Quote

'Family Secrets' is thought provoking, well written, and remorselessly intelligent.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that secrets are toxic and break up families.

Now that I think about it, maybe my own literary exploration of the dark secrets held by families could be traced back to V.C. Andrews.

I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.

Family tends to be one of the recurring themes in my fiction.

I think that it would be hard to find a family that didn't have a secret in it somewhere, and sometimes we know about them, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we have an inkling that there's something hidden, but I think that it touches everybody's life.

There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.

'The Secret Agent' remains the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside. But 'Under Western Eyes' dares to leap inside - not only into the terrorist mind, but also into the troubled zone that divides West from East, 'the autocracy in mystic vestments.'

If the sad truth be known, writers, being the misfits we are, probably ought not to belong to families in the first place. We simply are too self-interested, though we may excuse the flaw by calling it 'focused.'

The concept of the strong linkage to the family is breaking down in Western nations.