The secrets we inherit

Why family secrets are such a compelling plot device in fiction—and treasure troves for our imaginations

In my twenties, I learned a secret about my mother. The details aren’t the point of this essay, so I’ll keep them to myself, but what I can say is that the revelation reordered my entire understanding of who my mother was: why she’d made the choices she made, why our relationship felt the way it did, and what her youth had actually contained. It was the kind of information that should change a relationship.

But I had to sit on it. My mother never knew I knew. She carried that secret to her grave, the way she’d carried it for sixty-some years. After she died, I found out that my father and my stepfather had known the secret, but didn’t know many details. When my sister used her serious genealogy chops to start pulling threads, we uncovered more information that helped us understand why she’d kept it buried her whole life.

A buried family secret as plot engine

I realized halfway through drafting my debut novel The Pearl Farmers that the engine of the novel was a long-hidden secret about the family matriarch. Not my mother’s secret: the fictional one is less devastating. But as it did for me, the secret in the book reframes everything for the daughters: their understanding of who their mother was, what she was protecting, and what they inherited that they didn’t ask for.

I didn’t sit down to write a book about a secret. The secret arrived because that’s what I’d been thinking about, in some buried compartment, for two decades.

Family secrets in fiction sometimes seem like they’re everywhere. Many of my favorite authors, from Ann Patchett to Richard Russo to Tana French, build novels around them. I wonder sometimes if they’ve become a cliché—except that as a reader, they continue to be so tantalizing that I’m drawn to books with them over and over. And for writers, the family secret can be an excellent tool to make a story more layered, compelling, and human-feeling.

The human connection to family secrets

Author Lisa Montanaro, whose novel Everything We Thought Was True features a long-held family secret at its center, speaks frequently about how family secrets are natural and rich craft material for authors of virtually any genre. They generate built-in dramatic tension, double as backstory and antagonist, and create the conditions for genuine transformation.

The family secret isn’t just a device: it’s a category of authentic human experiences. Most readers either know a family secret, or they think they might. While it can be an effective tool that drives character development, story arc, and structure, a family secret lands because readers recognize it.

Also, depending on what the secret reveals, it can create turmoil in the life of the person who learns it, and that can lead to a roller-coaster of emotion that’s evocative in a protagonist. As I felt when I discovered my mother’s secret—and the Lockshire sisters encountered in The Pearl Farmers when they learned theirs—everything a person thought about themselves, their history, and their identity can shift in an instant. As Dani Shapiro wrote in Inheritance, a book about how a DNA test revealed a different biological father than Shapiro had always known:

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

The rich possibilities of unraveling family lore

These days, people spit into tubes and find out their father isn’t their father, their cousin isn’t their cousin, and their great-grandmother had a whole other family in Poland. The family tree, as a stable document, is falling apart in real time. I find this thrilling as a fiction writer. Every family across the last several centuries has organized itself around an origin story that was probably wrong. The misattributed paternity, the swapped baby, the affair never named, the adoption never disclosed.

The opposite problem fascinates me too. My husband is third-generation American. His grandfather emigrated from Russia in the early twentieth century. Beyond passenger manifests, census records, and a few passed-along details, there’s essentially no record of the family before then: no preserved stories, no documents, no oral history. The family history has been erased rather than hidden—a quieter version of the same phenomenon. The absence is its own kind of haunting.

But as a fiction writer, isn’t it ripe with opportunity? Think about all the stories emerging from the gaps between what we believed and what was true—and all the different ways our various characters would be affected when a secret comes out.

How to keep the secret from feeling formulaic

Once you’ve decided your novel has a secret, the easiest thing in the world is to default to the genre version: someone holds it, someone discovers it, the reveal lands in act three, transformation follows. That works, but it can also start to slip into predictability or cliché territory.

A few things I’ve found helpful, drawn partly from Lisa Montanaro’s guidance and partly from working on The Pearl Farmers:

• Track the secret like you’d track a character. Who knows? Who suspects? What happens to the relationships based on who does and doesn’t know? Mapping out who holds it, who's protected by it, and how it ripples through your relationships keeps it from feeling tacked on.

• Decide what the secret is protecting, not just what it is. My mother wasn’t keeping a fact hidden; she was keeping a wound from being touched. Characters who keep secrets to protect themselves from shame, or to protect someone else from shame, behave very differently from characters keeping a strategic, operational secret.

• Let the secret be perceived differently by every character who knows it. No two people who share a real family secret understand it the same way. My sister and I know the same set of facts about our mother and have completely different relationships to them. In The Pearl Farmers, each sister is affected by their mother’s secret based on their relationships with their parents and the story of their family. Multiple POVs lend themselves to this beautifully; even a single POV can suggest it through dialogue and the shape of what other characters won’t quite say.

• Resist the clean reveal. In life, secrets come out sideways—partial confessions, slipped names, an unknown relative who shows up through a DNA test. The fictional version that mirrors that messiness tends to feel truer than the well-staged drawing-room confrontation. The less clean the reveal, the more complex the question becomes about why the silence existed and whether it was the right thing to keep.