Helen Fremont grew up in a culture of secrets; her parents, Holocaust survivors, had pretended to be Christians and never told their children about the truth they were hiding. Years later, those secrets are still ruling the family's life. Helen Fremont is the author of the national bestseller After Long Silence. Her works of fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Ploughshares, and The Harvard Review. For more on this author and her latest memoir, The Escape Artist, visit https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Helen-Fremont/151906031.
Thank you for having the courage to write your truth about your role in your family and the intergenerational transmission of trauma that led you to who you are today. I am encouraged to carry on by listening to you ...I am writing my family story also and have looked deeply into family history and can clearly see how patterns of thinking, beliefs, behaviours and roles are passed down from one generation to another. I'm choosing to write in the genre of fictional memoir to protect privacy and also because I want to give to life a character, the main character, who died tragically whilst just a young woman. Writing my family story as a fictional memoir allows me the grace to tell our story in slant.
Thank you...I