Whisperings in the Blood – a biographical memoir: creating empathy and healing of multi-generational selves and wider community through a narrative exploration of intergenerational motifs

Inherited collective trauma is passed down through generations in a variety of ways. My biographical memoir Whisperings in the Blood (UQP, 2016), demonstrates through practice-led research, how turning life into art and using metaphor as the vehicle to transmit emotional truth can result in multi-generational emotional healing. The resulting effect on readers across the world has been one of deep empathy and dissolution of the idea of the ‘other’ in terms of how some people view those fleeing persecution, evidenced by fan-mail received after the book’s publication. As I traced narrative threads which appeared to connect generations of my Ashkenazi Jewish forebears, the result both during and after the writing was the understanding and therefore healing of not only my own inherited ‘wounds’ but also those of the family members I interviewed, and later, strangers, readers who read the story and whose view of the world changed as a result. Using a fiction-writer’s techniques I explore the subtle fabric of employing intergenerational motifs as extended metaphor. The effect of this has resulted in narrative empathy for both author and readers, and a deepening understanding connecting writer, characters and readers across time and place