Merriam-Webster recently announced its 2023 word of the year: “authentic.” This is the word that dominated searches and lookup volume on the dictionary’s website.

Authentic is the watchword at the core of the meticulous worldbuilding that Julia Park Tracey constructed for The Bereaved, a historical novel inspired by her own family history and imbued with her own personal tragedy and debilitating sense of loss.

Spanning 1859–1866, The Bereaved introduces a remarkable and resilient heroine, Martha Lozier, recently widowed and struggling to raise her children in Newburgh, New York. Dire circumstances compel them to flee to New York City, where she ultimately surrenders her children to the Home for the Friendless on the promise that she can reclaim them when she gets back on her feet. It is, Kirkus Reviews praises, “an often painful but uplifting novel by a writer at the top of her game.”

The Bereaved has its roots in a handwritten receipt for a foundling child that was included in a box of clippings kept by Tracey’s father (still alive at 97 “just to torture me,” she jokes). That child was Tracey’s great-great-grandfather. Christina Baker Klein’s 2013 novel, The Orphan Train, spurred Tracey to contact the museum of the National Orphan Train Complex, where she learned that her great-great-grandfather William Lozier Gaston had three siblings. She also learned about Martha, who, for Tracey, became the key to writing the novel.

Tracey originally envisioned the project as a nonfiction book. A former journalist, she had previously edited a great-aunt’s diaries (I’ve Got Some Lovin’ To Do, 2012) that focus on her teenage years in the 1920s. “I tried to write [Martha’s] story as a journalist,” Tracey says. “I thought maybe my sweet spot would be that I’d be like the New Yorker writers who write about history as a personal essay. It never came together. Was it a Nancy Drew mystery where I’m writing about what I discovered next? Who cares? There were too many missing pieces to write it as a straight narrative. So what do I do? I took this up with my local community of writers, and they said [Martha’s story] had the makings of a phenomenal novel. But I wanted to write serious nonfiction. I spent six months being outraged, and then I started writing my novel.”

In Martha, Tracey found a character whose plight deeply resonated with her. “As the 2010s progressed, there was President Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy that separated migrant families at the border. That very much informed the book. I had a rough divorce in 2000. My ex kept my kids from me. I knew how that felt for those families.”

In an indelibly dramatic scene in the book, Martha is horrified to learn that the organization to whom she entrusted her children has sent them to live with other families:

“Mrs. Lozier, even if for just one day, one hour, we require that the child be ‘surrendered’ to us…It is understood, Mrs. Philips always makes it plain, that we may send the children out to other homes…Did you not understand that?”

I faltered. “I did understand that some children, orphans and waits, were sent out, but I did not think mine would be sent away from here. Their father is dead, but I am their mother. They are but half-orphans. My daughter was sent to Illinois, for mercy’s sake!” I choked. “Where are my babies now?”

A family tragedy also profoundly impacted the book. In 2019, Tracey’s son Austin committed suicide. “My life just stopped,” she says. “I could not finish a sentence. We were so numb and shocked. I was the one holding it together and trying to manage everyone’s pain. I did not write for two years.”

Tracey remarried, and in 2021, the family moved out of the house and away from its painful memories to Grass Valley, California, in the foothills of the Sierras. “We spent a year restoring this funky Victorian,” she recalls. “It gave me an opportunity to pound a lot of nails, swing a hammer, learn to use a hacksaw and a nail gun, and lay a ton of tile. It turned out that’s the best way to get past writer’s block: move rocks, pound rocks, dig a hole, paint a wall. Do something mindless, repetitive, and time exhaustive so the wheels could start turning.

“I realized I wanted to get back to the novel. I would do it first person. Not only was I an aggrieved mother like Martha, but I could make her eldest boy similar to Austin. The novel became a work of rebirth.”

Tracey, a California native, was one of five siblings. Books and readings were key to her growing up. “We went to the library every week and would get a stack of books,” she recalls. “The way I found my own place was steering into books and…writing. I was able to create my own world, a room of my own.”

The first books she fell in love with were Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series (she still has the set given to her on her fourth birthday and reads it every other year). Later, she discovered another form of worldbuilding in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books, but she was not drawn to fantasy.

One day, at home on a sick day from school, she asked her mother (“on a whim”) to bring home some poetry. “That ignited my desire to write poetry,” she says. “The specific writer who excited me was Patti Smith, a punk rocker. It was huge to learn I didn’t have to write about unicorns and angels; I could write about being angry, all the things that were forbidden, [and] showing your feelings. My parents were big proponents of keeping feelings to oneself.”

Tracey would later become the city of Alameda’s poet laureate, but the family’s Protestant work ethic compelled her to study and get a job in journalism. Being a poet was not a practical job, her parents told her.

“Becoming a journalist was my way to write words for a living,” she says. “Journalists are among the lowest paid white-collar workers, but I felt like I’d make a difference by writing stories about nonprofits, new businesses, and struggling artists. That was more authentic.”

Tracey drew on poetry and journalism to craft her novel. “Poetry is like a ramen [noodles] packet,” she says. “It’s [made up of] very concentrated words that are intensely focused.”

Putting on her journalist hat, she immersed herself in microfiche, purchased contemporaneous diaries on eBay, visited New York to walk the streets where Martha would have walked, and found the cemetery where Martha’s family is buried. “I took the ferry to see Newburgh so when I left, I could watch it recede in the distance, as she did.”

In the new film The Holdovers, Paul Giamatti portrays a boarding school history teacher who states that the past is a study of the present. Tracey agrees. “The past informs the present,” she says, “in that it gives us red flags: ‘Don’t do this because this is where things could go.’”

Actors talk about challenging characters they find difficult to shake. Tracey feels similarly about Martha and honoring mothers’ stories. “She is part of me,” she says. “I carry her DNA. The ancestor is within me, and I stand on her shoulders.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer who is published in theWashington Post, Town & Country, and on Vanity Fair.com.