How Writing Mystery Novels Helped Me Write Two Nonfiction Books
After my appearance on PBS’s Genealogy Roadshow in 2015, where it was revealed to 1.5 million people that my mother had passed as white, I was encouraged to write either a novel or a nonfiction book about my mother’s racial secret, and the subsequent discovery of my mother’s “lost” family.
(How I Turned My Family History Into a Novel.)
As a mystery author with four novels under my belt, my first impulse was to fictionalize my mother’s story. Though I’d done quite a bit of journalistic writing over the years for newspapers, trade journals, and academic writing, I’d never written a memoir.
Uncertain, I pooled my writer friends and several people who’d reached out to me after my television appearance, and asked them their opinions. Almost to a person, they said, “Write a nonfiction book.” They wanted to know the real story. The story only a daughter who’d lived it could tell.
I wasn’t convinced. My mother wasn’t famous nor was I. Why would anyone want to read about us? I decided it had to be more than a memoir. In addition to telling our personal story, I’d tell the history of race and racial passing as it related to our mixed race and Black ancestors. In other words, I’d write a memoir and a social history. As a history buff, the idea appealed to me.
The title came easily—White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing. The writing not so much. I struggled to make this intricate and far-reaching true story, involving personal genealogy, interesting. Then I remembered what I’d written on my Genealogy Roadshow application and one of the reasons they selected me. “I’m a mystery author who can’t solve her own family mystery.”
Bingo.
I wrote White Like Her as if I was writing a mystery novel with one clue leading to another clue as I traveled back in time to ultimately discover Marta, an 18th century enslaved woman and my fifth great grandmother. Along the way I hit stumbling blocks akin to red herrings—confusing genealogical records, deceptions, and half-truths.
I also used the same literary devices that I used in my mystery novels, such as tantalizing opening sentences, engaging hooks, and strong characterizations, to create suspense and keep reader interest.
Chapter 1 opened with this hook:
Wild with anticipation I hurry up the granite steps of St. Louis Central Public Library, oblivious to the blistering heat and humidity. A family secret I’ve kept for seventeen years is about to be exposed in the most public way possible—on a national television show, Genealogy Roadshow. Although I’m a published mystery author, I’ve never been able to solve this mystery with any certainty. Today it will be solved.
My strategy worked. The first agent I queried accepted the book.
She said, “I started reading your book at my son’s sporting event. When I looked up the game was over.”
White Like Her became my breakout book, leading to appearances on NBC’s The Today Show, BBC World News and WGN-TV to name a few. And for several weeks, White Like Her was the number one book on Amazon.
Unexpectedly, the book’s success led to an avalanche of emails from strangers from around the world wanting to share their own family secrets with me. These strangers’ stories of heartbreaking family secrets became the impetus to my follow up book to White Like Her—What They Never Told Us: True Stories of Family Secrets and Hidden Identities Revealed. In the book, I told the stories of ordinary people, who made extraordinary, life-changing discoveries about their parentage, and in some cases, like me, their race or ethnicity. Prefacing these stories, I continued my own confusing and sometimes painful journey to redefine my racial identity under the spotlight of public opinion.
Again, I used mystery writing techniques. Like a psychological thriller, the book explored the psychic trauma of uncovering a hidden family secret, with all the twists and turns of a mystery novel from how the discovery was made, to why it was kept secret, to the arduous, sometimes disappointing, quest to find the biological parent or parents.
To set the scene for each story and create suspense, I began each person’s story with a provocative and succinct introductory sentence.
Kara Rubenstein Deyrin: The Salmon King’s Daughter
“My story is intertwined with the murder of my mother’s parents,” explains Kara.
Jane: A Tale of Two Sisters
“Jane contacts me via Facebook Messenger. Her opening statement stops me in my tracks. ‘This is my sister who one day with her husband decided to be white.’”
Jack Rocco: The Reluctant Seeker
“When Jack finally confronted his adoptive father with the truth of his identity, his father replied, ‘Five people went to their graves with that secret. We were trying to protect you.’”
In between writing the two nonfiction books, I wrote my fifth mystery novel and my first gothic, historical mystery, The Darkness Surrounds Us. Though I was adept at research from my previous mystery novels, writing White Like Her further honed my facility to discern what research was of value and what wasn’t.
By crossing genres, like crossing borders, I learned that certain skills and techniques travel well and enhance my ability to tell an intriguing story whether it’s fictional or true.
Check out Gail Lukasik’s What They Never Told Us here:
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