Writing the Great American Novel. Hint: It's about family.
My mom and Uncle George.
Since February 2026, I’ve been hard at work on an autobiographical fiction novel started, and then postponed, in 1999. White Rose work interrupted the writing.
Which may be for the best.
I’m now approaching the narrative differently. From 1999 to 2013, I bore witness to the best and worst years of my mother’s life. The best, when she used every ounce of her courage to join me in Pennsylvania, after having lived in Texas the first 6-1/2 decades of her life. Giving up her married name, I am finally, but finally, neither your dad’s wife nor your mother, but just ME.
And jumping with both feet into White Rose work. Learning best practices for videoing interviews. Documenting our research trips. Handling customer service and correspondence. If you ordered White Rose materials from 1999-2007, she processed your order, not I.
The worst, when dementia stole her from me, from her friends and family, a little at a time, until she was a shell of the vibrant, vivacious human being she had always been.
This historical fiction novel—I'm using Middle Earth Houston as a working title on social media—centers on our family, dealing with bigotry, hate, racism, lies, and flat-out abuse. “Grownups” like my parents and paternal grandparents, the Sachs family, struggled. They struggled to survive the cesspool that was Houston from 1954-1983, the period covered in the series. They struggled to keep us safe, to protect our minds and our bodies from awful people who did not have our best interests at heart.
In some ways, writing this novel is cathartic. My subconscious plows through hard, hard issues as I slumber. I wrote in my day planner that I’m grateful for that, but I wish it would let me sleep at the same time. Because these nightmares aren’t conducive to a good night’s rest.
I’m also having aha moments when I write family scenes. I’m not having to recall when what happened, because I kept a diary. But what I wrote in say February 1962 was from the perspective of seven-year-old me. Naïve, hearing what grownups were saying, and not comprehending.
Since I’m the narrator, I’m keeping the naïveté, the gullibility of five-, seven-, ten-year-old Denise. All the while, seventy-one-year-old Denise is saying, Oh my God! As I’m sure adult readers will, too.
I’m also learning “writing” things that may interest or help those of you who are writers, parents, thinkers on this platform.
- What you do as a parent matters a lot. More than you know.
- Our lives aren’t linear.
What you do as a parent matters a lot. More than you know.
Include your children in grownup conversations.
As I’m writing about listening to my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents talk—whether serious political considerations, chit-chat over a game of 42, or ethical concerns—I’m realizing that I truly heard those things. I may have made a cryptic note in my diary, but when I see that note, the whole conversation comes rushing back.
How my parents handled others’ using the n-word (and other pejoratives). Why they were distressed when friends belittled President Kennedy just because he was Catholic. My dad’s desire to own an auto repair shop and his contemplation about buying out one of his uncles.
When everyone fretted about the possibility of nuclear war, very real in the 1960s, they talked openly about the Soviets, about ongoing negotiations.
Open doors were so common in our house that when my parents shut their bedroom door so they could argue talk, I worried. (And yes, I had something to worry about, although naïve me didn’t know.)
But their willingness to answer questions, with no questions too dumb or silly, is part of who I am. Who I have become. If they had excluded us, I would have sought knowledge elsewhere. They ensured that wasn’t necessary.
They played with us.
The chapter that has been the most fun to write so far? Their participation in our elementary school’s Halloween carnival. My dad was the zombie in the casket who scared everyone to death when he sat up. My mom was the witch with the pot full of eyeballs. Dry ice added to the effect.
Both of them knew how to have fun. We didn’t take ballet or chess or other classes to teach us how to have fun. We just did.
It helps when your father is a big kid at heart.
We knew we were protected and safe.
When talk arose of nuclear bombs and Khrushchev’s threats to annihilate the USA, my little sister and I were scared. The stupid drills at school, covering our heads in the hallway with sirens wailing, didn’t help one bit.
My sister and I ran crying to our parents. After explaining what nuclear bombs were and the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union (see above!), my dad said we did not have to worry. He would make sure that no bombs hit our house, that we were safe.
Looking back, of course he could not guarantee that. But that was all we needed to hear, all we wanted to hear. That he and my mother would stand between us and bombs.
That trend continued well into our teenage years. If something or someone scared us, we could tell our parents. We counted on their protection from everything bad.
Our family often went “exploring.”
This may have been the best gift, next to safety, that we got from our parents. If we had a free day, we’d get in the car and take off until either my mom or dad found a road we’d never explored before. Anything interesting? Stop and check it out.
We gathered more rocks (to tumble) and flowers (to press) and “treasures” by the time I was ten! It did not matter where we were. If we visited my mother’s parents in New Mexico, we went exploring. If we were in Morgan Mill, Texas, we’d walk to see what my mother could find of her mother and grandmother’s homestead.
