Lived experience is the most potent tool at a writer’s disposal, though we often spend the first half of our careers looking elsewhere for inspiration. We tend to believe our personal histories are either too mundane to be interesting or too chaotic to be art. We treat the mess of our upbringing like a set of cluttered drawers we’d rather keep closed, fearing that if we opened them, the contents might spill out uncontrollably. But for the storyteller, that mess matters most. It is the raw ore that must be smelted. When we stop resisting the jagged edges of our personal history and start observing the patterns within them, we move from being a victim of our circumstances to a master of our world and our craft. Creative depth means taking the unique and perhaps mildly loony reality of our lives and distilling it into something relatable, feeling, and universal.
To understand the scale of the story I was born into, one has to look at the remarkable arc of my French grandfather’s life. He began in what he describes in his memoir as abject poverty, in a far-off and oft-forgotten corner of France where electricity, paved roads, and running water were fantasies as unattainable as the moon. During the German occupation of 1940-1945, his world was one of rationing and deep humiliation, yet he nurtured what he called a “secret garden,” his inner spirit that allowed him to see beyond the precariousness of wartime.
Driven by a traumatic past, he spent the middle of the twentieth century hurtling toward a greater destiny, eventually rising to become a global captain of industry and one of the wealthiest men in France. He built a commercial fishing empire with a fleet of ships that spanned from West Africa to Peru to France, ostensibly to ensure his children and grandchildren would never know the famine-prone hardships of his youth. But as he forged his kingdom, he unwittingly created a Ring of Power.
The drive that saved him in the 1940s became, decades later, a rigid system that valued preserving his institutions over the humanity of the individuals within it. By the time his businesses filed for bankruptcy in 2014, the legacy was no longer a gift; it was a weight that had torn the family apart over thirty years of mismanagement, corruption, and strife.
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