Family Secrets: A Storyteller’s Bounty, or Curse?

Authors weigh in on airing their families' unmentionables-- in print

Panelists: Aimee Liu, David Francis, Elle Johnson, Toni Ann Johnson, Colette Sartor. Photo credit: Joshua Gershick

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Hi Loreates!

One last AWP post for you. The panel I moderated on Family Secrets was so successful (over 100 in the audience and many raves) that I thought you’d surely want a taste of our conversation, especially since many of you are working on stories steeped in your own family secrets! [Don’t miss the Family Secrets Writing Prompt at the end of this post!]

Here’s our opening pitch:

Family histories provide raw material and inspiration for countless fiction and nonfiction writers, many of whom are motivated to probe deeply held secrets and past traumas. But many also fear familial disapproval, shame, and obstruction. They feel a moral responsibility to tell the truth, but truth is difficult to confirm when secrets have been buried, perhaps for generations. Not all relatives cooperate. And not all stories make sense when pulled from hiding. Vital pieces may be missing, essential informants deceased. Transforming artifacts and shards of memory into literature that rings true can be as vexing as it is seductive. Legacies of immigration and racism present special challenges, as this diverse panel of novelists, memoirists, screenwriters, and writing teachers know from experience.

Here’s who’s talking:

• David Francis, the Australian/American author of Agapanthus Tango, published in seven languages and in the US as The Great Inland Sea; Stray Dog Winter, which won an American Library Association prize for fiction; and Wedding Bush Road. Francis recently finished his fourth novel, Trick Season.

• Elle Johnson, a TV writer whose credits include Bosch, Law & Order, and CSI Miami. Johnson won an NAACP Image award for the Netflix series Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam CJ Walker. Her debut memoir, The Officer’s Daughter, was named one of People Magazine’s best new books of 2021.

• Toni Ann Johnson, a Flannery O’Connor Award winner for her linked story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste. A two-time finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary work, her new story collection But Where’s Home? is forthcoming from UPK’s Screen Door Press.

• Colette Sartor, the author of Once Removed, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She has taught writing for over twenty years and is the executive director of The CineStory Foundation, a nonprofit mentoring organization for emerging TV writers and screenwriters.

• And me, Aimee Liu, author of the novels Glorious Boy, Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face and the memoirs Gaining and Solitaire. Cloud Mountain was based on the buried story of my grandparents’ Chinese-American interracial marriage. And my mother tried to stop publication of three of my books because she didn’t want our secrets to be told!

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PANEL DISCUSSION

Family Secrets: A Storyteller’s Bounty, or Curse?

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Q: Many writers use their families’ most closely held mysteries and secrets as subject matter. What roles have these secrets played in your work?

• Aimee: The biggest secrets in my life have always revolved around identity, since no one in my family could ever explain why my white American grandmother married my Chinese grandfather, defying the racist attitudes and anti-miscegenation laws of 1906, and then burned every reminder of him and of China after living there for twenty years. Likewise, I never got a satisfactory explanation for my parents’ “international” marriage, which seemed to make both of them, as well as me, miserable, though they stayed together for over 60 years. These secrets/mysteries had complicated trickle-down impacts on family dynamics, which have catalyzed my creative work for decades.

• David: Whether consciously or not, I’ve been circling, prodding and excavating family secrets in different ways in each of my novels, historically in THE GREAT INLAND SEA, in a more contemporary setting in WEDDING BUSH ROAD, in the back story in STRAY DOG WINTER. I’m also fascinated with the notion of trauma bleeding through into next generations, either through the DNA or imprinted behaviorally, and how it manifests in weird ways.

• Elle: I have not intentionally sought to write about family secrets. But the secrets in my family have shaped and molded me to the point where the only way I can process them and their effect on me is to write about them. Secrets create a heightened state and fuel conflicts that otherwise would dissipate and disappear. The most compelling writing I find is full of conflict. Things left unsaid are most intriguing. As a writer and a human, secrets are the most powerful and compelling stories we hold.

  One of my first and favorite writing teachers used to make us do an in-class prompt where we wrote about our most shameful moments and secrets. This was a powerful exercise that helped me to realize how to find the real heat in a story. That exercise led me to always look for what was hidden in a story. Of course, this is something that as a TV writer I’ve always been taught: to play with subtext, to not ever be OTN – on the nose – but to hide and delay to draw out an audience’s interest in a story.

