How I Turned Family Scandals Into Fiction
While seated in a church recreation room in Southern California after a memorial for one of my mother’s many brothers, an aunt shocked me with the revelation that my grandfather had taken her and five of her siblings to an orphanage, having taken them away from my grandmother when her actions were untoward. Then came several surprising reasons and repercussions, my aunt disclosed casually. My mother, the eldest of more than a dozen children, had died eight years earlier without breathing a word of this to either myself or my much older sister!
(Writing What I Know and Feel.)
At home, I contacted my sister and some of my remaining aunts and uncles for their memories. I discovered smatterings, and of course, there were conflicting accounts. When an aunt died a few years later, her eulogy claimed that the orphanage event was due to the Depression and tight finances. But I learned from census records, years later, that my grandfather never lost his railroad job.
I put all of this in one document to see if there really was a fleshed-out story to be told. I gathered all the facts and suppositions I had about my grandparents into a nine-page essay. This work, with an occasional addition, sat in a file in my desk for over a decade. After publishing my second book, I tackled this family saga.
I thought, Is anyone going to be upset by my doing this? Maybe. Is there anyone who might sue me? Maybe. I learned from another author that if all the characters are dead, the family might come after me, but with no legal ground. To be on the slightly safer side, I changed the last name of the family. The real surname was German and began with “W.” “Wolff” jumped out at me. There was some infidelity on the part of several people in the story, so I thought, Ooh, perfect. I wanted to use an actual wedding picture of my grandparents on the cover. It’s so divulging of their dynamic. She’s clearly excited about the prospect of marriage to this handsome, hard-working man, and he’s sitting ramrod straight, unsmiling.
When I mentioned to some of my cousins that I was turning this story into a book, one of them sent me a census record from the relevant orphanage in 1930. My aunt had said, “It was someplace in Arkansas,” so I was surprised to see that it was in Kansas. Looking at a map, I saw that the home was near to Arkansas City, Kansas. As a little girl, my aunt would have remembered just bits about where she’d been. I found a picture of the orphanage and contacted the library and historical society there to get more information about the children’s home, assisting me to set up chapters about the orphanage.
Once I got started, I realized that I had two aims I hadn’t originally recognized. I wanted to vindicate my grandmother, who died when I was two, and who was blamed and shunned by some family members for the choices she made, especially by her first daughter, my mother. I made up a personality I thought went with the experiences I knew she had and the things I’d heard about her. Having been through a difficult marriage myself, I knew the angst she probably felt regarding her relationship and its failure, not to mention the sorrow of having her children sent away.
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I also wanted to narrate my mother’s childhood and youthful vignettes. Mom and I had a sorry relationship; there was love but not a lot of deep understanding for each other. I tried to show in the novel how her upbringing could have made her the strict disciplinarian and intolerant person my sister and I knew. She lived in self-pity and regret; afraid she was bound for hell.
When researching the family of a woman who ran a boarding house, with whom my grandfather reputedly had an affair, I found her residence in the census. My grandfather was living there without his children. I found a picture of the boarding house, which still stands. Photos of the interior of the house hinted at the former grandeur of the place, and I compared it to my grandparents’ shabby home, which I’d seen.
I loved researching which songs and movies were current for the chronological chapters and slogged through one of Wallace Stegner’s novels to get a sense of how people in Utah and western states spoke one hundred years ago. I looked up what railroad engineers were paid in those days, and prices, to determine if they could have afforded a car (no) or a vacuum (probably not, more likely a carpet sweeper). I also now knew that the boarding house matron could have bought an electric refrigerator, unlike the ice box my mother described in her childhood home.
Putting this all together was satisfying; creating situations that may have happened, based on where people were, who was in their households, and how they may have met. I let the reader know in the first chapter that Mr. Wolff had dropped some of his children in an orphanage, and then in the second chapter went back 11 years and recounted their domestic life and what led to his decision. I labored to create unexpected reveals of the shocking parts, so that the reader would be as stunned as I had been. I appear in the epilogue, because I remember the day my grandfather died, and my mother’s reaction. Coincidentally, this leads into my memoir, almost like a prequel, although I hadn’t seen that as a possibility until the novel was finished.
My Author’s Notes state that A Wolff in the Family is based on truth and that I made suppositions based on fact. I don’t think any of my cousins will sue me, and I suspect they will enjoy the book; some of them know nothing about the skeletons I brought out of the closet.
Check out Francine Falk-Allen’s A Wolff in the Family here:
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