Long before I began writing To Fly on Broken Wings, there was a photograph.
In it, my grandparents stand together on their wedding day, my grandfather dressed in his military uniform. They were newly married, with a future before them that must have felt both hopeful and uncertain. Soon afterward, he left for war.
I have looked at that photograph many times and wondered what existed beyond the borders of the frame.
What did they say to each other before he left? What fears did they keep hidden? What dreams did they make together, knowing how quickly war could change them? How did my grandmother carry on while she waited, and how did that season shape the life they eventually built?
My grandmother gave me some "table scarfs" that she sewed and embroidered while my grandfather was overseas. This piece of her story made it into Lila and Graham's.
Some family stories are passed down in vivid detail. Others come to us in fragments: a photograph, a name written inside an old book, a recipe in familiar handwriting, or a memory repeated so often that it becomes part of the family itself.
Then there are the stories that are never fully told.
Perhaps the people who lived them did not know how to explain what they had endured. Perhaps no one thought to ask while there was still time. Sometimes the silence surrounding a story becomes part of our inheritance too.
As a novelist, I am drawn to those quiet spaces.
Fiction cannot tell me exactly what my grandparents thought or felt during those years, and I would never pretend that it could. But imagination allows me to step toward the emotional truth of their time. It lets me consider what it meant to love someone whose future was uncertain, to wait for news that might change everything, and to build a life in the shadow of what had been lost.
Their story is not Lila and Graham’s story. Still, something of that old photograph found its way into To Fly on Broken Wings. Not as a retelling, but as a question.
What does war ask of the people who remain at home?
That question stayed with me as I wrote. History often remembers the battles, the dates, and the names of those who served. But war also unfolded in kitchens and grocery stores, beside radios and mailboxes, and in bedrooms where women prayed for the safe return of the people they loved. It lived in the ordinary moments that never appeared in history books.
Those experiences shaped families for generations.
I think that is true of all our inherited stories, not only those formed during wartime. We carry pieces of the people who came before us, whether we recognize them or not. Their courage may become our courage. Their fears may echo in choices we do not fully understand. Their wounds can travel through a family, but so can their faith, endurance, humor, tenderness, and hope.
As I grow older, I find myself valuing these stories more. I wish I had asked more questions. I wish I could return to certain conversations with the wisdom to listen more closely.
Maybe many of us feel that way.
We assume there will always be another visit, another holiday, another afternoon around the table. We think we will remember every detail. Then time passes, and we realize how much can disappear when a voice is no longer present to tell the story.
Yet even incomplete stories can leave something meaningful behind.
My grandparents could not have known that their wedding photograph would one day sit in my library, or that the sight of my grandfather’s uniform would help awaken a novel set during the Second World War. They could not have known that a granddaughter would study their faces and imagine the courage required to begin a marriage beneath the gathering clouds of war.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of storytelling. It gathers the fragments and holds them up to the light. It does not fill every silence or answer every question. Sometimes it simply says, “This mattered. These people lived. They loved, waited, struggled, believed, and hoped.”
Our stories rarely begin with us.
They begin in places we may never have seen, among people whose voices we may barely remember. They travel through photographs, traditions, mannerisms, warnings, prayers, and the tales told around family tables. Some arrive whole. Others come with missing pieces.
And somehow, God can use even those fragments.
He can take what was nearly forgotten and give it new meaning. He can remind us that our lives are part of a much longer story, one stretching backward through generations and forward into lives we may never see.
I inherited only pieces of my grandparents’ wartime story. But those pieces were enough to stir my imagination, deepen my gratitude, and remind me that ordinary lives are never truly ordinary.
Sometimes a single photograph holds more than a moment.
Sometimes it holds the beginning of a story still waiting to be told.
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