If either my sister or I asked, “What’s that?”—that was a sign for my dad to slam on the brakes and let us find out what that was. We combed through broken-down schoolhouses (retrieved old textbooks from the 1920s). We poked around openings in the ground that might be caves. We entered more General Stores, still in operation, just to see what they sold, and to buy penny candy, if they had some. If a town had a population sign less than 100, we knew we’d found a place to stop.
Most important for me as a kid, when we’d explore, my parents would explain the history of a place, or its geology, or its meaning to them (“my mom and I fished here when Buchanan Lake first opened”). We didn’t climb “mountains” (hills) just to climb mountains. We asked a bazillion questions along the way.
Both of my parents were flawed, and neither tried to be Perfect.
Hmm. Maybe this is the best gift. Knowing that you can screw up, ask forgiveness, mend fences, and move on. It’s not necessary to hold grudges till the end of time.
My dad especially had “feet of clay up to his hips,” yet we knew he loved us more than life itself.
They encouraged us to journal.
My first diary? 1962. I kept it faithfully, even if not daily, until May 1973.
I’m amazed, re-reading those diaries for the first time—they have been in storage for fifty years—that I wrote so well in second grade. One entry talks about a pageant, spelled correctly, with a pronunciation guide. It’s highly likely that I bugged my mom to tell me how to write that word. But it’s there.
Some entries are crazy childish, but that’s part of the fun of re-reading: Remembering that once upon a time, it was quite all right to be daffy and silly, to bring gray stuffed mouses named Hermann to school, to rant about G.G. getting a role in the school play, to confess true love for Brad Gilbert one day and Norman Lloyd Burrows the next. All in seventh grade.
In the middle of all that daffy, silly stuff, there’s serious considerations. What career do I want when I grow up? Why won’t my dad let me go to that party, but I can go to Barry’s? Why did those cousins leave me behind when they left Great-Gramma’s house?
And reading how gullible, naïve me thought Nixon would make a wonderful president.
Diaries. Documenting who I was, who I was becoming.
If you’re a parent, or a teacher, or a favorite aunt, be aware that what you do when the kids are “little” matters. They won’t ever forget. Even if you think they will. They hear and see more than you know.
Our lives aren’t linear.
There are indeed days that I think my essays cast too wide a net. I write about travel, translations, Real Texas History, FInding Family (genealogy) where this post is filed, and of course German and White Rose Resistance. Plus Our Common Table, how politics and policies should unite us, not divide us.
As I’m writing Middle Earth Houston, I’m understanding that those apparently disparate topics are interwoven in my brain. And have been ever since 1999, when this novel first took shape.
Travel: Places form who we are. Places expand our horizons. Even here in the United States, we will hear different languages if we travel to Gallup, New Mexico, or Laredo, Texas. We will eat different foods, observe different traditions, talk to people unlike ourselves.
My first trip abroad? June 1973, as an 18-year-old, a solo trip for the entire summer to Germany and Eastern Europe. Life-changing.
Small Business: As I’m writing Middle Earth Houston, I sometimes say Whaddya know! I’ve long had an aversion to jobs in Fortune 500 companies. Impersonal. Bureaucratic. A Borg-like machine. I’ve assumed that was just me. Even when I’ve had short-term consulting jobs that required working for one of those giant companies, I’ve felt like the Force was disturbed somehow.
As I’m writing, I’m appreciating that my expectations for “business” come from how I grew up. My dad took us to “his work” from the time we could walk. We would hang out the tenth-floor windows of Houston’s Petroleum Building as he caught up on paperwork. Glad his mother wasn’t there. Granny would have pulled us back inside.
Aunt WeeWee would let us accompany her to “her work” at Anheuser Busch’s Yeast Division. We’d punch the numbers in to her gigantic calculator and giggle the whole time. If we behaved, she let us open the mail with her copper letter opener. Which I still have. We helped!
And Granny took us to P.N. Hirsch, the first job she took post-divorce, and taught us the difference between cloth and stitching and things that aren’t fashion, just quality. She’d help us shop. Amazing how many times $0.10 could buy a frilly dress when we were with Granny!
When my mother started working, she’d bring home those heavy manual ledgers used in the days before computers. She sat on one side of the dining room table, I on the other, and we reconciled balance sheet accounts. My first “job” was working as receptionist for the office supply company where she kept the books.
Translations: I have had many translation projects that challenged me, made me think, let me become a part of history. Prospectuses for Germany’s Treuhandanstalt. Documents for a family in Texas trying to reclaim property in Hamburg taken by the Nazis. A metaphysics text entitled The Philosophy of Science, by Aloys Wenzl (Munich, 1934). Contracts. Financial statements. More certified immigration documents than I can count, and even more genealogical texts.
The documents that I treasure most? Letters to my great-grandfather Sachs from cousins in Germany. Especially the letter from a woman named Thieme, thanking Aunt WeeWee for the many, many CARE boxes she sent after the war. My great-grandfather never translated that for his daughter, never told her that they had received the goods.
