Updated December, 2018: Thank you to Inkshares for your support of my manuscript. I am now under contract with another publisher and as a result am deleting content from this page. Please stay tuned for future projects!


* * *

From the author: My book, What She Lost, is part memoir, part re-imagined fiction based on the story of my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who experienced these horrors first-hand. This novel is less a Holocaust story and more a coming-of-age story that occurs during one of the darkest periods in mankind’s history. It centers around the stories my grandmother shared with me growing up about her own life, and my own experience witnessing the psychological impact such horrors had on those that survived.

My passion and desire to chronicle this story began in college, where I majored in English and took many creative writing courses. Being Jewish, I also took a number of courses in Judaic studies. In one class, we were assigned Night by Elie Wiesel. Here was a story told very simply but powerfully about one boy’s experience in the concentration camps during World War Two. The story touched home because of my own family’s history. I knew at that moment the story I needed to tell . . . my grandmother’s own story.

But time and again, when I attempted to start, I was met with a blank screen. I didn’t know how to tell the story. I had never faced such writer’s block before. I tried writing it as a novel, a biography, a series of short stories. I struggled because the "main character" was my grandmother, a living, breathing woman and not some made-up figment of my imagination. I wanted to be as accurate as possible, but what I enjoyed most was writing fiction—making up stories and creating new characters and situations. Many times I put a pin in the project and moved on to other things. Then my writing took a further detour when I became a wife and mother. Before I knew it, I had two beautiful daughters who were my only priority. Between midnight feedings, play dates, and PTO meetings, writing took a back seat.

A few years ago, I found a bunch of home movies that were collecting dust on the top of our entertainment unit. “Hey, remember these?” I asked my husband excitedly. As a family, we sat down to watch hours of footage, from the birth of our first daughter to our first trip to Disney. But when I saw the video labeled “Interview with Grandma,” my heart raced. In my hand was an interview I’d recorded of my grandmother, made years before my girls were born. I’d forgotten all about it! Long after everyone else had gone to sleep, I stayed up to watch my grandmother tell the stories about her life and the family she’d lost. I decided it was time to try again.

This time when I sat down to write, the words flowed. The emotions and images that had once eluded me came flooding out. I realized that becoming a wife and mother had given me the depth and perspective I needed to write about something so difficult, something I wasn’t able to do as a twenty-something-year-old. It was a story waiting for the right time to be told.

Added July 23: My hope is that this book can be used as a bridge to better understanding of human rights and as a weapon against prejudice and bigotry. To that end, I plan to donate a portion of the proceeds of the sales of this book to the Anti-Defamation League, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the International Rescue Committee.

https://www.adl.org/

https://www.ushmm.org/

https://www.rescue.org/

* * *

Melissa Hunter is an author and blogger from Cincinnati, Ohio. Her articles have been published on Kveller.com and LiteraryMama.com. She is a contributing blogger to the Today Show parenting community, and her short stories have been published in the Jewish Literary Journal. Her novella, Through a Mirror Clear, is available on Amazon.com. Visit melissawhunter.com for more information on her projects and to see a video from the interview on which she based her novel, What She Lost.