Sunday,
The cover of Victoria Atamian Waterman's news book.
Rhode Island native Victoria Atamian Waterman said she knew the exact moment she had to write a book.
For Waterman, who grew up in Warwick and now lives in North Smithfield, it was a visit to her aunt’s grave in the North Burial Ground in Providence in 2015.
“I have the exact photo of finding flowers, old white silk flowers on her grave,” Waterman.
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What made the discovery somewhat mysterious is the fact her aunt Vicky never had children, so how they got there was puzzling to Waterman.
“In my heart, I knew that maybe they simply blew over, and someone picked them up and thought they belonged there,” said Waterman.
But the seeds were sewn for Waterman to write a book, with the catalyst being her aunt.
“She was a maid during the Armenian Genocide,” said Waterman, who was raised in a close-knit Armenian family — and Armenian was her first language.
“I grew up in a multi-generation house,” said Waterman. “And I’m really the last generation to tell this story with not just my voice, but their voice.”
“Who She Left Behind” is the first book from Waterman, who had a career in banking and non-profits before “semi-retirement.’
“I’m too young to truly retire,” laughed Waterman, who soon embarked on the start of her second career.
Victoria Atamian Waterman. PHOTO: Waterman
Intertwining Fact and Fiction
Waterman said that while the graveside visit — and her aunt’s story — prompted her to write a book, she said she realized she could make the main character “anyone I wanted to.”
“When the war was over, all those girls like my aunt were maids in Turkish homes,” said Waterman. “My mother would say by the grace of God, none of your aunts were raped. But from what we know of what happened there, it was pretty typical.”
So in Waterman’s book, the protagonist, a maid, is raped by the “man of the house” before the wife of the house kidnaps the child and leaves.
“I wanted to make the character based on my aunt a bad-ass,” said Waterman. “This could have been her story. She comes to the United States but she never forgets her daughter, or the other maids.”
For Waterman, who serves as a trustee of the Soorp Asdvadzadzin Armenian Apostolic Church in Whitinsville, Massachusetts and was a presenter at the 2023 AGBU Women Shaping the World Conference, keeping the stories alive — particularly of what women endured during the Armenian Genocide — was particularly important to her.
“My kids don’t know these stories. To them, this is reading about medieval times,” said Waterman.
Waterman says the book will be available for pre-order on October 1, and she will be kicking off with an event in Worcester, which is home to the first Armenian church in the Western Hemisphere.
“There’s a lot of Worcester in the book, and there’s a lot of Providence,” said Waterman.
And for Waterman, she is now working on her second novel.
“There is a lot of Providence in this one,” said Waterman.