Book description:

When his mother vanishes, a thirteen-year-old reads her secret memoir — and follows her ghost to Spain.

13-year-old Leo's mother disappears and not even his father can tell him where she is or why she’s left.

As the days pass, his unease grows. When he finds a mysterious file on the family shared drive, his curiosity gets the better of him, especially when he discovers it’s his mother’s secret memoir. Needing to understand the reasons behind her absence, Leo begins to read the book, searching for clues.

Meanwhile, life is increasingly complicated. Adam, an intriguing boy, transfers to school at the end of the year and is assigned as his study partner. Old stresses in his friend group begin to tear apart his long-standing relationships while he wonders if Adam shares his feelings.

As he reads the secret memoir, he is confronted with new revelations about his mother's past, propelling him to look for the lost side of his family that still lives in Spain, setting off a chain reaction of unintended consequences.  Old grudges and danger resurface while Leo searches for meaning in his lost family's history.

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Author Bio: Laura Camacho Frias grew up in a small industrial town in the North of Spain. Despite her initial dream of becoming a translator for the United Nations, life happened; she studied engineering instead and moved to Portugal to complete her first degree. This turned out to be the beginning of a relentlessly high-paced 20+ year professional career, during which she worked in product and project management across several multinational industries, overseeing multi-million-dollar projects and managing brilliant minds.

Because Laura is only human — despite other people's opinions — this way of life contributed significantly to a health scare. That's when she rediscovered her passion for storytelling and became a full-time writer, focusing on stories heavily inspired by her own personal experiences.

Her partner, three kids, and two dogs ensure she still can't have either a proper relaxing day or a full writing day, but deep down, she wouldn't change it for the world. They all live together in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

As Elena, one of the characters in her debut novel Unwritten, puts it: "Suddenly, everything fell into place, and I knew what I had to do. I had to write. That's why I started again.”

The book opens with an unnamed, distressed woman on a train (p. 9), and we don't learn her identity for many chapters. What made you choose to open with that image rather than starting with Leo finding the file, which is really the reader's entry point into the story?

I always considered Unwritten a “two-in-one” novel, and I wanted to give the reader the opportunity to see Elena not only as Leo’s mum, but as the complicated woman she is. Being a mum, the one who writes the file, is only one of her facets and meeting her for the first time on the train allows the reader to meet her from another angle.

Unwritten alternates between Leo's present-day chapters (“Day 1,” “Day 2,” and so on) and Elena's memoir, with each memoir chapter named after one of her childhood diaries: Aretha, Blossom, Claudia, Deirdre, Eastwick, Phoenix, Gabriel, Hazel. What was the point of the alternating perspectives, and where did that naming come from?

The idea behind this structure was to show that everything is connected, that things that happened in the past can still have impact years later. The chapters are connected, sometimes to make comparisons (for example, when Elena writes about her family and when Leo talks about his), and others to help Leo understand what’s going on in his life (about healthy relationships, expectations…). The names of Elena’s diaries came from mine, the ones I re-opened when I decided to write this book. 

Did you keep actual diaries yourself growing up?

Yes I did! I kept diaries, agendas, and post-its as silent witnesses of whatever happened to me for many years.

Elena writes that she is “who I am due to who I grew up with—my mother” (p. 19), and the book traces her mother's own hard choices, from the clinic scene on p. 21 to leaving with baby Elena in her arms soon after. What is the novel saying about motherhood, and how it carries from one generation to the next? 

The novel explains that the characters’ lives are strongly affected by their choices. Elena’s mum decides to keep the baby despite the fact that it would make her future much more difficult, and that reality influenced the way Elena and her kids were later raised. The expectations, dreams, and fears are passed through generations, sometimes willingly and others not so much, and all that started the day Elena’s mum walked out of the clinic.

Elena describes her father's custody visits as being “like a holiday timeshare” (p. 29), and in the Madeira chapter, a shop employee is rude to young Elena until he realizes whose daughter she is (p. 32). What does Elena's father come to represent about fatherhood in the novel?

Elena’s father is "the choice”. He represents the possibility to do whatever we want, the wild dreams we have, and, eventually, the horrible consequences we suffer. He’s the other side of the mirror, when compared to Elena’s mother, and a constant reminder that life can be different than what she tells her it has to be.

Your acknowledgments include the line “My father, who abandoned me” (p. 305). How much of your own experience of your father informed the characterisation of Elena's father?

Carlos is the fictional version of my father. I didn’t spend much time with my dad so along the years, I created this character in my mind that later became Elena’s father. I mixed all I knew he was, and all the “what ifs” that ever crossed my mind, and Carlos appeared. Some people told me they would like to read his story, and I’ve been giving it some thought.

Back in the present, Leo tells his father he can't miss his grandmother because “I had no time! How can I miss someone if I had no time to love her?” (p. 51). Did Leo's voice come easily to you, or was it harder to write in a thirteen-year-old boy’s voice than it was to write in Elena’s?

