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My Greatest Struggle
Fig Trees pieces together memories, letters, and ordinary objects to explore how your mother’s violent death reshaped your childhood. You write that “Memory isn’t a calendar.” How did that understanding shape the structure of the memoir?
My greatest struggle in writing the memoir was determining the order of events. Because this is a deeply personal story, I felt a profound responsibility to keep the narrative as true and authentic as possible. The heavy, monumental events of my childhood were obviously burned into my brain with absolute clarity. However, the lighter, everyday chapters didn’t always come to me in a neat, chronological line.
The breakthrough happened when I finally internalised the truth that “memory isn’t a calendar.” Once I gave myself permission to accept that memory works in emotional fragments rather than rigid timelines, a massive weight was lifted. I felt completely free to stop worrying about perfection, let the barriers down, and just blurt it all out on the page. That realisation ultimately gave the book its natural, honest shape.
Why was it important that readers come to know your mother as a person rather than primarily as the victim of a crime, and how did reading her letters as an adult change or deepen your understanding of her?
My mother wasn’t extraordinary or famous to the rest of the world, but she was special to me. Throughout my life, I carried a deep sadness because I never got the chance to know her as an independent adult—she was only ever “my mum.” It was incredibly important to me that readers get a glimpse of her actual life, to see that she was a real, living person whose existence was not defined solely by the tragedy of her death.
Reading her letters as an adult changed everything for me. They allowed me to step outside the child-parent dynamic and get to know her as a whole woman. Through her own words, I discovered her humour, her bravery, her compassion, and her vulnerabilities. Seeing those different sides of her was profoundly grounding, giving me the relationship with her I had missed for so many years.
What role did the relationship between you and your sisters play in surviving the instability that followed your mother’s death?
Following our mother’s death, my sisters and I all unconsciously took on silent roles just to survive the instability. For me, that meant becoming the protector of Ayrlie. I don’t recall being overtly protective of her when our mum was still living, but suddenly I felt this immense empathy for her. Sometimes, I had to push my own grief entirely to one side just to make sure she was okay.
My relationship with Stacey changed too. Whenever things felt especially low, I would turn to her when I could—though never in an obvious way. I would ask her to help me with my homework, and she would help, but it was in a clinical, structured way rather than a motherly one. Outwardly, our mum became an almost taboo subject that we simply didn’t speak about.
Caring for a younger sister gave me a vital sense of strength because I desperately didn’t want to let my mum down, but it also left me carrying an enormous, heavy burden of responsibility at a very young age. Had it not been for my sisters, I am truly unsure how I ever would have made it through to adulthood myself.
After returning so deeply to this period of your life, what does it mean to you now to remember your mother?
To remember my mother now simply means honouring the fact that she was here. I just want people to know she existed, as simple as that. While I wrote this book as a legacy for my family, it is, more than anything, a legacy for her. She will never truly be gone now. If someone picks up my book in fifty years’ time and reads her story, they will know she was here, she lived, and she mattered.
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‘I couldn’t put Fig Trees down. What I expected would take a week to read was finished in just a few days.This is one of those rare books that doesn’t just tell a story, it makes you feel it. I was completely immersed in the author’s world, experiencing the fear, grief and resilience as though I were living it myself. A deeply moving memoir that will stay with me long after the final page.’
A daughter returns to the story that shaped her life… because when a child loses her mother to violence, growing up changes forever.
When she was ten years old, Marnie Ross’s childhood was shattered by a single act of senseless violence: the murder of her mother.
Told through the eyes of the child she once was, this memoir traces a girl growing up in the long shadow of loss, the author’s voice maturing on the page as she matures in life. This is not a story about a crime, but about how a young mind survives grief, fear and responsibility far too early.
Some memories are sharp, preserved like photographs. Others are softened by time, yet still carry meaning. What follows is not the exact truth of how events happened, but the truer story of how they were lived.
Interwoven with tender recollections of a mother lovingly remembered, Fig Trees is a portrait of a childhood shaped by love and absence, and of a woman returning to the story that formed her.
Raw, poetic and quietly powerful, this is a memoir about loss, memory and the resilience of a child who learned too soon that the world is not always safe, but life must still be lived.
