End Matter Matters

“Liner notes junkie” is an appellation this writer wears like a badge of honor. I might not be able to tell you where I set my keys down last night, but I can definitely tell you who played bass on side two, track three of that ’70s progressive rock album. In the same vein, whether a book is a slender novella or an epic-length biography, I always, always, always read the acknowledgements.

The reasons are many. For one thing, acknowledgements demolish the illusion that a book is entirely the result of a single person’s efforts. For another, they demonstrate gratitude in a world that too often behaves as if manners are a relic of the past. (And yes, though my lawn is very small, please do get off it.) But what fascinates me the most about them is the peek behind the curtain they offer, into the world of the creator, and the process of creation.

Home Was a Dream has an Acknowledgements section, but also two more sections that I’ve never included in a book before: Notes on the Story and Bibliographic Notes. These additional bits—collectively known as “end matter” in the publishing industry—were made necessary by the story behind the story, the origins of the book, discussed in two previous posts here (“Deeper into the Forest” and “Imposter Syndrome”). A lot of research was required, and because I’m odd that way, the writing process itself ended up being nearly as interesting to me as the story that emerged from it.

These “notes” sections outline, respectively, the historical background that heavily infiltrated this multi-generational story, and the key sources I relied on in order to try to harmonize the fictional story I was telling with the non-fictional backdrop against which much of it plays out. I was less than a quarter of the way into writing the story itself when I realized both sections would be needed, and continued adding to and refining them right up through the end of the final edit.

Ah, but was it worth it? Can employing real historical backdrops help to make fictional characters occupying the foreground of a story feel more “real” and three-dimensional? I believe they can and would offer as evidence wildly entertaining historical novels like Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. But it requires a certain level of commitment, because once you’ve decided to incorporate well-documented historical facts and events in your story, you’d better get them right; one wrong note will pull readers right out of the story.

The process of incorporating real history—particularly the immeasurably heavy and fraught history of the Holocaust—into Home Was a Dream was challenging, but also deeply rewarding. Books can be entertaining or informative or transformational; the best may be all three, and may be so for the reader as well as for the writer.