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Family Romance: a Memoir
This is a memoir in which John Lanchester joins the dots of his parents' history, their extraordinary secrets and the shape of their shared life. From his grandparents' beginnings in rural Ireland and colonial Rhodesia, Lanchester navigates through his parents lives. He illuminates their characters and explores their motives.
392 pages, Hardcover
First published February 15, 2007
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425 people want to read
About the author
John Lanchester
35 books595 followersJohn Lanchester is the author of four novels and three books of non-fiction. He was born in Germany and moved to Hong Kong. He studied in UK. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was awarded the 2008 E.M. Forster Award. He lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
March 28, 2015
The author's insights are remarkable. Anyone who has ever experienced agoraphobia, acute anxiety, panic or depression will enjoy his explanation of these very real episodes. And that he thinks medication dampens a writer's talents is probably accurate. I learned a lot about a nun's existence and enjoyed visualizing the many exotic locations. Why only two stars the? It dragged on and on.
February 8, 2018
Brilliant,very moving.
February 20, 2020
4,5 estrellas
December 1, 2013
John Lanchester describes Family Romance as a memoir, but I found it more of a biography of a family. Much of the information in this book was not things he remembered, but information that he had found through extensive research, particularly on his mother. The part of the book that was most interesting were the sections on his mother's story and how she had kept secrets from him and his father. The book begins with his mother's death and ends with what he has chosen to put on her grave stone after his research of her life. He tells the reader at the beginning of the book that he felt guilty for having his mother cremated when he read her instructions asking to be buried in a casket. He hadn't read these instructions until after the cremation. This information is foreshadowing the story of his mother and her secrets. This book seems to really be his mother's story.
The sections on his father I found far less interesting and I felt the section at the end about his own struggle with anxiety detracted from the book. He seemed to be trying to give both of his parents equal time in the book and then as their only child his own life story. I found the sections on his father confusing at times. Although John Lanchester is an excellent writer and the book is well written, I think the real story he wanted to tell was the one of his mother. I would like to ask him why he chose to write the book about his family rather than about his mother.
The sections on his father I found far less interesting and I felt the section at the end about his own struggle with anxiety detracted from the book. He seemed to be trying to give both of his parents equal time in the book and then as their only child his own life story. I found the sections on his father confusing at times. Although John Lanchester is an excellent writer and the book is well written, I think the real story he wanted to tell was the one of his mother. I would like to ask him why he chose to write the book about his family rather than about his mother.
September 30, 2015
It was only when his mother died that Lanchester realized how little he really knew his parents. But with Julie Lanchester's death-and the cache of papers and letters she left behind-Lanchester set out to reconstruct just who his parents had been.
This book resonated with me on many levels. I was brought up Catholic. My mother, a British colonial, had a hidden past, not necessarily filled with secrets like this author's mother, but alien to me in many ways as I was an American girl and she was brought up in Gibraltar. I've spent the last few years researching her childhood and life in London during the war. But in the end, I think I learned more about how NOT to write a memoir about my parents as I felt pushed away by the author's voice. Too much telling and analyzing and not enough direct experience of the story, a hard thing to do when you're writing about people, places and times you never knew while at the same time, hampered by having to stick to the actual facts of these two people's lives. Add to that that they are your parents who, even though they are dead, would probably heartily disapprove of being exposed in this way and as the author, you keep shying away from the tough stuff. At least I have, and I think Lanchester has too, by over intellectualizing. Reading him helped me to turn the spotlight around and focus on my own childhood first and then look at what about my parents' history made them the parents they became.
This book resonated with me on many levels. I was brought up Catholic. My mother, a British colonial, had a hidden past, not necessarily filled with secrets like this author's mother, but alien to me in many ways as I was an American girl and she was brought up in Gibraltar. I've spent the last few years researching her childhood and life in London during the war. But in the end, I think I learned more about how NOT to write a memoir about my parents as I felt pushed away by the author's voice. Too much telling and analyzing and not enough direct experience of the story, a hard thing to do when you're writing about people, places and times you never knew while at the same time, hampered by having to stick to the actual facts of these two people's lives. Add to that that they are your parents who, even though they are dead, would probably heartily disapprove of being exposed in this way and as the author, you keep shying away from the tough stuff. At least I have, and I think Lanchester has too, by over intellectualizing. Reading him helped me to turn the spotlight around and focus on my own childhood first and then look at what about my parents' history made them the parents they became.
