The objects do not tell the whole story

I am a curator at a museum of twentieth-century Czech history and my professional view is that exhibitions are excellent at conveying facts and very poor at conveying what it felt like to live inside those facts. We can show you the ration card and the identity document and the queue photograph. We cannot show you the specific domestic texture of a Tuesday in 1953 when nothing happened and everything was wrong. I started writing fiction in 2018 after a visiting literary scholar gave a talk about historical fiction and said, somewhat provocatively, that novelists could do things with the occupation and normalization that historians were structurally prevented from doing. He meant imaginative access to private experience. I went home and started a chapter. The novel is set in Prague, starting in 1948 and running through 1968, and follows a family across two generations. I write it on weekday evenings at my desk near Náměstí Míru and I am slow. I need to be accurate and I need to be fair to people who didn't get to choose their roles. That combination requires more drafts than I initially planned. I'm on draft three.