A first book and a mission for San Juan Capistrano author

The time-honored advice instructs writers to “kill their darlings” — to trim lines or passages that they cherished early on so that the work can mature to completion.

In Aline Ohanesian’s case, the darlings survived.

The author, who lives in San Juan Capistrano, got the idea for her first novel when two sentences flashed in her head one day: “There is only what is, what happened. The words come much later, corrupting everything with meaning.”

Ohanesian jotted the words down and took them as inspiration to enroll in a writing course — her first ever — at UC Irvine Extension. Eight years later, after workshops, revisions and a publishing deal, those sentences remained in “Orhan’s Inheritance,” which recently was long-listed for the 2015 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. The center is nonprofit organization in New York City.

Over salad last month at a restaurant near her home, Ohanesian recalled the moment when the first words came to her.

“I knew it was a female voice,” she said. “I knew it was a very old voice, over 80. And I wrote those sentences down. And when I got my Kirkus starred review, the reviewer, who was anonymous, only quoted one or two sentences. It was those sentences.”

The female voice eventually belonged to Seda, an elderly Armenian woman who, in Ohanesian’s story, lives in a Southern California retirement home in the early 1990s. A survivor of the Armenian genocide, Seda gets an unexpected visit from a young Turkish man named Orhan, whose grandfather listed her as a beneficiary in his will.

Over the course of “Orhan’s Inheritance,” these characters and others become a prism for the competing legacies of Turkey’s last century: those who swear by the genocide and those skeptical that it occurred, the expatriate activists who push for recognition and the young Turks who face oppression of their own at home. For long stretches, the novel flashes back to 1915 to follow Seda as she begins the march with her family, while Kemal, a teenage Turk who has wooed her, becomes a sharpshooter in the army.

Another of the book’s major characters is Seda’s niece, Ani, who organizes an art exhibit about the events of 1915 and invites the governor to speak at it. Ohanesian, who considers the character “maybe who I was when I was 16,” also learned about the genocide through an outspoken family member — although, in her case, it wasn’t one who knew about the event secondhand.

It also wasn’t one whom Ohanesian knew to be outspoken. One day, at the age of 8, she was watching “The Sound of Music” — a musical about a family who flees the Nazis — on television with cousins when her typically reticent great-grandmother called her into the next room and explained quietly that she had a story of her own.

The account Ohanesian then heard, about her great-grandmother and other family members being forced out of their homes by Ottoman Turks and led on a march through the desert, left her perplexed.

“I just was shocked,” Ohanesian said. “Growing up in an Armenian family, I knew there had been some horrible thing that happened to a couple generations before. I was 8, so I was very fuzzy on the details. It was not an appropriate story. I would be very upset if someone told my 8-year-old a story like that.”

Ohanesian, who is married now with two sons ages 13 and 9, has been open — at least in carefully worded terms — about her family’s heritage. Earlier this year, she took her children to a remembrance march in Los Angeles, and the family has a trip to the Museum of Tolerance planned this summer.

The author, meanwhile, is busy making appearances of her own. She spoke in April at a genocide centennial rally hosted by the Armenian Students’ Assn. at UC Irvine — at one point chastising President Obama for his “cowardice” in not acknowledging as genocide the Ottoman government’s systematic killing of as many as 1 million or more of its minority Armenians. She is scheduled to kick off the University of Michigan’s Armenian Studies Program’s fall schedule with a lecture in September, and Southern Connecticut State University plans to have her visit later this year.

As for “Orhan’s Inheritance,” it has steadily racked up laurels, including being listed among Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Selections for the summer.

“It’s often hard to sell a first novel,” said Kathy Pories, the book’s editor at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. “It’s not like she’s somebody famous. She’s really just a new voice, and given all that, it’s doing really, really well. I think, as a paperback, it’s going to be a much bigger book.”

Ohanesian has a hope that transcends reviews or sales — she wants more people, including government officials, to admit that the genocide took place. Largely, it’s a matter of semantics. The Turkish government has stated that the 1915 killings do not meet the traditional definition of genocide, and the U.S., which considers Turkey an important ally in the Middle East, has refrained from using the term.

When Obama — who pledged to acknowledge the genocide as a candidate in 2008 — sidestepped the word this year on the 100th anniversary of the killings, many considered it a betrayal. Ohanesian, though, would most like to see another government make an overdue admission.

“I’m not terribly interested in what the United States says about this historical event,” she said. “I’m more interested in what Turkey says about it. For me, the most important thing is for the Turkish government to make some sort of acknowledgment.”