How A Grandfather I Never Knew Sparked A New Novel

My two novels:

• The Overlife: A Tale of Schizophrenia visit  https://amzn.to/4pdZBbW and
• Three Kidnapped, Three Siblings, Three Furies visit https://amzn.to/49cMa5Q

Research book:

The Slow Evolution of Foster Care in Australia: Just like a family? (Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood) by Nell Musgrove and Deidre Michell, visit https://amzn.to/48Yp5Fs

• The above three links are my Amazon Affiliate Links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

#Fictionwriting #Familyrelationships #FosterCare #FosterCareAustralia #FictionNovel #NewNovel #Fosterfamilies

A vanished mother, a departing father, and three children waiting in an empty house set the spark for my next novel. I’m starting the year by opening the door to book three, a story shaped by my maternal grandfather’s oral history and the fault lines it carved through generations. I share why I’m choosing fiction over memoir, how family accounts from my mother and her sisters guide the narrative, and what it means to honor facts while building scenes that carry emotional truth.

We journey to Ballarat at the turn of the 20th century—Jewish families adapting after the gold rush, a synagogue that still stands, and a boy named David whose childhood shatters when both parents vanish days apart. I break down the family fracture, the mayor’s intervention, and the uneven outcomes of foster placements that left one child abused, another bounced between homes, and a sister sheltered by luck. The heart of this episode explores resilience and anger living side by side: how a man can build a loving family and a successful business while never letting go of the fury he felt toward the adults who abandoned and mistreated him.

To ground the story, I pull back the curtain on my research into historical foster care in Australia, including insights from The Slow Evolution of Foster Care in Australia: Just Like a Family by Nell Musgrove and Deidre Mitchell. You’ll hear how period policy, placement practices, and social pressures help me avoid anachronism and sentimentality. We talk ethics, composite characters, and the craft choices that keep a narrative honest when memory is secondhand. If you’re drawn to historical fiction, family history, Jewish diaspora stories, or the craft of turning oral history into a novel, you’ll find a clear roadmap of where this project is heading.

Join me as I build a story about fracture, belonging, and the quiet endurance that outlasts harm. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves literary historical fiction, and leave a review telling me what questions you want the book to tackle next.

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Transcript

Introducing The New Year Project

Published Novels And Links

Why Fiction Over Memoir

David’s Early Life In Ballarat

Family Fracture And Foster Care

Researching Historical Foster Care

Legacy, Resilience, And Anger

Farewell And Subscribe

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hello. I hope you're all enjoying the festive season uh and uh getting some good times in. So uh I wanted to talk to you today. Uh so this is the an episode for Fractured Inc, Writing in Life's Chaos, so it's that podcast. A little bit about uh my new year plans. So my next novel is uh the big thing for the new year. I'm just starting it now and won't really get underway until 2026. So for me, 2026 will bring a new book project, which for the moment has no title. So I refer to it as book three to distinguish it from my former fiction novels, The Overlife, A Tale of Schizophrenia, and Three Kidnapped, Three Siblings, Three Furies. So these two books are published, and you can uh get them, for example, from uh Amazon. And uh in the episode description, I'll put links uh to the books. So uh if you click on uh the link, you go directly to the book. The above two links are my Amazon affiliate links. So they the the two links about which I speak. As an Amazon associate, I earn it from qualifying purchases, so it's kind of buy me a cup of coffee type deal. Okay, so let's get back to book three. The genesis of book three is my maternal grandfather's oral history, whom I call David in my novel. The book is closely based on David's life, yet I classify it as fiction and not a memoir. My maternal grandfather died in 1957 when I was a few months old, so I have no memory of him. Yet, based on my mother's and her two sisters' stories, he became a powerful imaginary relative during miserable times in my childhood. As a memoir could not be exact, a fictional story closely based on facts I learned about him is a good solution. David was born in 1894 in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. Ballarat had prospered during the Victorian Gold Rush and remained a place where good work could be found when my great-grandfather arrived there with his wife and David's paternal grandfather. The family was Jewish, but I gather from the oral history that the Orthodoxy lapsed somewhat as they assimilated into Australian culture. The synagogue they attended is still in Ballarat, and I had the good fortune to visit it and take a great selfie. The family underwent a significant fracture around 1900. David's grandfather had passed, and David's parents' marriage was failing. First his mother left, then a few days later, his father left. No explanation was given to the children. David, his older sister, and his younger brother. They remained alone in their home for three days before the mayor visited them to organize foster care. David's foster care experience was abysmal. His siblings fared somewhat better, but his brother was a victim of repeated moves to a new foster home. The sister was lucky enough to be fostered by a loving family. My book three will detail what my mother and her two sisters have handed down to me with fairly good authority about David's experience in foster care and how that impacted his life. I am currently doing a lot of research on foster care in the late 19th century in Australia. A handy reference, the slow evolution of foster care in Australia, just like a family, by Noel Musgrove and Deidrey Mitchell, is uh very helpful, and they have been kind enough to offer to read my book. So once again, I have opted for fiction closely based on fact over memoir. I have no memory of my grandfather, so I am making a story that closely integrates the oral family history of which he is a part. David's experience as a foster child was abusive, yet he went on to be a successful family man with a good business. For all that, he never lost his anger against his birth parent for deserting him, nor his foster father for mistreating him. David's story is indeed a fractured one in life's chaos. So I look forward to sharing the adventure of uh writing this book with you and um other topics to do with writing, and I hope you have a wonderful New Year's Day and uh a wonderful 2026. Goodbye for now. Oh, don't forget to subscribe to my channel or subscribe to the playlist, uh, like my videos and make comments. Comments are really useful. Okay, bye bye for now.