I’m just mulling over possibilities for the novel I’m planning to write in November. I’m quite interested in family secrets, and I’ve heard of several that would be great novel material.
- The woman who was 60 when she found out she was adopted and the biological youngest of a large family.
- The woman who discovered that her father and mother were not married and that he had another, legitimate family.
- The woman whose husband disappeared, leaving her with six young children during the depression. The mystery was never solved.
- The man whose father turned out to have faked his own death and started a new life.
All of these seem like gold mines. Any other ideas?
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Did I tell you about my friend Phyllis, whose parents died in the Spanish ‘flu epidemic? She was the youngest of 3 little girls. They were sent to Maine grandparents, to the lighthouse where their grandfather was the keeper. The 3 proved too much to take care of, so Phyllis, aged 3, was adopted by a loving, childless couple, and didn’t remember about her original family. At 67, when searching for her birth certificate, she began her discoveries. And then
How about an obsessive-compulsive accumulator collector who lived like a pauper until he was forced to start selling off everything he owned at age 60 and became a multi-millionaire because of the rarities in his collections? I don’t know, maybe I should write that one . . .
Well, there was that Belgian woman whose WWII GI father I helped locate about ten years ago. She’d grown up in a variety of convents, because her mother was so ashamed of her. Michele later met her mother by chance in a store; her mother Genevieve was old, alcoholic, and broken. After Genevieve’s death, Michele found a few scraps of information about her father, Al, but wanted to find him; all she knew was that he’d been an American GI. When I was able to help find his son Roy (Al was dead), Roy was astounded, practically speechless, that he had a Belgian half-sister.