Between the lines of the balance sheet

I analyse financial statements for a living and the skill that work has given me, unexpectedly, is reading what isn't written. A balance sheet tells you what a company chooses to disclose. The interesting information is in the relationships between the numbers and in what the numbers don't say. The fiction I write is about families and money, which is probably obvious. About the specific conversations families don't have about inheritance and debt and the assumptions each generation makes about what the other one has. I grew up in a household where money was not discussed, which is a very specific kind of financial education, and I am thirty-five years old and I still piece together things from my parents' past that I wasn't told. I'm writing a novel set in Singapore over three generations of a Peranakan family, starting in 1965 and running to the present. The architecture is a house in Joo Chiat that is bought, extended, mortgaged, and eventually sold, and I'm using the house's changing value as a way to track the family's changing relationship to the city and to money and to each other. I've been working on it for two years. I write at the café in my building on Saturday mornings before anyone else is up.