of advice with other authors, what would it be?

All of the writers I know are voracious readers, so I’d start with suggesting to read as much as possible! Read things you love. Read things you hate. Read different forms of writing. Dissect the work you come across. See why it works or why it doesn’t. 

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Monroe is captivated by the beauty and fragility of the wild habitat around her. In particular, the coastal southern landscape became a strong and important focus of many of her novels. Monroe immerses herself in both academic research and hands-on/volunteering to learn about a species or conservation issue. Then, she uses the knowledge and experiences working with animals and wildlife experts to craft captivating stories that identify important parallels between nature and human nature. Bottlenose dolphins, monarch butterflies, shorebirds, and loggerhead sea turtles are among the wild species she has worked with and woven into her novels.

Monroe is an active conservationist and serves on the South Carolina Aquarium Board Emeritis, The Leatherback Trust, The Pat Conroy Literary Center Honorary Board, Friends of Coastal Carolina, and Casting Carolinas Advisory Board. She is especially proud to be a 20-year plus state-certified volunteer with the Island Turtle Team, the group that first sparked her love for loggerhead sea turtles, and is the inspiration of her Beach House series.

Monroe has also published two children’s books, which complement the environmental themes she’s known for in her novels. Monroe’s first middle-grade book, The Islanders, will be released June 15, 2021.

Her latest novel, The Summer of Lost and Found, will be released nationwide May 11, 2021.

She is also a contributor to Reunion Beach, an upcoming anthology by several bestselling authors and writers as a tribute to the life and legacy of their friend New York Times bestselling author Dorothea Benton Frank.

Monroe is the co-creator and co-host of the weekly web show and podcast Friends and Fiction featuring the five bestselling authors Mary Kay Andrews, Kristy Woodson Harvey, Kristin Harmel, and Patti Callahan Henry with endless stories, special guests, and a way to connect readers and writers.

In this post, Monroe discusses what it’s like to draft a series that spans generations and storylines and much more!

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Name: Mary Alice Monroe
Literary agent: Faye Bender, The Book Group
Book title: The Summer of Lost and Found
Publisher: Gallery Books
Release date: May 11, 2021
Genre: Literary fiction
Elevator pitch for the book: The Beach House series continues with The Summer of Lost and Found as Mary Alice Monroe creates a family saga about relationships, courage, nature, and life lessons as the legacy passes from one generation to the next.
Previous titles by the author:

The Beach House series

• The Beach House
• Swimming Lessons
• Beach House Memories
• Beach House for Rent
• Beach House Reunion
• On Ocean Boulevard
• The Summer of Lost and Found

Stand Alone

• The Summer Guests
• A Lowcountry Christmas
• Last Light Over Carolina
• The Butterfly’s Daughter
• Time is a River
• Sweetgrass
• Skyward
• The Book Club
• The Four Seasons
• Girl in the Mirror
• The Long Road Home
• One Summer’s Night
• Second Star to the Right

The Lowcountry Series

• The Summer Girls
• The Summer Wind
• The Summer’s End
• A Lowcountry Wedding
• Children’s Books
• The Islanders (middle grade)
• A Butterfly Called Hope
• Turtle Summer

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What prompted you to write this book?

My novels center around a woman’s life—family sagas. What could be more interesting to write about than the changes and challenges families faced with the phenomenon of forced isolation, friend and family pods, and the emotional and economic strains of the year 2020? I wanted to write about this phenomenon we were living in—not about the Covid-19 illness, but family dynamics. And how better than with a family I knew so well—the Rutledge family of The Beach House series.

(10 Tips For Writing a Family Drama Novel)

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? 

I wrote this novel in real-time—and yes, the idea changed continually during the process. It was a roller coaster journey! I write from structure, and I did begin with an outline. The problem came when living through the weeks and months of the pandemic year, my perspective kept changing. I threw out my outline. What I wanted to say in April was different in July and changed again in November. Rewrite followed rewrite. I pulled my hair out, cursed the characters, the story, swore I would never do this again. It was a long, arduous process. By the year’s end, however, I read my novel for the last time, tweaked the final words, and smiled with satisfaction. My story was told.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I had a new editor for this book, and I was naturally concerned about our new working relationship. As it turned out, we worked beautifully together with patience and positivity. But as I said, writing a book in real-time rather than having a story structure was agonizing for me as a writer. Her challenge was to edit all my rewrites as the year progressed. In the end, we both felt the book spoke about the heart of the book—what was lost in 2020, but also what joys and lessons were learned.

(On Writing Dysfunctional Families)

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

There were many! 2020 was a year like no other. We have never been in a pandemic before. Necessarily, my perspective changed as I lived through the months of relative isolation and observed what was happening in my own home and in homes around the nation. After the original shock and fear of a global shutdown, we went through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Our defense strategies shifted to coping strategies. As my experiences changed, so did what I wanted to say in the novel.

