I understood the dynamics of family secrets when I started writing “Two Roads,” but it wasn’t until I started looking at how to market it that I became aware of the number of books, films, and psychology-related work that is available! I guess there is some truth about the common phrase that “we don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.” I can only imagine how a family can appear happy and stable when connecting with others outside the family yet hide dark secrets.

Easy plots for every kind of story (genre), depending on how you spin it.

How many books can be written, films produced, or counseling sessions can occur in the face of domestic abuse, physical and emotional abuse, alcoholism, incest, covered-up suicide, mental illness, or any combination thereof?

A young adult story of shame…

I was just eight when my parents divorced. A taboo subject back then, ashamed…our new “status” kept from my friends. I made new friends but would not invite them home for fear they would see how unstable my mother was, or be creeped out by her boyfriend, whose previous “home” had been a car he had stolen!

Oh, what a journey I could take that young character on; revealing a society where deep shame made it necessary for family members to be complicit in keeping “secrets” and perpetuate dysfunction.

Although it is not my desire to write of deep, dark secrets, yet the newspapers are ripe with extreme cases, where family secrets, had they not been kept would have had different outcomes—such as that of sixteen-year-old Richard Jahnke, who testified during his trial that he killed his father to protect himself, his mother, and sister from further mental abuse at his father’s hands. Or, a few years later, the secrets of Jeremy Bamber’s life, who brutally killed his parents, Nevill and June Bamber, and his sister and twin nephews at their White House Farm estate in Essex, England. Fast forward to 2020 when ITV in Britain broadcast a television miniseries called White House Farm, which was based on the events on that fateful day in 1986 and starred the ex-girlfriend of Prince Harry. These links to the British monarchy marked just the beginning of the strange turns that this case would take—beginning with his true parentage, his troubled childhood, and the needless end of so many lives.

When I write of family secrets, I am aware that above all else…we loved each other!