1. QUESTION: The Old Manor is described as both a relic of the past and a mirror to Eliza’s fractured heart. How did you approach writing the house as a living, emotional character rather than just a setting?
ANSWER: I approached the Old Manor not as a backdrop, but as an extension of Eliza’s internal world almost as if the house itself had memory, breath, and a quiet consciousness shaped by everything it had witnessed.
From the beginning, I was less interested in describing the house in purely physical terms and more concerned with how it felt to inhabit it. Every creaking floorboard, every dim corridor, every room left untouched was written to reflect something unresolved within Eliza. The Manor became a container for what had been avoided—grief, silence, and unspoken history.
In crafting it as a living, emotional presence, I leaned into the idea that spaces absorb the lives lived within them. The Old Manor had held Eliza’s childhood, her mother’s longing, and years of absence. So when Eliza returns, she is not simply entering a building; she is re-entering a relationship. The house responds to her—not literally, but emotionally—through atmosphere, tension, and familiarity that feels almost intrusive.
I also used contrast deliberately. Certain parts of the house remain frozen in time, while others show decay or neglect. That duality mirrors Eliza’s own state—caught between who she was and who she has become. The Manor, in that sense, becomes a reflection of fragmentation, but also a space where reintegration is possible.
Importantly, I allowed the house to reveal itself gradually. Just as Eliza cannot confront everything at once, the Manor does not give up its story all at once. Rooms, objects, and hidden details act almost like emotional thresholds—each one inviting her deeper into truth.
Ultimately, writing the Old Manor as a character was about treating space as something relational. It holds, it remembers, it resists, and, in time, it allows healing. The house does not simply exist around Eliza—it participates in her journey back to herself.
2. QUESTION: The novel explores the delicate threads between mothers and daughters, love and loss. What inspired you to tell this story through buried letters and unspoken truths rather than direct confrontation?
ANSWER: I chose buried letters and unspoken truths because the relationship between mother and daughter, particularly one shaped by distance, regret, or emotional restraint, is rarely lived out in direct confrontation. More often, it exists in what is withheld—in what could not be said at the time it mattered most.
In this story, the letters became a way of restoring voice where silence once dominated. They allow the mother to speak from a place she could not access while she was alive—free from fear, pride, or the limitations of the moment. In many ways, the letters are not just communication; they are confession, memory, and longing preserved in time.
Direct confrontation often demands readiness from both sides. But in fractured relationships, that readiness is uneven or never arrives. By using letters, I was able to create a space where truth unfolds gently, without resistance, and where Eliza can receive it at her own pace. This felt more authentic to the emotional reality of unresolved relationships, where understanding often comes too late for dialogue but not too late for meaning.
There is also something intimate about discovery. When Eliza reads these letters, she is not being told what to feel; she is uncovering it. Each revelation becomes personal, almost sacred, because it is earned through reflection rather than forced through confrontation.
On a deeper level, I was interested in how love can exist even when it is not expressed well. The unspoken truths in the novel reflect the limitations people carry—their fears, their generational conditioning, their inability to articulate emotion. The letters then become a bridge across that limitation, allowing love to be seen in retrospect, even if it was not fully felt in real time.
Ultimately, this approach allowed the story to honour both absence and presence at once. The mother is gone, yet her voice remains. The relationship is broken, yet still capable of repair—just in a different form.
3. QUESTION: Eliza unravels secrets her mother kept across generations. How did you balance the weight of those secrets with the novel’s ultimately hopeful message about forgiveness and peace?
ANSWER: I treated the secrets not as plot devices to shock, but as emotional inheritances—things carried, often unconsciously, from one generation to the next. That framing changed the balance. The weight was not just in what was hidden, but in why it was hidden: fear, protection, shame, and, at times, a misguided form of love.
