Here is a memoir about the author’s mother. To give you a flavour, let me tell you that the epigraph at the beginning is to the author’s brother: “For LKC: Together we made it to the shore.” Clearly a lot has gone on.
The opening is the author telling us that she wrote this book to deal with her grief, about which she is: ‘puzzled and more than a little ashamed.’
Her mother leaves her husband because he is an alcoholic, and ends up finding a way to go from teaching in one rented room to founding a whole school. It’s a titanic effort. Here is the author:
“It has taken me years to come to terms with the fact that I was a middle child, one of three siblings, not two. My older sibling was a boy, and my younger sibling was a school. There was never any doubt about who our mother’s favourite child was. She loved, fought for and protected her youngest child with everything she had. That kind of focused, ferocious love, regardless of what it may choose as its object, is a blessed love. The challenge for those of us who are not chosen, and instead watch love pass us by, is to learn from it, marvel at it, and not grow bitter and incapable of love ourselves.”
Her mother can only be described as a real piece of work. Both her children ‘go no contact’ (as Reddit would say) for many years. But they can’t escape how much she formed them, and what she achieved for them, and they both get sucked back in. The book gets into the overall life of the author, which is interesting in its own way (who wins the Booker for their first novel?!?) but somehow lacks the immediacy of the parts about her mother. I wonder for how many people it’s true that their entire adult life has less emotional energy than their childhood