Aunt WeeWee read my translation, tears streaming down her face. It only took thirty years for her to receive the thank-you.
That translation gave me insights into her life and character that I could not have gotten any other way. All those kindnesses, the loans she forgave? Made perfect sense. It’s simply who she was.
Texas History: Although my novel is “autobiographical fiction,” it likely hews closer to the truth than most history books in Texas schools these days. It’s lived history.
It’s my grandmother losing her business because she divorced her husband (needed a spouse to cosign in 1955).
It’s living smack dab in the middle of first-gen Americans, with languages and food and traditions so different from what I knew. Immigrants. The life blood of the neighborhood I grew up in.
It’s growing up with the threats of the KKK and John Birch Society on every hand. Editorials supporting racist candidates. Unabashed hatred on the pages of the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle.
My family’s story—with persons combined, invented, or changed to prevent lawsuits—is Texas History. My great-grandfather Sachs settled in Houston in 1892, in Texas since 1883, in the USA since 1881. When he couldn’t speak a word of English. When he died in 1951, his English was still atrocious.
His wife’s family, the Blounts, had lived in Alabama, plus cousins in Texas since the days when it was part of Mexico. The Heaps, Trumps (not Trumpf!, thank goodness), Nabors (yes, those Nabors), Norrises, Sidelingers, Kellys, Lights, Hughes, Becks, Barrons, Langstons, Edmondsons, Poages, Pogues, Simpsons, Harrells, Robinsons, Mintons, Schillers, Schrecks, and all the rest eventually made their way to Texas from shores unknown. To America.
They spoke German, Swedish, Italian, Yiddish. They sported really odd British and Irish accents. They were professors, brickmakers, writers, mathematicians, musicians, farmers.
Texas history. Real Texas history.
Genealogy: I don’t think I have to explain how all of the above dovetails with genealogy. In fact, I’m combining writing of Middle Earth Houston with more genealogical digging and finding out some strange things about these ancestors of mine that are still percolating in my brain. I don’t have to figure them out for the book. But I will need to correct Ancestry “leaves” brought over from cousins’ trees that are flat wrong.
And of course, I write about it in this section, Finding Family.
What does this mean for you?
Your Venn diagram won’t be the same as mine. The topics that float your boat will likely be equally diverse, just different.
But they make up your story. Who you are. Who your children are becoming. How you create your world (because we all do so).
Wherever you are in your writing project—even if it has nothing to do with your family story—keep in mind that your family matters, good, bad, or indifferent. And the tapestry you have been weaving for the past however many years matters.
Claim both family and tapestry. If you write against either, you will struggle.
Postscript: My friend Clare sent me a wonderful New York Times article (no paywall) about a young German writer named Nelio Biedermann. If you’re a German major, or simply German, please stop giggling about his last name. He does not harbor or support arsonists.
His novel, Lázár, is based on his family’s story. Specifically on stories he heard from that family as he was growing up.
Then there is the connection to Biedermann’s real-life family, whose aristocratic lineage can be traced back to Michael Lazar Biedermann, who arrived in Vienna from what is now Slovakia around 1800 and eventually helped found the Austrian National Bank. His descendants, known as the Biedermann von Turonys, acquired numerous properties, including in what is now the Czech Republic.
The author heard stories about the family as a child mostly from his grandmother, who lived in a modest apartment in suburban Zurich filled with stately family heirlooms, including old furniture, cutlery and portraits. “It just didn’t fit the place where she lived,” he said. “It was like a time capsule.”
Clare was right. The article inspired me to keep writing.
But so far I haven’t uncovered an aristocratic lineage. Oh well.
Postscript to the postscript: If you don’t know the Max Frisch play Biedermann und die Brandstifter, you may want to check it out. [English title: The Fire Raisers. Original German from 1948, English version 1961.] Why do works from those days take on fresh urgency and relevance?!
Comments worth keeping
Your parents - flaws and all - gifted you with a childhood filled with SAFETY, curiosity, and unconditional love. That is truly a treasure.
--Gwen Miertschin, April 16, 2026.
This is a really interesting piece; and some great advice about writing.
--Leslye Joy Allen, historian, April 16, 2026.
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© 2026 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact me for permission to quote.
Image credits: Top photo--My mom with one of her uncles (her mother’s brother). Photo © 1970 John Heap. Bottom photo--Albrechtsburg in Meissen, Germany. So far, my genealogical work has not uncovered any nobility. Photo © 2019 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact me for permission to use either photo.
No part of this post may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the “fair use” of quotations that are properly cited and credited, including identification of the translator if applicable. No part of this post may be included in any Large Language Model without proper licensing from the copyright holder, Denise Elaine Heap.
