DID AURORE EVER REVEAL THE TRUTH ABOUT HER PARENTS?
There was this metafiction concept I had when writing Manacled that I ultimately decided to omit. The Handmaid’s Tale concludes with a metafictional epilogue in which Offred’s story was a cassette being studied in a history class in 2195. Originally when writing Manacled I had intended to include a fourth epilogue which was formatted as an editor’s note with the implication that Manacled was written by Aurore in order to set the record straight about who her parents were and their part in the war. And that intention informed the way I wrote and depicted different parts of the story and the language choices I made when writing the sex scenes, etc.
In the end I decided to leave it out because I felt like adding any further twists or reveals would undercut the impact of Manacled’s closing line. Because of course the vindication of setting the record straight is so desired by most people; the injustice of Hermione being a footnote is intended to burn. Soothing that sense of indignation wouldn’t have made the point that I really wanted to make: that war is unjust and we forget most of the people who fought and suffered most simply because we never even learned their names.
If the story was going to have an point to it, that’s the one I want people to walk away with because I feel like that perspective is one that counts for something, even more-so than the story itself, and I didn’t want to reduce the impact of it by trying to add anything else. But even without it being explicitly revealed, a surprising number of people have actually picked up on the implication that Manacled is the story that Aurore wrote for her mother and that was my intention/hope.