How Stories Take Shape

A Fondness for Truth is now officially launched into the world! The Münstergass bookstore co-owners Susanne Bühler and Monika Steiner sponsored the launch, which was held in Bern’s PROGR (short for Progymnasium), a former school building that has been turned into an artists’ cooperative and cultural center. In front of an audience of fifty, my friend and fellow writer Clare O’Dea* asked me questions about my books and writing process. Afterward, I read a few pages from the new mystery and took audience questions, and then people enjoyed fancy finger food and wine while I signed their books.

One of the questions Clare asked me during our interview was why this new book brings up the cause of Rainbow Families, which has long lobbied for lesbians’ and gay men’s rights to marry and have or adopt children.**

The answer begins not with LGBTQ+ politics but with my interest in Switzerland’s Sri Lankan Tamil population. Before I write about Swiss Tamils or gay marriage, though, I want to explain that Switzerland has created a statistical category called “people with a migration background.” This sounds as if it would apply to almost everyone in the US, including the descendants of the men and women who came over with the Mayflower. But “migration background” in Switzerland is more carefully defined—it means (1) everyone who is not a citizen of Switzerland, no matter how long they’ve lived here; (2) first-generation foreigners who have acquired Swiss citizenship; and (3) citizens with one or both parents born abroad. By this definition, 40% of Switzerland’s residents have a migration background. Most are Europeans, the majority from the seven ex-Yugoslavian countries, followed closely by Italy, Germany, Portugal, and France.

A Fondness for Truth introduces a set of Swiss residents with migration backgrounds who aren’t European: Sri Lankan Tamils. In 1983, fighting broke out in Sri Lanka between the majority Singhalese and minority Tamil populations and continued until 2009. During this long civil war, Tamils dispersed worldwide, seeking safety, and Switzerland became one of their refuges.

Fifty-thousand Sri Lankan Tamils are not many in a population of almost nine million Swiss, but in a country as white-skinned as Switzerland was in the 1980s, they stood out. I’m sure those first Tamil refugees suffered all kinds of discrimination, but they did find work. They labored at menial jobs for decades, determined that their children—boys and girls—would get good educations and do well. Many of the Tamils who arrived in the 1980s and 1990s are now parents and grandparents; the younger generations speak perfect Bernese German and work at skilled jobs.

During the past twenty years, I’ve heard from Tamil women that their process of assimilation has been complicated by their parents expecting them to follow important Tamil cultural rules. One of these is that they marry within their own caste. Since these strict social distinctions are based on traditional trades like sailor, pearl diver, blacksmith, or weaver—professions that no Swiss Tamils follow—they are meaningless to the younger generations. But not to their parents.

Deciding that A Fondness for Truth would examine cross-cultural clashes, I planned to focus on the experience of a Swiss Tamil woman married to a native Swiss man. But when I spoke to someone in just this situation, she told me her parents weren’t as upset about her Swiss husband as they would have been about a Tamil from the wrong caste.

What about gay and lesbian Tamils in Switzerland, I wondered then? How do their parents react to their choice of partners?

That was when I began learning more about the LGBTQ+ scene in Bern; the plot and characters in A Fondness for Truth grew from there.

I thought that, like my audience at the launch, you might enjoy this example of the long and quirky process by which a book takes shape!

*Clare O’Dea’s most recent book, which I love, is the novella Voting Day, about the day in 1959 when Swiss men turned down women’s right to vote in federal elections. Voting Day is available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Voting-Fairlight-Moderns-Clare-ODea/dp/191414807X ) and through bookstores.

**On September 26, 2021, 64% of voters agreed to a law permitting same-sex marriage, adoption, and access to fertility services in Switzerland. The law came into effect on July 1, 2022.