I believe the things I wrote about are universal; that everyone in this world felt at a certain point joy, sadness, fear, excitement, and doubts. When I started to write this novel, I doubted about the characters, about the need to write from a feminine perspective, and then I realized that the message I wanted to convey could be equally passed by a boy or a girl. I have three kids, and listening to them has helped me to write these characters. Of course, I was once a teenager, but right now the world is different, and their daily experiences are different too. 

In the “Blossom” chapter, Elena is bullied by an older classmate, and her mother threatens a bully's father directly, saying she'd “punch him... and knock him on the floor” (p. 65). Elena calls it “a massive success of hard diplomacy.” What did you want that scene to say about her mother, who is otherwise portrayed as quite hard on Elena?

Writing this scene was fun, because despite all those things Elena’s mum said, she would never hit someone. For me, this is a mix of  “fake it until you make it” and fear of showing weakness, which we see later in the book. Elena’s mum tries to show herself as strong and resolute, but as the years go by we start to see that she focuses more and more her attention on her daughter and not on all those other things she once said were important to her.

Reina, at eleven, tells her mother “It should have been me... I am your daughter; I am the one who would understand” after learning Leo got to read the book first (p. 149). What does this moment say about Elena's relationship with her daughter, and maybe even mother-daughter dynamics throughout the novel?

Elena shares her file with Leo because she feels she cannot communicate with him. She assumes she had no trouble with Reina, which turns out not to be true. Throughout the novel, expectations, assumptions, and fears appear repeatedly. Elena expects to be good at everything she wants to do, assumes everything is in control at home, and fears becoming her own mother, and what we see along the book is that keeping control of those things in life is more than a full-time job… like motherhood itself. 

Grief, assault and illness appear more than once in this book, alongside quite light, comic family scenes. For example, Elena's grandmother's decline into dementia is introduced almost casually, through a fall in the bathroom that reveals a brain tumor (pp. 151). Also, Elena mentions, almost in passing, that her uncle “hugged me one day, sliding his hands down my back” and that she never stayed alone with him again (p. 22). How did you approach balancing those tones from chapter to chapter?

One of the harder scenes in the book is the encounter with Fernando, where Elena repeatedly says “Stop please... too many times” (p. 145) before he finally stops. It's not resolved with confrontation or consequence. She just ends things with him afterward. Why did you choose to let that moment pass without a bigger reckoning in the story?

That moment with Fernando does not define Elena. She recognizes things could have gone terribly wrong, but instead of hiding herself, she decides to stop their relationship and talk about it with her friends. Of course, she could have done more in that room, but she chose otherwise. The experience served her to behave in other ways in the future.

There’s a thread throughout the novel about how our relationships with others shape our acceptance of ourselves. Leo's own subplot suggests he may not experience romantic or sexual attraction the way his friends do. He says at one point he'd “never cared for girls... and never cared for boys either. Not in a romantic or touchy way” (p. 174). Was this always part of Leo's character, and what did you want it to say about family's role in that acceptance? 

I believe it is important to give space to people to know and understand themselves. Leo’s character is my way to tell that what others expect and the labels we could be given don’t matter. Leo doesn’t feel like his friends, and it doesn’t mean he won’t in the future. It means that, in that moment, he feels different and he needs to make peace with it and decide how to move on (or not).

How did you come up with a subplot with almost thriller-like stakes running underneath a book that is, at its heart, about a mother and son reading together?

My father passed away many years ago, and as I was staring at him on the funeral day, I could only think he didn’t look like himself. The suit didn’t fit him, his skin was yellow, and the expression on his face was weird. When I was writing the book, that thought came to me again, and the plot developed, putting together the memories I had from him and all the other things Carlos was made of. 

The book doesn’t end with resolution, but with Elena getting a text from the grandmother she cut off, and choosing to “tell her goodnight” and “not worry about it, not now” (p. 303). What made you want to end on that note of deliberate non-closure rather than a cleaner reconciliation?

The reason is the same as why I didn’t write “The end”: life continues, and one day we might know more about all these characters. People rarely break out completely with others, and even when they do, it doesn’t mean they aren’t still somehow connected. That was the idea, to show how difficult it is to end something, and in this case, the story and the book itself.

Unwritten is marketed to both adult and YA readers, because it pairs Leo's coming-of-age with his growing awareness of his mother's own coming-of-age, as he reads her memories of growing up with dysfunctional parents. What do you think it is about this dual structure that gives the book appeal across both audiences? 

It gives two different points of view about the same thing: growing up and getting to know ourselves. While Elena decides to share her secrets, Leo doesn’t. We see the boy carry on with his days, wondering why a teenage girl would behave as his mother did and still finding they have much more in common than he thought. Growing up, I was curious about older people, how they had achieved to be what they were, and this book seemed to me a good way to convey that feeling… it isn’t gossip; it is a little peephole into other people’s lives.

What do you hope a reader carries with them after finishing Unwritten?