Turning three women's war into The Burning Tree series.

They were three sisters in a French colonial family, living their years before, during and after the Second World War. The story spans Madagascar, France, and England. These were women whose lives I knew only in outline, the way you feel you know the layout of a house from the street without ever having been inside. The story starts really with a photograph. A wedding, a collection of people, some smiling, some whose faces expressed no emotion. A uniform and, amidst the snapshot of a hopeful future, a sense of loss.

Over the years, fragments accumulated; the kind a family carries for a generation or two and then, if no one writes it down, quietly loses.

I wanted to write it down. But fairly early on, I had to decide what "it" would be. Would it be a record or a story? Why not a memoir, then?

In fact, there is one. It's the memoir of a life spanning the twentieth century. A small part of this was devoted to the war years in Madagascar. But it doesn't deal with the people I'm interested in, or look at the world from their side of things. It leaves gaps that needed to be filled: years with no letters, conversations no one recorded, motives no one explained because at the time it wasn't considered important. A memoir must rely on verifiable facts, and the book I envisioned would have consisted primarily of silences. It would have been accurate, but it would have read like a supermarket list, and wouldn't have satisfied the objective I was looking for. It would also have bypassed some of the most dramatic of the historical events through which the women in my story lived.

Fiction let me do something a memoir couldn't: it let me go into the room. Not the room as it was, of course, but the room as it plausibly could have been, built from everything I knew about the women, and could verify through research: the politics of the period, the geography, the rhythms of colonial life, the particular cruelties and compromises of wartime. And I could inhabit it with people who could say what silence hid. Martine, Daphne and Mariclou are not transcriptions of three real women. They are what I visualised to stand where those women stood, so the emotional truth of what they lived through could have somewhere to go, even though it could not hope to resemble it.

Once I'd chosen fiction, the changes appeared. I compressed time. Real lives run at their own pace, full of dead months that make for dead pages; a novel must keep moving. The novel compresses months into scenes, merging scenes across the years. Where research suggested something that might have happened, and roughly why, I invented incidents. Not the afternoon it actually happened, but as a "possibility" of what would have happened on that afternoon.

I built composite characters, taking traits and roles that in life may have been spread across several people, and giving them to one, because a novel can only hold so many names before a reader stops trying to keep them straight. And I gave my women agency in scenes where the real history was probably quieter, and more passive, than fiction allows.

I tried to do nothing carelessly. Every invention was built to be "plausible" and grounded in what I'd researched about the period, the politics, the war itself, even where it didn't actually happen. The distinction matters because I'm not trying to make anyone think this is a factual account of what the women would have lived through. I was trying to write something true to what women like them might have faced.

The thing fiction can do that memoir can't is carry a larger canvas than any single life contains. The family I started from lived through one version of a colonial, wartime world. But that world produced thousands of versions: women who resisted and women who collaborated, families that held together and families that didn't, colonists who never once questioned the hierarchy they benefited from and a smaller number who did.

By fictionalising, I could let Martine, Daphne and Mariclou each carry a different piece of that larger truth: one in occupied Madagascar drawn into a resistance network, one in occupied Paris married to a man on the wrong side of history, one arriving in postwar England as an outsider, a migrant. None of that is my family's exact story. All of it is true to the world my family's story came from.

That's really the whole answer to "why fiction, not memoir." A memoir would have honoured three women. A novel let me examine the world they lived in as well and imagine different interactions.

This blog is the first in a series of posts unpacking the history and ideas behind The Burning Tree series. Next time, I want to look at the real events the sisters' fictional lives move through — Operation Ironclad, the occupation of Paris, armed resistance, the slow collapse of an empire — and at the ideology that persuaded so many of its participants to fight against their own interests, a mindset whose roots reach deep enough that it still resonates, long after the empires that produced it have imploded.