As if Amy Terrill didn’t already have enough credentials to her name, she can now add “published author” to her resumé.
The former CHEX Television personality and current executive director of BGC Kawarthas in Lindsay has released her debut novel No Secrets Among Sisters, a work of historical fiction inspired by her own family history.
The origins of the novel dates back to 1986 when Terrill was attending the 90th birthday party of her Great Aunt Frances “Frankie” Horton (nee Ford), who stood up and began sharing stories about her life in “incredible detail.”
“Everyone in the room encouraged her to write it down,” says Terrill. “Given her age, we didn’t want to lose all that amazing information, so she started right away, and it took her about five years. She had Parkinson’s (disease) so, as time went on, she wasn’t able to physically write any longer and had to record it in a tape recorder for someone else to type it out.”
The book was printed and bound, and copies of A History of the Ford Family From 1900 were distributed to every member of the family. The memoir chronicles her experiences growing up as the eldest of 10 children in Irondale in Haliburton County, and her time working at the Russell Motors Car factory which produced munitions during World War I.
Though Terrill was in university when her great aunt’s book was completed and she read it for the first time, she continued to open its pages throughout her life — most profoundly in Toronto in 2015 when she was reading it while taking the GO train to her job at Music Canada in Toronto.
“When I got to the chapter about World War I, I realized that the munitions factory where Aunt Frankie and her sister Aunt Mattie worked was literally around the corner from my office, at King and Dufferin,” says Terrill.
“Her book contains lots of details about what jobs they had, what they were paid, and other really interesting details about that work, but it was the fact that it was around the corner that just hit me like a bolt of lightning. They had been walking virtually the same sidewalks 100 years earlier to work, and it was that moment I thought ‘I have to do something with this.'”
It wasn’t until around Christmas in 2020 when Terrill did exactly that and began putting pen to paper to write No Secrets Among Sisters. The novel is set in Toronto, alternating between present day and World War I, and fictionalizes her Great Aunt Frankie.
In the novel’s present-day timeline, 38-year-old Amelia Collins is a successful reporter with The Globe and Mail who is grieving the death of her father. Simultaneously, she is feeling conflicted upon being asked to be the candidate in an upcoming federal election after years spent contemplating her political ambition.
“She needs to try and figure out if she’s actually in a frame of mind where she could pursue this now,” Terrill explains. “It’s really both her emotional state, but also she is concerned about how women are treated in politics and if she has the fortitude to withstand the abuse that women suffer through social media and other ways in politics.”
When Amelia sees her mother to contemplate the decision, she learns her late father had left her a letter asking her to figure out why her Great Aunt Frankie Ford abandoned her political dreams when she was a leading suffragist, encouraged by Nellie McClung, during World War I. Amelia decides she must find out why Aunt Frankie decided not to pursue politics in order to find her own path, and along the way, she uncovers a web of violence, disappearances, and a mysterious fire that destroyed Canada’s Parliament buildings in 1916.
While there are many factual details about her great aunt, Terrill got creative in making her a suffragist in the past timeline.
“The character works in the munitions factory, and she and her sister travel back and forth to Irondale where their family is, so there is a lot that is actually based on her real life, and even some specific scenes that Aunt Frankie wrote about in her family history that I’ve been able to incorporate into the book,” Terrill says.
“I took the liberty of making her a suffragist because I’ve always enjoyed observing politics and learning more about politics and it seemed like a really good fit for me to build that into the novel.”
This delicate balance between fiction and fact is at the core of what makes historical fiction, and something that Terrill was always thinking about as she was writing the book.
“It’s my favourite genre to read, so I am inspired by the way authors are able to take true events or characters and then put them in different circumstances, but it’s hard to know the right balance,” she says.
“There’s a fire that destroyed the Parliament buildings in 1916 that’s a key event embedded in my story, but I have taken a very creative approach to what actually happened in that fire. I think about if I’m taking too much liberty with our Canadian history, or if it’s exciting to present an actual event that may give the reader some inspiration to look into that further and actually learn about the true history.”
Conducting the research for the book around the factual points of history — like life on the home front during the First World War and the suffrage movement to ensure women had the right to vote — was a lot easier than it would have been for Terrill’s Great Aunt Frankie, considering she wrote her family history from memory and without support from the internet.
“I was quickly able to find archive photos of the Russell Motors factory in Toronto from World War I, so that helped give me a visual of what the factory floor would have looked like for them,” Terrill says.
She adds that she also visited museums to explore what streetcars and the railways would have been like in Toronto, while also reading the diaries of Lucy Maud Montgomery to help her get in the psyche of women who were at home during the time period.
What Terrill found even more challenging than conducting the research, however, was crafting the fictional elements.
“I didn’t know if I could make something up because, throughout my career, I’d always had to write factual stories or policy papers,” she says, noting she took an online masterclass on creative writing with Margaret Atwood. “In the course, she gave some very practical advice about every aspect of creative writing, but character development was really helpful for me and timeline development. There were lessons in that masterclass that were fantastic.”
Terrill will be launching the debut novel at two events this fall. On Thursday, September 25 at 7 p.m., she will be at the Kindred Coffee Bar in Lindsay where she will read excerpts and sign copies, while her former CHEX colleague, Kim Coulter, will lead a Q&A.
“There are some folks I know (who) have already purchased and are reading it in their book clubs, and I know a couple of those small book clubs are going to come out to the launch event,” Terrill says. “So hopefully there will be lots of conversation about the book.”
Terrill will also be hosting a launch event on Thursday, October 2 at 7 p.m. at the Ottawa Tennis Club. There, she will explore in more detail why the 1916 Parliament fire is featured in the book, and do another Q&A and book signing.
While she is still celebrating the launch of No Secrets Among Sisters, she is already well into the draft of a sequel that can be read as a standalone novel.
As Terrill continues to explore this new avenue in her career, she remains hopeful she’s doing justice to her Great Aunt Frankie’s story.
“I’m sure she would be very proud,” Terrill says. “She was a good writer on her own and, to think that her great niece is venturing into writing with her as an inspiration, I think she would be very proud.”
“She might be a little bit uncomfortable that I made her a suffragist, but she was intelligent — she was an inspiring woman — and I think she would have been fantastic if she had ever run for politics.”
No Secrets Among Sisters is available at Kent Bookstore in Lindsay, Coles at Lindsay Square, Take Cover Books in Peterborough, at online retailers, and through Terrill.
For more information on the book, visit www.amyterrill.com or follow Terrill on Instagram.
