Goodreads asked E. Rose Sabin:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

E. Rose Sabin Well, that's an interesting question, and the answer is rather personal. My father deserted my mother and me when I was only five years old. We never had further word of him until the internet came and made that type of investigation easier. I learned that he had died at age 73, but I also learned that within a year of leaving my mother he remarried. That would be bigamy, as he was not divorced from my mother. But through an internet search I found a half sister, two nieces and a nephew. From them I learned that while he told their mother nothing about being married to my mother, he did tell them he had been married before. He claimed that he married quite young a woman named Mary who was ill with tuberculosis. They had no children, and Mary died in a TB sanitarium just a year or two after their marriage. However, a cousin who spends a great deal of time on ancestry research has been unable to find any record of Mary's death but did find that she and my father had a son. The last record of the son my cousin was able to find was a record from his military service in World War II. It was a record of his being sentenced to a period of time in the brig for going AWOL. No death record could be found, but it is quite possible that he was killed in the war. So--what really happened to Mary? Did she live to raise her son? If not, who did raise him? Was my father a serial bigamist? I have no interest in writing a mystery, but I do believe that a mystery could easily be plotted using some of this story and perhaps being of the type that is set partially in the present and partially in the past. If anyone who reads this is inspired to write a mystery based loosely on the story, you have my encouragement to go for it.

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