Generational Dynamics: Story DNA 

Generational Dynamics: Story DNA 

There have been stretches in my creative life when family and career commitments demanded most of my available time and attention. At those moments I imagined my writing life as a river, sometimes ebbing and sometimes swelling, swirling around other demands and obligations—personal, professional, familial. But also like a river, always present, finding a channel where it could.  

It is hardly unique, struggling to find a way to fit one’s writing into a complicated day-to-day reality. I have a sense it might be even more common–and more complicated– for women, given the outsized roles many of us play in our families and communities. And I suspect it is especially true when we are dealing with several generations in a family. We may be involved with our parents or other elders, providing physical or emotional or financial or social support, as well as raising children and possibly even grandchildren, on top of building and maintaining diverse careers and participating meaningfully in causes that are important to us. 

In my book, You Should Have Known, there are a lot of generational dynamics at play. The family of the main character, Frannie Greene, has been marred by grief.  Her granddaughter Bethany was killed by a drunk driver, leaving her daughter Iris shattered. The accident and its aftermath have distorted the emotional shape of the family, impacting her remaining grandchildren, and her son and son-in-law in addition to the devastated Iris. We often read about generational trauma, when the pain of one generation is passed to the next. But it is possible for the pain to be passed upward as well. 

Several interviewers have asked me about my own background, and if there was any similarity between Frannie’s story and that of my family. 

I realized there are two ways to think about that question. One is on the level of plot—did that happen to me? I am happy to report that there is no direct equivalency between my family and the book’s story of a tragedy caused by a corrupt judge. Certainly, there are specific details– traces and echoes of circumstances and experiences—that inform the narrative. For example, Frannie’s background of growing up on a farm in North Dakota mirrors that of my mother, and the idea for setting a story in an assisted living facility came to me after my mom moved into a similar place. 

But the emotional and moral stakes of the story are where those questions become really interesting. After having been asked so many times–(and to be honest, the question is usually framed as a compliment regarding the sense of reality and truth in the writing) I began to think about the ways my real life influenced the book, despite the fact that the circumstances described in the story and the events of real life were vastly different. 

In my family we lost my two younger brothers within the space of 16 months, both unexpectedly, both relatively young. My mother never fully recovered from the grief of losing two of her children. Shortly after that, my father became ill. As my dad was failing, one of my daughters was studying overseas, and desperately homesick. While I was struggling to support my mom and my far-off daughter, my younger daughter was muddling through, quietly miserable. Everyone was having a tough go of it. During that period, pain, grief and anxiety were passed around, sometimes landing hard on one person who would need love and attention, until another of us would crumble. We soldiered through, doing the best we could for one another.

Not long after the turmoil and intense emotion of those years, I began the first pages that eventually became You Should Have Known. Thinking back along the timeline of the stop/start writing process is illuminating. Reconstructing the chronology brings into focus the way that real experience left traces and residue of grief and resilience that emerged in my writing. 

I have come to think of it as emotional DNA: the building blocks of the story that informed and shaped the narrative. But just as DNA can be combined and recombined (so that I had both blond and black-haired brothers) it can show up in surprising ways in writing. Writers transmogrify experience. We infuse fictional characters and settings with emotional truths from our real lives—and those of our family and friends. 

Of course it doesn’t stop with people we know– how many writers stumble across something in the newspaper or hear an amazing story about a stranger that then somehow shows up in in their work? I’m not talking about a conscious decision, an “inspired by true events’ type of story. The sort of transformation I am talking about is not even conscious, not a direct transfer or a simple retelling. It is what happens when the material lodges in our memories and hearts, and through internal, unconscious and mysterious alchemy is filtered and reshaped, to emerge with different particulars. But the underlying emotional truth is what is left—an essence of life. 

And just as the writer transforms their experience into emotional truths, the insights a reader gleans from fiction can circle back around, and become embedded in the reader’s mind and outlook, connecting to their own emotional DNA. It is these underlying truths—of grief and resilience, joy and fear, whatever their connections to plot–– that readers remember.

—

Rebecca Keller is the author of YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN (April 4, 2023; Crooked Lane Books) whose stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is also an internationally exhibited visual artist, a college professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Fulbright Scholar and a recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.You can visit her online at rebeccaakeller.com.

YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN

Perfect for fans of Helene Tursten and Caroline B. Cooney, a grieving grandmother turns to murder in Rebecca Keller’s taut debut mystery that explores the bonds of family and the grudges we refuse to let go.

When retired nurse Frannie Greene moves into a senior living apartment, she finds a compelling friendship with her new neighbor Katherine, only to discover that Katherine is married to the judge who Frannie believes is implicated in the death of her beloved granddaughter.

Observing the medication cart sparks Frannie’s darkest imagination, and her desire for revenge combines with her medical expertise. In one dreadful, impulsive moment, she tampers with the medicine. However, the next day, someone is dead, and Frannie realizes the gravity of what she’s done.

The police get involved, and suspicions gather around someone Frannie knows to be innocent. Wracked with remorse, Frannie’s anxiety becomes unbearable. As she works to make it right, Frannie discovers that things are more complicated than they seem.

She’s spent years aching for accountability from people in power. Is she the one who now needs to be held culpable? What really happened that night?

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