How much research is required for historical fiction?
And best books of 2023/2024
I was working on a perfectly fine article about character development, but when I read It's Time to Rewrite the Rules of Historical Fiction by Vanessa Chan, new inspiration struck.
The title hooked me immediately, because my first novel is set in Italy in the 1950s. It is, technically, a historical novel because it takes place in the past, but it’s not about historical events. It’s a story that just happens to occur in another time.
When it comes to the question of research, much like Chan, I’ve questioned, “Can memory be research? More importantly, can secondary memory, stories passed down through time, unreliable, malleable—can these stories be considered research?”
While writing the first draft, I frequently researched key details (buttons, police uniforms, radios, etc.). I also watched movies from that era and I had notes from my travels in Italy. That said, am I an expert in this time period? No. Did I get some minor details wrong? Probably. Does this impact the believability of the story? Absolutely not.
I had plenty of material to work with. And enough left over for more novels, if I want.
You see, this first novel is based on stories told by my mother, aunts and neighbours. To this, I added stories told by friends, other Canadian-born children of Italian immigrants, who also carry the lives of their mothers, aunts, grandmothers and neighbours. Stories of community, friendship and bravery, the stories deemed not worth telling because they are the stories of women.
The novel happens in a town based on a real place, but I gave it a fictitious name and I reimagined the architecture. I even make reference to other neighbouring towns in the region, but my town only exists in the imagination as a backdrop to an emotional past.
In her article, Chan writes:
Memories are records. Yes, there is a shakiness to memories and a patchiness to oral history. But the power of fiction is its ability to transcend the wobbliness of facts—to write shaky moments into concrete existence and make them sturdier than the historical event. Memories make for rich fiction because they are specific, personal evidence—yes evidence—of a life lived. As the documentarians of family histories that have remained ignored by the Western sources, we must trust and rely on the stories our families tell us, and on the histories our ancestors have lived. Our stories deserve their place in history, too.
The very instability of these memories is what makes for good storytelling, because they reflect the emotional states of that person while it was happening, across the years that separate them from the original event, and how they are feeling as they retell it. These stories hold space for all the many emotions we experience in the course of a life. Evidence of a life lived.
Immigrant memories are especially amorphous, as they are tinted by two filters.
My mother, for example, landed in Montréal 61 years ago. Her childhood memories are, naturally, gilded with the brush of nostalgia. There was poverty, hard labour and violence, yes, but there was also innocence, discovery of the world, a sweet freedom that was lost with age, marriage, and all the responsibilities that brings.
But in order to adopt a new homeland and make peace with this permanent distance, she had to (and continues to) minimize where she came from in order to stay comfortable with where she is now. My mother has zero intention of returning to Italy, a place that (she says) is riddled with violence, hate, corruption and rising costs. In Canada, she is safe and comfortable, a narrative that she has told herself for more than six decades.
So her memories are unreliable, yes, but all the more interesting for being so.
As my favourite physicist writes in “The Order of Time”, “This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.”
And the novels we write, above all, should give a glimpse into the kind of meaning life can have.
My mother’s stories reflect every part of her journey, how she made meaning and how she continues to make meaning. Her memories and her emotions, passed on to her by the women who came before, live on in me, live in on the words I write. In reading my novel, readers will see shades of that life lived, the reactions, joys and grief, the separations and reconciliations redistributed to a variety of fictional characters, the resonance of the whole portrait still holding its integrity across time.
That is “research” enough for me.
What are your thoughts about research, historical novels and memories? Drop me a comment, send me a DM, you know I live for this kind of discussion 🫶🏼
BONUS! I am updating my to-read lists so I have these links open on my browser. If you’re looking for your next read, please enjoy:
Getting a basic fact wrong in a historical novel can rip the reader right out of the story. As an editor, I'd say it's worth doing a fact check. As we used to say on The Gazette desk, "if in doubt, cut it out."