In 27 years as a psychologist, one pattern appeared with remarkable consistency: the secrets that families keep do not stay quiet. They find another generation to speak through.
How secrets travel
I am not talking about dramatic revelations — affairs uncovered, inheritances disputed. I mean the quieter secrets. The depression that was never spoken about. The alcoholism explained away as 'stress'. The pregnancy that preceded the wedding. The uncle nobody mentioned.
These things do not disappear when the people who lived them are gone. They leave marks in behaviour, in family rules, in the unspoken agreements about what can and cannot be said. And those marks are inherited.
A child who grows up in a family where a certain topic is never discussed does not need to be told the rule. They absorb it. And they pass it on.
What I have seen in the consulting room
Again and again, I have sat with a person who has come to see me for one problem and discovered, as we worked, that the real story is several generations old. A mother's grief she was never allowed to express. A grandfather's trauma that nobody named. A family rule — 'we don't talk about that' — a rule that is still being obeyed by people who have no idea where it came from.
In the Name of the Mother
This is the soil in which my novel grows. Alice is trying to find the truth about her family's past — not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity. She cannot understand who she is until she understands where she came from.
What she discovers is that the secrets she is looking for were not buried to protect anyone malicious. They were buried by people who were afraid, or ashamed, or simply doing what their own families had taught them to do.
That is usually how it goes. Secrets are not kept by villains. They are kept by ordinary people under ordinary pressure. And that is what makes them so hard to excavate — and so important.