• Toni Ann: My last two books Light Skin Gone to Waste and Homegoing, and one forthcoming in early 2026, But Where’s Home? have all been autobiographical fiction about my family, so family history, including secrets, have played a huge role in my writing. The craziness and dysfunction of my family are why I started writing to begin with. The first thing I wrote, at age nineteen, was about my parents’ divorce and how I was in the middle of it. The same story was used as the inspiration for the title story in my new story collection. I think I’m a result of the insanity of my family and so I’ve been obsessed with revisiting it to understand my issues and to create a better, non-toxic present and future.

• Colette: I was raised in a chaotic household filled with the ill kept secrets of my ever-warring parents. Secrets, I learned, could warp intentions and erode trust; they could destroy relationships, families. The only degree of control I had was to appoint myself resident seeker and keeper of secrets. I eavesdropped on conversations, read letters, emails, texts that weren’t meant for me. I told myself I’d use whatever I discovered to help fix my family. Really, though, the information festered until finally it drove me to write stories exploring the impact of those secrets—having them, holding them, betraying them—on the keepers and their sources.

Q: What was the most valuable discovery or realization you had while researching and writing about your family secrets?

• David: The unnerving experience of writing a fictional event in a novel that I assume is emanating purely from my imagination, then discovering much later that it reflects an actual family secret which I have no conscious awareness of and no tangible way of knowing.

• Elle: My memoir is about the murder of my 16-year-old cousin when I was 16 years old myself, and how years later I learned to forgive. I set out to just tell the story of my cousin’s murder, but as I wrote chapters and tried to find the structure of the memoir I realized there was a powerful theme of forgiveness that touched on dark secrets in my family that I had not only never discussed but blocked. Exploring the details of my cousin’s murder forced me to examine parallels in my own life. It seems obvious now but the idea of my cousin’s killers coming up for parole when I had been raised by a parole officer led me to examine various acts in my life that needed forgiving. The most surprising discovery I made was not that I needed to forgive people who I thought had done bad things, but that I had done something that I needed to forgive myself for.

• Toni Ann: I discovered my parents were narcissists when I shared my first novel with early readers. I had no idea. I didn’t know what narcissism was as a personality disorder. I wrote their behavior as I experienced and understood it and readers identified it as narcissism. Learning about narcissistic personality disorder changed my life for the better. I finally understood what I’d been dealing with and why it was so challenging to navigate.

• Colette: What I’ve come to learn is that, though I’ve verified the truth about many of my family’s secrets, what I’ve uncovered is my truth and not necessarily the truth. Ultimately, the information I’ve gleaned from emails, text messages, journals; overheard conversations, etc. is fragmented and subject to interpretation, which is colored by the interpreter’s own motivations and desires, her biases and perceptions.

  The effect of perceptions on truth struck me in particular once, when I was discussing with a friend a novel I’ve been working on. The novel, called Piecework, is based on a murder my paternal grandmother helped cover up in the 1970s. My mother only told me what my grandmother had done when I was an adult, prefacing the revelation by saying that it might forever sully my view of her.

  I was fascinated instead of shocked. I adored Grandma Sartor, a tough, fiercely loyal woman who for decades ran a small sweatshop with questionable (and probably illegal) tactics to compete in the male-dominated garment industry. She was someone even the men in my Italian-American family respected because she didn’t “piss like a puppy,” aka get emotional or soft. She was a big dog like them. She would have done anything to protect her family and piecework shop from the corruption in her impoverished New Jersey city, even it meant helping a murderer hide his crime.

  One night, I told a friend her story with a mix of awe and admiration. “Why would she do such an awful thing?” he asked. That shut me up. I’d assumed she’d done it for somewhat noble purposes. But my friend was right, what she’d done was awful.

  I found myself wondering what darker motives might have driven her—greed, hubris, jealousy, pride. I wondered whether her big dog tendencies had propelled her into an act she regretted the rest of her life, or whether that act had left an indelible mark on her that made her even more determined to hide any puppy tendencies she might have been willing to show in a softer, less desperate version of her life. Then I started writing.

• Aimee: My biggest revelation is the amount of shame and guilt my father carried, not only as an Asian man in lily-white Connecticut during the McCarthy period, but more so because of the role he played in abandoning his father to the Communists before the 1949 takeover. His emotional burden scarred our whole family in ways I’m still just beginning to unpack — after nearly 50 years of writing about it.

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Q: What was the greatest obstacle you faced in digging up these secrets?