When David Kherdian, author of The Road from Home, was growing up, the mothers in his Armenian American community were insistent that their story be told, believing that telling the story of the Armenian Genocide would force history to be rewritten and provide an end and a meaning to the suffering of the Armenians. As a writer Kherdian felt the obligation to tell his mother's story, bitter and difficult as it was. He provides insight into how he was able to portray people he had never met from his mother's point of view, and describes the emotional impact of "becoming" his mother, drawing on her strength as a survivor to write The Road from Home.