Family secrets are such a mainstay of young adult stories. They have to be among my favorite clichés.
Almost every family has them, in one form or another. My own family has plenty of them. Some of them are just information lost to time, or information obscured by differing accounts that can’t be reconciled anymore.
Some of them have been in the open for years, but were secrets for so long that their secrecy is still their most notable feature.
In my family, that late type showed up in the form of my great uncle telling my dad that my great grandfather didn’t actually die in the last great deadly flu pandemic, which was the story dad had been raised with. The reality was that my great grandfather was institutionalized when my grandmother was young, for “a weakness in the head”. Gotta love those 1920s mental health categorizations.
There’s apparently a chance that it was less a matter of mental health than it was that he was a loud and proud supporter of the Kaiser, which was a dicey position in the American Midwest during WWI, but that’s pure speculation.
Whatever the initial reason was, during the big deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s (if you ever want a very long rant on the many virtues and villains of that movement, let me know.) he was offered release back to the community, if his wife would have him back. She declined, having spent decades telling everyone he died. When he did die, it was in an institution.
And that’s all I know. The big secret revealed unlocks countless other secrets, but there’s nobody left to ask for more information. Besides which, it seems like the people who had the most information weren’t very free with it.
In my therapist work, I deal with other people’s family secrets.
In my fiction, I deal with family secrets I weave myself.
In both roles, I gravitate towards them because of how much a secret tells you about the system that housed that secret. You can learn a staggering amount about a family if you can identify how the secret functioned.
What I love the most about this as a reader and writer is the way it exponentially expands characters. The details of a secret spread out like a spiders web; each character ensnared causes ripples and vibrations with their every movement. It’s so incredibly satisfying to see how one character’s kick ripples through the whole system, so I can map them out as one coherent whole.
The main things I always want to ferret out/write into my books are:
Who decided the secret was a secret?
Why did they think it had to be a secret?
What about their role or status in the family allows them to do that?
Who enforced the secrecy?
How did they enforce that?
Who does the secret protect?
Who is is the main person who can’t be told the secret?
Who has to be indoctrinated into the secret, in order to maintain it?
Who’s job is that?
Who can break the secret?
Different secrets in the same family can include radically different answers to those questions. Kids may keep secrets from parents, who are keeping secrets from them, with aunts, uncles, siblings, and grandparents functioning differently in each secret-maintenance system.
If you know the answers to these questions, then you’ve learned way more than the secret itself. You know the values, power structures, alliances, and the way information and accountability flows. You know what’s been deemed unspeakable. You know who can be burdened and who must be protected, and how those ideas are defined.
I think part of the reason family secrets are such a mainstay of young adult in particular is that, when you’re a teenager, you’re already renegotiating your roles within your family. And that can cause major shakeups to even very old and ingrained secret-holding systems.
A teen character’s expanding maturity can let them realize for the first time that the family stories that they’ve been given don’t match the behavior of the people around them. That can lead them to work to uncover hidden truths. Or, they might be deliberately granted entry into secrets as they get more able to handle complex or upsetting information. This could be for their benefit, or to entangle them in the maintenance of the secret. Or, they may have seen the vague shape of a secret silhouetted through other’s behaviors, and eventually gain the status to demand the full picture.
And of course, their own expanding life may generate plenty of their own secrets.
Regardless, your teens years are a time of reconceptualizing the people around you, while trying to influence how others reconceptualizing you. Secrets are great for exploring either one.
Honestly, what novelist isn’t going to get excited about a setup like that?
As always, dear reader, I’m happy to hear back from you.
And I’m going to close out by showing off my tattooing efforts on some hapless citrus fruit, because you know I always have to be up to something weird. I think these turned out pretty well, considering this is only my second time working with the tools.
With Thanks, as Always,
Lee Brontide
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