April 14, 2014
This is a beautifully written, absorbing account of the author's parents' very unusual lives. After both parents had died, the author, an only child, went in search of their stories and uncovered some startling secrets. His mother had spent her youth as a nun, only leaving the convent barely in time to have a child: the author. His father's childhood was interrupted by World War II, when he was evacuated from Hong Kong to Australia, separated from his parents for the entire war. After the war, and after university, the author's father became a banker, living in many different parts of the world. How his parents met and married is kind of amazing. This is a lovely, lyrical tale of one "family romance".
April 2, 2018
I was surprised to find that Lanchester, whose writing I have long admired from his contributions to The London Review of Books and his satirical novel The Debt to Pleasure had written a family history or memoir. Then, as I read, I found it was all about the secret life his mother had led and how he had never known that she had been a nun, which is when I remembered the piece he had written for the London Review some years back about how his mother resigned as a nun in India and how difficult it had been for her to travel back to London and the poignant details about her anxiety about her hair and getting a change of clothing as soon as possible after the plane had landed. However, her son had never known this until after the death of both his parents when, sorting out her papers, he was able, with the help of his aunt, to follow the trail of clues and reconstruct the surprising story of her secret life. She had been a nun, twice. This gradually was revealed to him through his research. He organises his text like a detective story writer but it is distinguished by the love he felt for his mother and the anger he felt towards her parents and those in the church who had not supported her.
She was born in a small town in Ireland where her impoverished parents were the proud possessors of a son who became a priest and Julia who became a nun. Symbolically, when she did not take her final vows and returned home in 1938, there was nothing to wear but the cut down remnant of her black postulant's dress, “ a deliberate piece of public shaming that Julia never forgot or forgave'. Lanchester sees how this permanently affected his mother's character. She became hard, “ she would not be a supplicant; she would not admit to needing anything or anyone...from now on she was always the one who did the rejecting.” In an instant, the family heroine became the “family disgrace”.
Lanchester writes, “I wish she had had the chance to tell me the whole story, start to finish, and to see how outraged it made me feel on her behalf. I wish she had trusted me, and herself, enough. But, I'm sorry to say, to wish that, is at least partly to wish that my mother was somebody else.” And this is the clue to me about his role in the telling of the remarkable series of secrets that he reveals. His mother became a nun again and was a successful principal of a Catholic school in India before she renounced her vows after 14 years. Even more secrets are revealed about her courtship and marriage and the keeping of the secret by her sister.
To Lanchester's credit and this makes the book more honest and interesting for me, he realises his part in the tensions that must have affected his relationship with both his father and mother as an only child of a woman who suffered numerous miscarriages. “I know, because I was told, that to my parents I had become a tyrannical monster of sarcasm, silence, eye-rolling, parent-despising, moral superiority, boredom and argumentative radical politics.” And there is another admission from him that “writing an therapy are linked, because they are both about a search for meaning.” Near the end, he quotes Edmund White: “Family life binds strangers together.”
In researching and writing this story, he finally found some of those parts of his mother's character that he had never known and that, like her, he wanted to become a writer and now he could. A Debt to Pleasure had sat in his desk drawer for years and now he was able to rewrite it and find a publisher.
She was born in a small town in Ireland where her impoverished parents were the proud possessors of a son who became a priest and Julia who became a nun. Symbolically, when she did not take her final vows and returned home in 1938, there was nothing to wear but the cut down remnant of her black postulant's dress, “ a deliberate piece of public shaming that Julia never forgot or forgave'. Lanchester sees how this permanently affected his mother's character. She became hard, “ she would not be a supplicant; she would not admit to needing anything or anyone...from now on she was always the one who did the rejecting.” In an instant, the family heroine became the “family disgrace”.
Lanchester writes, “I wish she had had the chance to tell me the whole story, start to finish, and to see how outraged it made me feel on her behalf. I wish she had trusted me, and herself, enough. But, I'm sorry to say, to wish that, is at least partly to wish that my mother was somebody else.” And this is the clue to me about his role in the telling of the remarkable series of secrets that he reveals. His mother became a nun again and was a successful principal of a Catholic school in India before she renounced her vows after 14 years. Even more secrets are revealed about her courtship and marriage and the keeping of the secret by her sister.
To Lanchester's credit and this makes the book more honest and interesting for me, he realises his part in the tensions that must have affected his relationship with both his father and mother as an only child of a woman who suffered numerous miscarriages. “I know, because I was told, that to my parents I had become a tyrannical monster of sarcasm, silence, eye-rolling, parent-despising, moral superiority, boredom and argumentative radical politics.” And there is another admission from him that “writing an therapy are linked, because they are both about a search for meaning.” Near the end, he quotes Edmund White: “Family life binds strangers together.”
