Does that make the stories richer? Can myth and fable be more important than reality?
I think what makes a family in a story is not necessarily a biological connection so much as it is a relationship, however much based on love or need or affection it is. There’s also an element that’s missing or there’s an element in which someone hasn’t been told everything. There’s something that’s been withheld from a child. That’s often a case in a novel of mine – that what a child imagines is the story of his life isn’t quite what it was. There’s something he hasn’t been told, something that conceivably he’s not old enough to hear or is simply unseemly for him to know at any age. There’s a missing element when Ruth Cole is a child. She knows she had two brothers, she knows they’re dead but what she can’t imagine is how the death of those boys has affected the relationship between her mother and father. She can only see that it’s not very good. She can only see that some damage has been done, but she can’t imagine herself all the way back to what that relationship might have been b
