4 ideas
Quintín finds the manuscript and secretly reads it, disputing her accounts of his ancestors' crimes, affairs, and racial mixing and insisting on his own 'factual' version. The fight over the text grows into the breakdown of their marriage, so the contest over who may narrate the family becomes a contest over power inside the household.
Whoever writes the official version of a family or nation claims ownership of its past, and so of its legitimacy and inheritance. When a subordinate, such as a wife, a servant, or a colonized people, takes up authorship, the dominant party reacts as if property were being seized, because the story is what justifies the property.
Frame one account as 'mere imagination' and the rival account as 'objective record', then ask who benefits from the label. The label 'fact' often belongs to the voice that already holds authority. The label 'fiction' can be the only space where suppressed truths, such as illegitimate children, racial ancestry, and domestic violence, get recorded at all.
A family home's architecture records social hierarchy. Elite owners live in the upper floors that are rebuilt with each generation's tastes, while Black servants and hidden kin live below, near the lagoon, keeping memories and bloodlines the owners deny. Reading a house by who lives on which level exposes the racial and class foundations a family's official history leaves out.