The Joy—and Challenge—of Writing a Novel Inspired by Family Stories

There’s an old adage that writers enjoy pulling out from time to time: “Be nice to me or you’ll end up in my novel.”

Although I’ve never been one to torment my enemies—not that I have any—in the pages of my books, I have from time to time dipped into family lore for inspiration. And never has this been more evident with my recent novel The Lost English Girl.

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The seed for the novel, which starts in 1934 and stretches until 1945, came from an old family story. The tale goes that my mother’s aunt fell pregnant out of wedlock. That alone would have raised eyebrows in their Catholic, working-class Liverpudlian community, but the situation was even more complicated because the father of her unborn child was not Catholic. He was Jewish.

The young couple was either strongly encouraged or—more likely—forced by their families to marry in order to legitimize the coming child. However, instead of living as a family, the couple was separated by their families on their wedding day because they were of different faiths. Legend goes that my mother’s aunt raised the child—a boy—at home with her mother. She never saw her husband again.

How did my mother’s aunt feel about marrying and immediately being separated from her husband? How did her husband feel about not meeting his son? Were they in love or was the child the result of a fling? Who ultimately made the decision to force apart these two young people, and did the couple have any say in the matter? We don’t know any of the answers to those questions, and anyone who might have answered them has been gone for a long time.

This is where, as a novelist, I come in. I believe that writers often feel compelled to fill in gaps, to provide context, to imagine why something is and what could have been. I wanted to answer some of those questions for myself.

The Lost English Girl is not biographical or in any way the story of my mother’s aunt. It is entirely a work of fiction, especially when it comes to everything that happens after the wedding of the first two chapters. However, there is truth in some of the roots of the story, and I wanted to try to be respectful of the people who inspired the story.

It was a unique challenge to try to take the seed of an idea in my mother’s aunt’s story and breathe life into my main character, Viv, who finds herself in the same situation at the start of the book. Even more of a challenge was creating the other half of that fictional couple, The Lost English Girl’s Joshua. If we knew only a little about my mother’s aunt, we knew even less about her estranged husband and how he felt about their marriage and their child. Joshua goes through an incredible amount of growth over the course of the book, and I hope that readers will come to empathize with him and his story as deeply as I have.

I believe authors—especially historical novelists—offer a window into someone else’s life. They create worlds and characters that readers have never experienced before but that those same readers can connect with. One way that we do that is through looking to the truth in order to tell stories that feel lived-in and undeniably grounded in reality.

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My book The Lost English Girl, an epic saga of love, motherhood, and betrayal during World War 2, is available in print, ebook, and audiobook. Further information is available on my website.