Tina Boscha

And, she’s, um, how do I say this without sounding crass? Still alive.

Here’s a pic of me and my mommy taken in early August:

At that point in time, she knew I was publishing the book, so clearly she still loves me.

All kidding aside, my mom is probably the biggest champion of this endeavor.  It’s (hopefully) clear that my novel is based on her life out of love, admiration, and ultimately, inspiration.  As for how my mom feels about being the basis for the main character, I think she vacillates between intense pride and some embarrassment at being the focus of River in the Sea.  That lovely, serious young woman on the cover is her, right around the age she is in the book - fifteen. We never know our parents when they are teenagers, and certainly the Leen De Graaf in the book is not an exact depiction of the Leen De Graaf my mother was during the 1940s. And I never meant this to be biography, anyway.

Yet when I first started writing this (goodness, ten years ago) it was extremely difficult for me to break from the idea that whatever happened in the book had to mirror exactly what happened in her history.  I knew intellectually that Book Leen was not Mom Leen and yet I felt wedded - welded, even - to being as true as possible. This was my family’s history, I HAD to be accurate.

It took me a long time, and a lot of prodding by writing profs and colleagues, to free myself of that.  This book could honor my family, but yet it had to be my own.  It was and always was meant to be fiction, inspired by events that fascinated me since my youth. My mother is an amazing woman who made some difficult and courageous choices at a young age (and she says, looking back, that she barely thought them through, that she can’t quite believe she did what she did) and therefore is a great basis for a character.

But trying to stay so close to that paralyzed the writing, and the book, until I finally let go and realized that by writing about my mother, I was indeed writing about myself.

And you know what? By changing the story, by prodding and shaping and molding it, I think I got closer to the essence of what attracted me to writing about her and what happened to the De Graafs of Wierum, Friesland, than if I had tried to keep every chapter in lockstep with the actual series of events. I discovered that I had some things in common with my mother. I didn’t necessarily want to fit into a prescribed mold. I wanted to do something big for myself. I wanted to follow my own path. Perhaps that was what really drew me to her story. I think so.

And so I changed it up. I added new characters, I attributed events to different people, I shortened the timeline. The beautiful thing is that when reading it, my mom said that I did capture the essence of that time - the fear, the intensity, the kinds of thoughts that go through your head when your seemingly ordinary self and family is put up against extraordinary forces.  She’s proud of the book, and that makes me feel like I truly succeeded. I may or may not ever become a bestseller, but knowing she’s behind this - still, nearing 80 years of age, by the way - is an amazing feeling.