I’ve always been a people watcher. I am that person who sits around a pool, in the corner of a coffee shop, a pub or an office, just watching all the people around her. I’m constantly fascinated by the way people interact in social situations, and unbelievably dismayed by the way that mankind treats each other. The news channels are constantly full of atrocities, wars, and cruelty that’s simply beyond my own personal comprehension. And every night there’s another murder, an act of domestic violence or a dramatic, escalating scene that which in my younger life would have been a shock. Whereas now, I must admit, it isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, all of these act’s disgust and sadden me, but they don’t shock me. Not anymore.
My overthinking of the ‘world’ and the people in it made me begin to think about those who live closest to us. And like every author I know, I began to question the situation. Could I honestly say that I knew everything about my parents, my siblings, my relations or even my friends?
We all have family members, people we live with, work with and people that we think we know – yet somehow it can turn out that we didn’t really know any of these people at all. Which is ironic, because I then began to wonder about how much those people really knew about me.
And after much thought, I concluded that we all keep secrets. We all keep certain parts of our lives to ourselves. They’re the parts that we don’t want to talk about or to admit to and it all depends on how big that secret is – as to whether it’s something we’d eventually choose to reveal, or whether we’d hold that secret right to the end.
Which was what gave me the inspiration behind The Family Home.