To keep that weight from overwhelming the narrative, I was careful to reveal the secrets with context. Each discovery Eliza makes is accompanied by a deeper understanding of her mother’s humanity. The goal was not to excuse what was done or left undone, but to make it legible. Once something is understood, it becomes less of a burden and more of a truth that can be held without breaking the person carrying it.
Pacing was also important. I did not allow all the revelations to arrive at once. Instead, they unfold in layers, giving Eliza—and the reader—time to absorb, resist, question, and gradually reinterpret what those truths mean. That space is where forgiveness begins to take shape, not as a single moment, but as a process.
I also resisted portraying forgiveness as immediate or sentimental. Eliza’s journey includes anger, confusion, and even a sense of betrayal. Those responses are necessary because they honor the reality of what was lost. Forgiveness, in this sense, is not about forgetting or minimizing the past; it is about releasing the hold it has on the present.
The hopeful tone emerges from this shift. As Eliza begins to see her mother not only as a source of pain but as a person shaped by her own limitations and history, something changes. The secrets lose their power to isolate and instead become points of connection—evidence of a shared, imperfect humanity.
Ultimately, I wanted the novel to suggest that peace does not come from uncovering a perfect truth, but from learning how to live with an honest one. Forgiveness, then, becomes less about reconciliation with the past and more about reclaiming the freedom to move forward without carrying its full weight.
4. QUESTION: The summary mentions ‘voices of memory and regret.’ How did you weave together past and present timelines, and what challenges came with writing from multiple generational perspectives?
ANSWER: I approached structure as something fluid rather than strictly linear. The story moves between past and present in the same way memory works—triggered, layered, and often unexpected. A room, an object, or even a silence in the present becomes an entry point into the past. This allowed the timelines to feel organically connected rather than mechanically arranged.
The “voices of memory and regret” were shaped as distinct emotional registers. Eliza’s voice in the present carries immediacy—questions, resistance, and the need to understand. The mother’s voice, often expressed through letters or remembered fragments, carries reflection—what is seen more clearly in hindsight, what was felt but not expressed. The generational layer beneath them holds something quieter, almost embedded—a sense of inherited silence, patterns that were never named but deeply felt.
Weaving these voices together required careful modulation. I had to ensure that each voice retained its own texture without becoming repetitive or confusing. One challenge was avoiding over-explanation. When writing across generations, there is a temptation to clarify everything, but doing so can flatten the emotional depth. Instead, I allowed certain gaps to remain—spaces where the reader, like Eliza, must interpret and connect meaning.
Another challenge was maintaining continuity of emotional truth across time. Even though the characters exist in different periods, their experiences needed to feel connected in a way that was believable. This meant tracing not just events, but emotional patterns—how silence, longing, or restraint echoes from one generation to the next.
Pacing was also critical. Moving between timelines can disrupt momentum if not handled carefully. I used transitions that were anchored in feeling rather than chronology, so the reader moves because something resonates, not just because time has shifted.
Ultimately, the structure reflects the central idea of the novel: that the past is not separate from the present. It lives within it, shaping perception, relationships, and identity. The voices of memory and regret are not interruptions to Eliza’s story—they are part of its foundation.
5. QUESTION: Did any elements of Eliza’s journey—returning to a childhood home after loss—come from your own life or observations? How much of the story is autobiographical?
ANSWER: Eliza’s journey is not autobiographical in a literal sense, but it is rooted in lived observation and emotional truth. The idea of returning to a childhood home after loss is something many people encounter at some point—whether physically or psychologically. What interested me was less the event itself and more the internal experience it creates: the confrontation between who we were, who we became, and what we left unresolved.
Much of the emotional landscape in the novel draws from that universal moment of reckoning. I have observed, both personally and through others, how spaces tied to our early lives carry a particular weight. They hold memory in a way that is not always conscious, and when we return, we are often met with versions of ourselves we thought we had outgrown. That tension—between distance and familiarity—became central to Eliza’s experience.
