The Past Is Not Past, That It's Present

I was really going not so much for factual understanding, but for emotional understanding. I read something about how that was one of the most painful books for her to write because it dealt with this history that was so directly connected to her own family. She used to feel ashamed of her mother being a maid, but then she also realized that her mother suffered those humiliations in order for her to eat. Their existence and there the things that they did in order to survive were very much present in who she was, who she was becoming. And I think Octavia felt that her mother and her grandmother were really the archetypal heroines, her heroes, that were not being written about.