Perhaps that was the biggest surprise. At the ending, I realized that despite the frustrations and limitations, there were unexpected joys, new patterns and habits developed, bursts of creativity, and memories forged that might not have otherwise happened. Learning this myself, I could create scenes in the novel that were illuminating and hopefully inspirational.

The character focus also changed. Initially, I was introducing a new, young generation of a well-loved family in The Beach House series. As the year and the story progressed, I recognized that the problems of 2020 were different for the older generation than the younger. Two sides of the same coin. The young lost jobs, didn’t date, their lives were put on hold. The older generation feared for their health and survival. Yet with an eye to loved ones, they helped with wisdom, love, and a place to live!

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope they appreciate that for all the hardships of 2020, there were some hard-won lessons of joy, too. Life is to be lived in the moment. Plans cannot be made without knowing one just might have to pivot. I hope after reading the novel, readers hug their loved ones and go outdoors and appreciate the beauty that surrounds them, even—or perhaps especially—if it’s is in their own backyard.

If you could share one piece of advice with other authors, what would it be?

Allow yourself the rough first draft. Chisel the hard marble. Get the story out, its shape and form. Release your emotions and find out what it is you want to say in the novel. In your subsequent drafts, you can pull out your tool belt, listen to select critiques, and use your craft to hone the novel into a finished piece of art. 

The post Mary Alice Monroe: On Writing the Family Saga appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Humor often stems from things that are not humorous. In Dial A for Aunties, none of the characters in my book finds their situation—having to hide a dead body while catering to a huge wedding—humorous, but we as readers find it hilarious. Meddy, the main character, does not find her mother and aunts’ feuds funny. But again, it’s what we readers want. The more drama, the more comedy. Here are my top tips on how to extract the humor from family dynamics.

(Jesse Q. Sutanto: On Accidental Murder and Meddlesome Families)

How to Mine Humor From Family Dynamics in Your Writing

1. Identify the feuds

Remember that drama means a treasure trove for humorous interactions. New drama is great, but old drama is even better. Think of the history between your characters. The “enemies to lovers” trope is so good precisely because it relies on a rich and complicated history between the characters. Apply that your main character’s family members—why does your MC’s mother hate her second sister? What happened in their past to make them have an ongoing feud? And how does it affect their present-day interactions? You don’t need to include everything in the book, but it’s useful to have it at the back of your mind to inform yourself on how these characters would interact with each other.

2. Identify the family hierarchy

Every family has its own hierarchy. This can be shaped by cultural norms or by wealth, age, gender, and so on. Whatever it is, identify it. Have a clear idea of how each character falls within the hierarchy, and ask yourself: is this character happy with their position in the family hierarchy? And if not, what are they doing to try and change the hierarchy, and how do the other characters react to it? For example, in Dial A for Aunties, the hierarchy is defined by age, so Big Aunt is the leader of the family, followed by Second Aunt, then Third Aunt, and so on. The main character, who is the youngest, has the least say. This hierarchical equation leads to a lot of trouble, especially because Second Aunt, who is vying for Big Aunt’s position as the matriarch, makes decisions to undermine Big Aunt, which ultimately causes more problems for the main character.

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The family hierarchy is a beautiful thing I always refer back to when I feel like a scene needs more tension or humor or if I need to figure out how a certain character would react. Also, how important is the family hierarchy to your characters? In Dial A for Aunties, the hierarchy is so important that the main character finds herself having to do things like listening to her elders despite her common sense telling her to do something different, which of course leads to more disasters and therefore even more comedy.

3. Pit them against each other!

Ma can’t stand Fourth Aunt? Great. Put them in a room with each other and blow up one of their dark secrets! Second Aunt has always longed to be the matriarch, but Big Aunt is in the way? Put them in a position where people have to vote between Big Aunt vs. Second Aunt’s idea! Whatever skeletons you’ve come up with for your character’s family, parade them out at the most inopportune time.

Just remember that in all this, you need to have a touchstone, a character who is the voice of reason that your readers can relate to. This character’s job is to point out how ridiculous the family is being so that your reader doesn’t get too frustrated by the antics that your characters pull. In Dial A for Aunties, that touchstone is the main character, who is always trying to mediate between her mother and aunts (who then ignore her and cause havoc anyway). This is also a great way of inserting humor because the over-the-top antics of side characters work really well when juxtaposed with the normalcy of the main character. Think of Jane’s over-the-top family in Jane the Virgin. All of the side characters are delightfully zany, whereas Jane is relatively average when compared to the rest of them. She’s placed in an extraordinary situation, but on her own, she is a pretty ordinary, albeit very likable, character.

I hope this shines a light on mining humor from family dynamics, and honestly, I think the best drama is family drama!

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