Reading the author, it turned out that Ellen Foster might actually be a somewhat true story. This is an excerpt from Mike Child's research article on Kaye Gibbons:“She had a poor and troubled childhood on which she drew freely to create her novels. She grew up in a tin-roofed house with an alcoholic father and no electricity or running water. Like the protagonist of her debut novel Ellen Foster, Gibbons' mother committed suicide when she was ten. Gibbons' father died just three years later, in 1973. She passed from relatives to adoptive parents before living in relative stability with her older brother David. the same life a bit like Ellen Foster did in the novel. It creates even more emotion for readers to understand how hard and true life must have been