Lies told and truths hidden give compelling life to fiction and memoir by authors from Maggie O’Farrell to Ocean Vuong and Claire Keegan
Where there are families there are stories and where there are stories there are always secrets. It’s ripe crop for a writer. In literature, these are a staple of the coming-of-age novel. Family secrets seem to rise to the surface when a protagonist steps from childhood into adulthood, in that equally devastating and freeing moment of realising that one exists both within a family and outside of it, too.