I’ve been talking about my historical fiction novels for a while now, but this book crept up on me.
I was not planning to write it. One day, I simply found myself thinking about how my journey had begun and realised I had never properly answered the question my readers ask me most often. How did you get here? Why fiction? Why ten books? Why the past?
This memoir is my answer
It began with a family — not my own. I grew up in a small family and married into a large one. Suddenly surrounded by generations of stories I knew nothing about, I needed to know more. That curiosity, once ignited, never went away. I began searching the records, following the threads, piecing together fragments of lives from the stories and myths. I became, without quite meaning to, a genealogist. Thirty years later I still am. Possibly more so.
The question I am always asked
Fellow genealogists ask me regularly why I chose to write fiction about my ancestors rather than the truth. The answer is that fiction allowed me to go where the records could not. The facts tell us what happened. Fiction asks why — and I try to recreate their lives as close to history and the truth as possible. I am not simply inventing people. I am giving voice to real women and men whose lives I spent years uncovering. Their stories are fictional, but they are drawn from someone’s truth.
That distinction matters to me. And it is one of the things this memoir explores at length.
What do genealogy and writing have in common?
More than most people realise. Both require patience, persistence, and a tolerance for dead ends. Both reward the person who keeps looking when others would have stopped. Both are, at their heart, about the same thing — understanding why people lived the way they did, and why it still matters to those of us who came after.
What I love most is delving into the lives of ordinary people.
Women especially. The more I delved, the more inspired I became. Ordinary people living ordinary lives — yet every one of them had a story worth telling.
Why now?
I published my first novel at sixty-one. Fifteen years later and with ten books behind me, it felt like the right time to look back at my journey — not with nostalgia, but with honest reflection. What worked, what didn’t, what surprised me, and what I would tell my younger self if I could.
Where Stories Lie Buried is that reflection. It is the story behind the stories — the how, the why, and the what next.
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Behind every family tree is a story. Behind every story is a voice that brought it to light.
I hope this one finds you.
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