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Love in Good Time: A Memoir
The world of the Robson family is a complicated mixture of suffocation and strength, and Claire’s parents’ lives are as small and safe as they can make them. A mother who wants her daughter to fulfill her own dreams and a daughter who wants to be everything her mother is not―both may love each other, but neither understands the other.
Claire Robson escapes her village and her family through a scholarship to university, where she easily becomes a hippie, marries the son of a family far wealthier than her own, and plunges headlong into domesticity. But before long she leaves her husband and rides her motorcycle straight into the lesbian community to become first a squatter, then a school principal.
This memoir reads like a novel, and is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreakingly poignant. It is a coming out story that tackles the trade-offs some gay people make after they leave the closet and choose acceptance instead of activism, work instead of sex, success instead of happiness, and silence instead of truth.
While this may not seem to be everyone’s story, the author’s courage, honesty, warmth, and humor make it an unquestionably universal one.
Claire Robson escapes her village and her family through a scholarship to university, where she easily becomes a hippie, marries the son of a family far wealthier than her own, and plunges headlong into domesticity. But before long she leaves her husband and rides her motorcycle straight into the lesbian community to become first a squatter, then a school principal.
This memoir reads like a novel, and is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreakingly poignant. It is a coming out story that tackles the trade-offs some gay people make after they leave the closet and choose acceptance instead of activism, work instead of sex, success instead of happiness, and silence instead of truth.
While this may not seem to be everyone’s story, the author’s courage, honesty, warmth, and humor make it an unquestionably universal one.
262 pages, Paperback
First published August 31, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 4, 2010
Claire Robson was a teacher of mine at secondary school, so this memoir was of interest on a personal level as well as out of general interest. I found it to be a really well written memoir, not particularly "deep", but moving, especially the description of Claire's parents in their small Durham town.
The chapters dealing with her time at the school I was at were eye opening, and the teachers (despite having their names changed) were easily identifiable. I pretty much agreed with her assessment of most of them (especially piggy Harlow and Setchell, the pious idiot), but despite having suspected that she and a certain games teacher were in a relationship, it was a bit of a shock to find it was actually the case, especially as the teacher in question was actually incredibly unpleasant and had an ineffective and aggressive teaching style. What on earth did Claire see in her?
As lesbian memoirs go, this was not earth-shaking, but was warm, funny and evocative of the 1970s. The descriptions of York university reminded me a little of writings by A.S. Byatt in the way they invoked a certain time and academic lifestyle.
The chapters dealing with her time at the school I was at were eye opening, and the teachers (despite having their names changed) were easily identifiable. I pretty much agreed with her assessment of most of them (especially piggy Harlow and Setchell, the pious idiot), but despite having suspected that she and a certain games teacher were in a relationship, it was a bit of a shock to find it was actually the case, especially as the teacher in question was actually incredibly unpleasant and had an ineffective and aggressive teaching style. What on earth did Claire see in her?
As lesbian memoirs go, this was not earth-shaking, but was warm, funny and evocative of the 1970s. The descriptions of York university reminded me a little of writings by A.S. Byatt in the way they invoked a certain time and academic lifestyle.
December 12, 2014
I met Claire in Key West at a workshop with Edmund White. Then I heard her read from the book in Northampton MA at the Broadside Book Store—a wonderful bit of serendipity to wind up at the same spot at the same time.
A most moving memoir. Claire tells of her coming out, but more important, she does it amid the conflict of her hectic family life in England. Beautifully realized “character,” if you can say that about person in her own memoir (you can). I’ve never truly laughed and cried simultaneously before as I did over the scene in which her family motors to her father’s funeral, seventeen miles of joke-telling and smoking and crying.
A most moving memoir. Claire tells of her coming out, but more important, she does it amid the conflict of her hectic family life in England. Beautifully realized “character,” if you can say that about person in her own memoir (you can). I’ve never truly laughed and cried simultaneously before as I did over the scene in which her family motors to her father’s funeral, seventeen miles of joke-telling and smoking and crying.
“They were impressed by the depth of our sorrow” (215).So witty, so multilayered. Not just about being a lesbian. Much broader and more literary than that. No wonder Michigan State Press published it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews