The story behind the story: Writing Secrets from Myself
Each of my novels starts with a ‘what if’ type of question. With Watching July, it was, “What if you accidentally started dating your stalker?” For Best Laid Plans, “What if your parents were the bad influence in your life?” And for In Irina’s Cards, “What if the men destroying our world were doing it on purpose?”
Secrets from Myself started with a question as well, minus the ‘if’ part. “What can we really do for the dead?” Over twenty years ago, I lost a friend, Harvinder Gakhal, to a horrible domestic violence incident in which her whole family was killed. It has eaten at me to varying degrees over the years. She was academically brilliant, genuinely thoughtful, and a good friend. Would she have a family by now? What career would she have settled on? Where would life have taken her? Why did it have to happen? The man who committed the crime took his own life. There is nothing left to do for my friend, except to remember her. Hence my ongoing curiosity about how we can best honour victims of tragedy.
During the summer of 2014, I spent most of my lunch hours walking around Gastown. I quickly picked up on the district’s history, not only because of its raw brick aesthetic, but because of the ghost stories lurking around places like Blood Alley. I had been toying with the idea of a story about a runaway connected to a ghost. I had spent several years working on The Variant Conspiracy, a sci-fi urban fantasy trilogy, and I thought it was time to go back to magic realism. I also wanted to challenge myself with a historical element.
When I encountered the story of the Komagata Maru Incident, I saw something of my lost friend between the lines. The effect was profound enough to enter the fictional story I’d been crafting. I had always wanted to write a story for Harv, as she’d actually done for me once upon a time. So I was inspired to craft a story that lived where she lived, inside two worlds, caught between what she wanted and what her loved ones wanted for her.
In Secrets from Myself, Akasha and Harv are not one and the same. Like Katelyn is not me. The girls in my story have an even more profound connection, one that explores the idea of how the human soul can rediscover the world while staying mired in trauma.
Writing Secrets, confirmed the idea that justice can be an empty present for the dead. We can only console the living. And we can’t fix the past. We can only apologize and remember.
