The Things We Cannot Say
The Things We Cannot Say
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Kelly Rimmer on The Things We Cannot Say
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A Christmas party and fifty descendantsThe book began not at a desk but at a family gathering, when a single arithmetic observation reframed everything Rimmer thought she understood about her own existence. She had been standing in a crowd of relatives eating traditional Polish food when the scale of what two people had survived — and chosen — landed on her all at once.
It suddenly struck me that our now-large family had once been just a single Polish Catholic couple — my maternal grandparents. Displaced by war, they made a home almost 10,000 miles from the world they’d always known, in a country that was often less than welcoming to refugees. But seventy years later, more than 50 of their direct descendants know only that new country as home. Whether we are conscious of it or not, our grandparents’ decisions in wartime changed our lives.
The harder problem was that there was almost no record of what those decisions had cost. Her grandparents had died in the 1980s, and the silence they kept was not unusual for their generation. What was lost in that silence was not just memory but the hard-won knowledge that suffering produces.
Like many of their generation, there was little time to reflect or grieve even once the war ended. Their focus was on the future, and the physical, emotional and psychological wounds of war were soon trapped beneath the surface of the new life they were forging. The lessons they learned along the way were often lost to time.
That Christmas party was roughly a decade before the book appeared in print, and the gap was deliberate. Rimmer had already begun working toward the story around thirteen years before publication, initially treating it as a research project, a way to imagine what her grandparents had endured when she could no longer ask them directly. The weight of writing about people who had actually lived through the war held her back until she felt ready.
I always say that this book was ‘the book of my heart’. Often it’s only a year or two between idea and publication, but in this case I wanted to write this story for a decade before I actually attempted it. I was anxious to try to tackle anything related to World War II — it is a huge responsibility to write about those stories in a way that honours the people who actually lived in that time.
The caution was not timidity. It was the specific pressure of knowing that the people she was fictionalizing had once been real, and that at least some of their real experiences were still waiting to be found.
How she wrote it
Three weeks in Poland, a cousin she had never metWhen Rimmer finally committed to writing the novel, she and her Aunt Lola spent three weeks traveling through Poland, with Lola there to translate. In Trzebinia, her grandfather’s birthplace, they ate with distant cousins Rimmer had never previously met. At her grandmother’s childhood home, she looked through the window and recognized the house. She had been imagining it accurately for years without knowing it existed.
It would have to be the time I spent in Poland. My aunt came along to help with translation, and we shared such a meaningful and intense experience as we travelled. I just loved everything about writing this book. It felt like a special story right from the first word.
The research produced one discovery that unsettled the boundary between invention and family record. Rimmer had already written a plot element in which one of her fictional character Alina’s siblings is selected to stay on the family farm while the rest are sent to labor camps. When she tracked down a long-lost cousin during the trip, she learned that this was not just plausible history. It was her own grandmother’s story, one she had never been told.
While I was in Poland I learned that my grandmother was sent away for forced labour at the age of 14, after her parents were told that they had to select one of their children to remain behind to work the family farm and the others would need to go into labour camps. Until I tracked down a long-lost cousin, I had no idea that this was my grandmother’s experience, but I had already planned a similar situation in the story.
The coincidence is not evidence of anything supernatural. It is evidence of how thoroughly Rimmer had absorbed the patterns of her family’s world before she ever set foot in it.
The contemporary storyline, set in present-day Alabama, required a different kind of preparation. Eddie, the young autistic grandson whose medical crisis drives the modern-day plot, drew on consultation with a specialist educator who helped Rimmer build his character with accuracy rather than approximation.
Out of all of the characters I’ve ever written, Eddie is my favourite. I had a lot of help in planning his part of the story with a friend who is also a special ed teacher.
The personal thread
Questions she can never askRimmer writes historical fiction regularly, but she distinguishes this book from the rest of her work on personal grounds. The gap between what she could research in archives and what she could no longer recover from the people themselves shaped every page.
It is true that in this case the personal connection was particularly intense because I adored my grandparents and this story was inspired by all of the questions that I can never ask them about their lives before they came to Australia.
Asked during the book’s promotional Q&A who she would invite to a dream dinner, Rimmer’s answer bypassed the expected celebrity names entirely. The wish underneath the answer is the same wish that generated the book in the first place.
Can I have a sneaky extra dinner guest, pretty please? After writing this book, I’d have to say my own grandparents. All four passed away when I was young, but I so wish I had the opportunity now to sit down with them and to learn more about their lives.
What she wants us to sit with
What blood and silence leave behindRimmer closes her author letter with a statement about why stories like her grandparents’ need to be told at all, and why the telling becomes more urgent, not less, as the generation that lived through the war disappears. The argument beneath the novel is not primarily about World War II. It is about what happens when hard-won knowledge is allowed to die with the people who earned it.
History’s most important lessons can be difficult to confront and even harder to share — but we are all richer when those lessons persist through generations. Perhaps more than ever, we need the wisdom our forebears gleaned through blood, sweat, and more than their share of tears.
The contemporary storyline is not just a structural device for delivering the historical narrative. Rimmer has said she wanted readers to encounter Eddie on his own terms, and responses to the character suggested the dual-timeline structure was doing exactly the work she intended.
I was so proud and so moved by readers getting to meet Eddie through the book, and to get a glimpse into the way some ASD families experience life.