Mourning What Was Never Spoken: Intergenerational Trauma in Fiction
“Some stories aren’t told—they’re absorbed.”
In Bones of the Moth, the real ghosts don’t always have names. They don’t wear sheets or whisper from corners. They linger in the quiet glances between parents and children. In the silences around the dinner table. In what’s not remembered—but somehow still inherited.
This is the landscape of intergenerational trauma: the unspoken grief that echoes down bloodlines, not through language, but through patterns, absences, and survival behaviors. It’s one of the deepest emotional currents running through the novel—and one of the most urgent conversations we can have about how fiction helps us heal.
What Is Intergenerational Trauma?
Intergenerational trauma (also called transgenerational or inherited trauma) refers to psychological and emotional wounds passed from one generation to the next. It can be the legacy of war, genocide, displacement, abuse, or any unresolved trauma that isn’t metabolized by those who experience it directly.
The trauma doesn’t just pass down in stories. It often passes down in silence.
Children grow up shaped by moods they don’t understand, fears they didn’t earn, and survival mechanisms they never chose. And so, the trauma lives on—not through memory, but through muscle.
How It Lives in Bones of the Moth
The novel is set in postwar Heidelberg, where the aftermath of World War II is still pulsing just beneath the cobblestones. Rebecca Vogel tries to rebuild a life, keep order, feed her children, and not look too hard at what’s broken. But her daughter Dolores sees everything. She doesn’t always understand it—but she feels it. Deeply. Viscerally. And unlike the adults around her, she has no filter for denial.
In this way, Dolores becomes the emotional tuning fork of the story.
She reacts to what others repress. She mimics behaviors they don’t know they’re modeling. And she carries grief that was never meant for her—but is hers all the same.
Rebecca, like many postwar mothers, doesn’t speak of what she endured. She can’t. She’s too busy surviving. Her silence becomes a kind of shield—but it also becomes a shroud. Dolores grows up in the shadow of things unnamed.
Fiction as a Vessel for What Was Buried
One of the most powerful things fiction can do is give voice to silence. It allows us to bear witness, even retroactively. To imagine the things our ancestors couldn’t say. To name the wounds they couldn’t treat.
Through characters like Dolores, fiction creates space for what was emotionally off-limits in real life:
Children naming the behaviors they weren't allowed to question
Mothers being seen in their fragility, not just their function
War not just as historical backdrop, but as psychic rupture
In writing this novel, I found myself asking: What happens to the generation born in the ruins? What happens when children inherit grief like a family heirloom?
The answer isn’t always resolution. But it can be recognition. And that is its own kind of healing.
Real Echoes: Why This Matters Today
Many of us walk around with inherited burdens:
The silence of a grandfather who never spoke of the camps
A mother who flinches at certain sounds
A nervous system shaped by stories that were never told but somehow understood
These are not abstract concepts—they are very real in the body, in relationships, in the ways we parent, attach, or retreat.
Fiction like Bones of the Moth helps us sit with those ghosts. It doesn’t always exorcise them. But it listens. And sometimes, that is enough.
“If you don’t speak it, you don’t escape it. You just pass it on.”
— from Bones of the Moth
We all inherit stories. Some come with words. Others come with shadows. Writing this novel was a way to step into those shadows—not to banish them, but to offer light.