Where there are families there are stories and where there are stories there are always secrets. It’s ripe crop for a writer. In literature, these are a staple of the coming-of-age novel. Family secrets seem to rise to the surface when a protagonist steps from childhood into adulthood, in that equally devastating and freeing moment of realising that one exists both within a family and outside of it, too.
It’s something I find myself drawn towards as a reader and as a writer – to the way untold truths take root between friends, lovers, families. In my debut novel, The Things That We Lost, I explore a family history through the eyes of a British Indian mother and son, Avani and Nik, as Nik tries to uncover the circumstances of his father’s death.
Whether in memoirs, novels or short stories, I’m also interested in the negotiation that takes place between a narrator and reader when secrets are involved, whether the two stand side by side in unearthing them, or the dramatic irony that charges through a story when truths are revealed to one but not the other. Here are 10 books that pull off this kind of negotiation especially well.
1. Foster by Claire Keegan
The story opens with the narrator’s father leaving her with the Kinsellas, a couple who live on a farm in rural Ireland. Cautious at first, the compassion she is shown by the couple draws her closer to them. She is bathed, fed, loved, and told, fervently, “there are no secrets in this house”. Except there are, or rather, there is one, sitting quietly behind the couple’s tenderness towards the girl. It’s the memory of their dead son, whose clothes the narrator wears to mass, whose room she sleeps in. A subtle, beautiful tale, all the more powerful for its succinctness.
2. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
This novel takes the form of a letter from Little Dog, a Vietnamese American narrator, to his illiterate mother. The fact that she will never be able to read it creates the perfect occasion for sincerity, for whispering truths that will never be heard. Revelations are made, secrets surface. Little Dog discovers fragments of his family’s history, the trauma they fled, and how all of this can lead him back to the pieces of himself.
