How I turned family scandals into fiction

Sitting in a church recreation hall in southern California after the funeral of one of my mother’s many brothers, my aunt shocked me to discover that my grandfather had taken her and five of her siblings to an orphanage, taking them to my grandmother when her actions were inappropriate. Then came some surprising reasons and consequences, as my aunt casually revealed. My mother, the oldest of over a dozen children, had died eight years earlier without saying a word to me or my much older sister!

(I write what I know and feel.)

Back home, I contacted my sister and some of my other aunts and uncles to get their memories. I discovered minor information and of course there were conflicting accounts. When my aunt died a few years later, her funeral oration stated that the event at the orphanage was caused by the crisis and tight finances. But years later, I learned from the census that my grandfather never lost his job on the railroad.

I put it all into one document to see if it really was a rich story to tell. I compiled all the facts and assumptions I had about my grandparents into a nine-page essay. This work, with occasional additions, sat in a folder on my desk for over a decade. After the second book was published, I took up this family saga.

I thought Will anyone be angry that I do this? Maybe. Is there anyone who could sue me? Maybe. I learned from another author that if all the characters die, my family can come after me, but without any legal basis. For greater security, I changed the family name. The real name was German and started with “W”. “Wolff” attacked me. There was some infidelity on the part of a few people in this story, so I thought: Oh, perfect. I wanted to use a real wedding photo of my grandparents on the cover. It’s a way of revealing their dynamics. She is clearly excited at the prospect of marriage to this handsome, hard-working man, and he sits straight and unsmiling.

When I mentioned to some of my cousins ​​that I was turning this story into a book, one of them sent me a 1930 census of the relevant orphanage. My aunt said, “It was somewhere in Arkansas,” so I was surprised to see it was in Kansas. Looking at the map, I saw that the house was near Arkansas City, Kansas. As a little girl, my aunt only remembered fragments of where she was. I found a photo of the orphanage and contacted the local library and historical society for more information about the orphanage, which helped me create the chapters on the orphanage.

Once I started, I realized I had two goals that I didn’t recognize at first. I wanted to make up for my grandmother who died when I was two years old and was blamed and rejected by some family members for the choices she made, especially by her first daughter, my mother. I created a persona that I felt matched the experiences I knew and what I had heard about her. Having been through a difficult marriage myself, I knew the anxiety she probably felt about her relationship and its failure, not to mention the sadness of sending her children away.

I also wanted to talk about my mother’s childhood and youth. Mom and I had a miserable relationship; there was love, but there was no deep mutual understanding. I tried to show in the novel how her upbringing may have caused her to become the strict disciplinarian and intolerant person my sister and I knew. She lived in self-pity and regret; she was afraid she would go to hell.

While researching the family of the woman who ran the boarding house, with whom my grandfather was allegedly having an affair, I found her place of residence in the census. My grandfather lived there without any children. I found a photo of the guesthouse that is still standing. Photos of the inside of the house showed the place’s former glory, and I compared it to the dingy house I had seen of my grandparents’ house.

I loved seeing which songs and movies were current in chronological chapters, and I dug through one of Wallace Stegner’s novels to learn how people in Utah and the Western states spoke a hundred years ago. I looked up how much railroad engineers earned back then and what the prices were to determine whether they could afford a car (no) or a vacuum cleaner (probably not, more like a carpet sweeper). I also now knew that the boarding house matron could buy an electric refrigerator, unlike the refrigerator my mother had described in her childhood home.

Putting it all together was satisfying; creating situations that could occur depending on where people were, who was in their households and how they could meet. In chapter one, I let the reader know that Mr. Wolff placed some of his children in an orphanage, and then in chapter two, I went back 11 years and described their home life and what led to his decision. I tried to reveal shocking parts unexpectedly so that the reader would be as stunned as I was. I appear in the epilogue because I remember the day my grandfather died and my mother’s reaction. Coincidentally, it leads into my memories, almost like a prequel, although I didn’t see the possibility of that until the novel was finished.

This is what my author’s notes state Wolff in the family it is based on truth and my assumptions are based on facts. I don’t think any of my cousins ​​will sue me, and I suspect they’ll like the book; some of them don’t know anything about the skeletons I pulled out of the closet.

Check out Francine Falk-Allen Wolff in the family Here:

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