The mother-daughter dynamic, the presence of unspoken truths, and the gradual uncovering of family history are also informed by broader human patterns rather than specific personal events. In many families, there are stories that are partially told, emotions that are not fully expressed, and histories that are carried quietly across generations. I was interested in exploring how those silences shape identity and relationships over time.
Where the story becomes personal is in its emotional authenticity. While the characters and events are fictional, the feelings—grief, longing, confusion, the desire for understanding—are drawn from real human experience. That is where I allowed myself to be most honest.
So rather than being autobiographical, the novel is reflective. It gathers fragments of observation, emotional insight, and shared human experience, and shapes them into a narrative that feels true, even if it is not directly lived.
6. QUESTION: You write that each generation yearns ‘to be understood, to be seen, to be free.’ How does the Old Manor become a place of reckoning and rebirth for Eliza, not just a repository of pain?
ANSWER: The Old Manor begins as a repository of pain because it holds everything that was left unresolved—memories, absences, and emotional truths that were never fully confronted. But I was intentional in not allowing it to remain fixed in that role. For Eliza, the house becomes a place of reckoning precisely because it does not let her remain distant from those truths. It draws her into them, slowly but persistently.
Reckoning, in this sense, is not a single moment of confrontation but a series of encounters. Each room, each object, each fragment of her mother’s voice asks something of her: to look again, to feel more honestly, to question what she believed to be final. The Manor becomes a space where denial is no longer sustainable. That is where the shift begins.
What transforms the house from a site of pain into a place of rebirth is Eliza’s changing relationship to what it holds. At first, she experiences the house as something oppressive—heavy with memory, almost resistant to her presence. But as she begins to understand the context behind those memories, especially through the letters and the unfolding family history, the same space starts to open. What once felt like accusation begins to feel like invitation.
I also approached rebirth through the idea of redefinition. The Manor does not change in a physical sense as much as it changes in meaning. Eliza begins to see it not only as the place where things went wrong, but as the place where truth can finally be acknowledged. In doing so, she reclaims both the space and her place within it.
Importantly, freedom in the novel is not about escape from the past, but about a new way of relating to it. The Manor becomes the environment where Eliza moves from inheritance to choice—where she can decide what she carries forward and what she releases.
By the end, the house is no longer just a container of history. It becomes a witness to transformation. It holds pain, but it also holds understanding. And in that balance, it allows Eliza not only to remember, but to begin again.
7. QUESTION: The final line says home is ‘where we finally make peace with who we are.’ What do you hope readers grappling with their own family secrets or unresolved grief will take away from this book?
ANSWER: I would want readers to come away with a quieter, more grounded understanding of themselves—not necessarily with all the answers, but with a greater capacity to hold their own story without turning away from it.
For those grappling with family secrets or unresolved grief, the book is not offering a neat resolution. Instead, it suggests that understanding is often a gradual process. What we inherit—silence, pain, unanswered questions—does not have to define us in a fixed way. It can be examined, reinterpreted, and, over time, integrated into a fuller sense of self.
One of the central ideas I hoped to convey is that not everything will be explained, and not every wound will be fully repaired. But there is still the possibility of peace. That peace comes from seeing more clearly recognizing the
humanity in those who came before us, including their limitations, and allowing that awareness to soften the way we carry our own experiences.
I also wanted readers to feel that they are not alone in the complexity of their family history. Many people live with partial stories, with things that were never said or understood. The novel creates space for that reality without forcing it into a simplified narrative of blame or closure.
Ultimately, “home” in the book is less about a physical place and more about an internal state. It is the point at which a person can say: this is my story, with all its contradictions, and I can live with it without being defined by its pain. If readers can move even slightly toward that kind of acceptance—where they no longer feel the need to escape their past but can stand within it with clarity
16-year-old Sino and his 17-year-old cousin, Martín, run away from their family’s ranch—El Petaco—after witnessing their cousin Adal murder their cousin Javier over Adal’s marijuana business.
