The Book I've Wanted to Write My Whole Life
The Story
Manila, 1942. A 13-year-old British girl named Mary is imprisoned at Santo Tomas Internment Camp along with her father and younger brother. For the next 37 months, she will survive on rice gruel, fish heads, and sheer will.
She will become captain of the camp basketball team — fast, scrappy, a "really good shot" despite being 4'11". She will watch friends die of beriberi. She will listen to music on loudspeakers at night and pretend she's somewhere else. She will fall for a boy she shouldn't.
And on the night of liberation, when American tanks crash through the gates and the Japanese take hostages, she will watch her father drop 20 feet from a window — and drag his unconscious body to safety. Alone. At thirteen.
This is a true story. Mary was my grandmother.
Why I'm Writing This
My grandmother died before I understood what she survived. I knew the outline — the camp, the war, the basketball — but not the texture. Not the weight.
Then, a few years ago, I found a 15-year-old audio recording buried on a Sony IC recorder in a drawer. It was an interview with my Uncle Dennis — Mary's younger brother — recorded before he passed. The battery was dead. The device was obsolete. I thought the recording was lost forever.
It wasn't.
I recovered the audio. And what I heard changed everything.
Details I'd never known. The night of liberation. The fires. The three days of chaos. The baseball game where the Americans let the Japanese win because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn't. The houseboy who remembered my uncle 50 years later: "Dennis? How's your little sister Mary?"
I have the story now. The one she couldn't tell. The one that's been waiting.
Follow Along
I'll be sharing the journey here — the research, the artifacts, the writing process, the walls I hit and how I get past them.
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Research discoveries, writing progress, and the story behind the story.
Artifacts
Photos and documents from the research — coming soon.
- •The dragonfly pin my grandmother wore to every book signing
- •The handmade basketball trophy from Santo Tomas
- •Pages from the POW survivor book
- •The Sony recorder that held the lost interview
- •Family photos from before the war