Occasional notes on books, family history,
and whatever I’m currently obsessed with.
Deb Holman writes at the intersection of family history, memory, and the stories we inherit—whether we asked for them or not. For more than twenty years she’s been digging up family secrets (the genealogical kind, mostly) and translating research into narrative that people actually want to read.
She is the author of Nothing Really Bad Will Happen (a family memoir shaped by her family’s Holocaust-era history and its long echoes) and Doris’s New Home, a children’s book inspired by her mother Doris’s true journey from Vienna to New York.
Her current project, Countess of Cons: The Story of a Gilded Age Grifter, tells the true story of her husband’s great-grandmother—divorced at fifty, armed with a diamond ring, and absolutely not interested in staying respectable.
One of my favorite parts of writing Countess of Cons was taking the fragments I found in old newspapers, court records, and city directories and figuring out how they fit together into Catherine’s story. Sometimes a single newspaper article gave me the bones of a scene. And sometimes…
deborahsholman.com 