Colin Falconer

People often ask: how much does a writer put of themselves in a story?

Perhaps it depends on what story means to you. For me, stories are a very personal thing. The first ones I ever heard were about my own family. I couldn’t have been more than four years old.

My mother, you see, was quite the storyteller. She must have been, because all these years later, I still remember the smallest details of many of her tales.

She used to tell me about her life growing up in the poorer parts of East London. She didn’t have the easiest life; she was one of nine children and her father, who I never met, was a violent alcoholic.

So although my own family are Cockneys, not Irish, much of the research for Kitty O’Kane was very familiar to me. I already knew, for instance, that the women who lived in the slums scrubbed their doorsteps every day; my mother had long ago explained to me that just because you lived in a tenement was no reason to let your standards slip.

After all, what would the neighbours say?

And it was no coincidence that Kitty’s father was a bully and a drunk. I couldn’t have imagined him any other way, even if he only played a cameo in the book.

My mother remembered to her dying day the beatings he gave her and her siblings. In later years, she often wondered aloud why my grandmother never left him.

She seemed to forget that my gran lived in a very different time, and in a very different society. There was also a psychology to it; Gran didn’t think she deserved any better.

Kitty’s story completes the circle; it is about a woman who takes back her own life, and discovers her own sense of being worth something in a forbidding world.

Which means that although there is a lot of my mother and my grandmother in Kitty O’Kane, my own daughters are in her, too. Kitty O’Kane’s journey takes three hundred and fifty pages; in real life it took four generations.

For all the similarities, it is still fiction. My grandmother was never a maid on the Titanic, she never witnessed the Russian Revolution first hand, as Kitty did, or the Siege of Dublin. But she did see the worst of East London and she did get through the Blitz.

Her daughter, eyewitness to it all, finally recounted the stories to a wide-eyed three-year-old boy; they were tales of tough times and hard people and about finding a way to survive long enough to find love at the end of it. When he grew up, the little boy took these bits of soft fact and molded them to something solid in his imagination.

So to answer the question: how much of the writer ended up in the story?

I suppose you would have to say; in the end, quite a bit.

https://colinfalconer.org/

 

The post Colin Falconer appeared first on Warren Adler.