Why I Keep Writing About Found Families

Found family is one of those things I didn't realise I was writing until I had to start thinking about how to market my books.

I never sat down to write What Falls to Us and thought, I want this to be a found family story. But I didn't write it by accident either. Hale's group became what they did because it fit the story, and because those were the relationships I wanted to write.

I think what I love about found family is the idea of people finding somewhere they belong.

Family is important, but so are the people we choose. I like friendships that are fiercely loyal: the kind of friends who will drop things for you when you really need them. I also like stories that treat those relationships as being every bit as important as romantic ones.

That's probably because it's something that's important to me in real life too. Some people plan their holidays around beaches or cities they want to explore. I spend almost all of mine visiting friends and family. Making time for those relationships matters to me.

Unsurprisingly, one of my favourite examples on TV is 9-1-1. The characters have their own families and romantic relationships, but the firehouse becomes another kind of family. They're colleagues and friends, but they're also the people who will turn up when everything goes wrong.

Given that 9-1-1 also had something to do with my decision to make Hale a firefighter, apparently its influence on What Falls to Us goes a little further than I realised.

Found family also takes on a different meaning in an apocalypse.

The survivors in What Falls to Us don't know exactly what has happened to everyone they left behind, but they know the chances aren't good. The people they're travelling with become some of the most important people in the world because, quite literally, they need one another to survive.

I think you can see that most clearly in the way the adults move around the children. It doesn't really matter whose children they are. Keeping them safe becomes everyone's responsibility. They protect them, feed them and make decisions around them because that's simply what you do when these are now your people.

That doesn't mean I want found families where everyone gets along perfectly. Conflict is interesting. People can irritate each other, disagree and get things wrong. I just want those conflicts to eventually be resolved.

There are elements of this in The Hawthorn Oath too, particularly towards the end.

So I suspect found family is something I'll keep coming back to.