In researching and writing this story, he finally found some of those parts of his mother's character that he had never known and that, like her, he wanted to become a writer and now he could. A Debt to Pleasure had sat in his desk drawer for years and now he was able to rewrite it and find a publisher.
October 7, 2016
This is a triptych of father, mother, son and ghosts of life. And his parents die in that order. Father, Bill, first, unexpectedly of a heart attack not long after retiring from banking. Then mother, Julie, unravelled by strokes until there was nothing left. This is where the story begins and ends, because it allows John, their only son to bind himself closer, and find out more about their earlier life. His life too comes under scrutiny, but it is also a meditation on truth and lies, and how we construct the characters we become and how they inhabit our own lives.
Lanchester suggests that ‘very few things in life are a revelation’, but his mother’s secret life, the longest and most compelling part of the book, must have come as a shock. He comes to the conclusion that if his mother ‘had not lied, I would never have been born’. In other words if it hadn’t happened, he couldn’t have made it up.
‘Julie Lanchester, who died on 6th August 1998, aged 77 years’ had shaved ten years off her age. Her father Bill when he got engaged and married her (she was already pregnant with son John) believed most of his life until his death at 57 that his wife Julie was ten years younger than she was. That when he married her, she was thirty-years old and not forty. Bill, as an only child, with knowledge of all that entailed, wanted to go on to have lots more little Lanchesters; something she also wanted. John, their only child, later found out his mother had suffered four miscarriages. But suffering was something Julie was practiced in.
Bill had no reason to disbelieve that his wife’s name Julie was also a lie. She was born Julia Gunnigan was born on 5th December 1920 in Lurgan, Ireland. Her father Pat was a subsistence farmer and her mother Molly (Mary) was the wife of a subsistence farmer with the family wed to the land. This was most graphically shown at the age of sixteen when Julia, a postulant nun, returned home from Sister of The Good Shepherd (made infamous by Peter Mullan, The Magdalene Sisters) to convalesce and decided not to go back or take her final vows. Her father and mother punished her by ignoring her and sending her to Coventry, but until an Uncle found her an escape route, she remained in the religious garb of the novitiate. Part of the reason for this was economical. She had by that time five other younger sisters. Four of whom also became nuns. And there was literally no money, but they could scrape enough to eat. But there seemed also to be something of the branding of the one that disgraced the family, the equivalent of Hester Pyrnne in The Scarlett Letter. And this experience John believed helped mark his mother for life. But perhaps more surprising is after a man she was engaged to in a sanatorium died of tuberculosis, which she also contracted whilst working there as a nurse, at the age of twenty-six, she joined another order of nuns, the Presentation Sisters in nearby Lurgan. She took the name Sister Eucharia and after taking holy orders was able to get herself sent to Madras in India, which she ran as head teacher of a Catholic school attended by the up-and-coming classes in that region.
John knew nothing of this part of his mother’s life, and was surprised to discover he had Catholic relations. But he comes to the conclusion: ‘some of the most important things that can happen to people can happen before they are born.’ This sounds decidedly to me like the importance of money and wealth and good connections – something Lanchester went to write extensively about for example How to Speak Money, and his recent television drama series on BBC 1 based on his book Capital. His father was a living example, a man who found his work boring and repetitive, but like many other ‘found it impossible to give up money’ and the need for financial security, ‘where money is concerned, [there’s] no such thing as enough’, something he’d learned from his own father. The boarding school John was sent to as a ten-year old, before taking a First at Oxford in English, was decidedly Anglo-Protestant. But Julia/Julie his mother had an almost preternatural way of hiding things she didn’t want to talk about or confront. ‘Julie wanted to be her own crypt’. And his father Bill, although an international banker, travelling the world, also didn’t like confrontation. In many ways they were made for each other.
Julia Immaculata Gunnigan became Bridget Teresa Julia Gunnigan, or on her passport B.T.J Gunnigan before her marriage by applying for her younger sister Dilly’s birth certificate and getting an Irish passport issued in her new name. This is very John Le Carre, where I think I first read about this trick. But then after marriage B.T.J Gunnigan become B.T.J. Lanchester. Julia/Julie felt she had to cut all ties with her family in case this lie became revealed. But B.T.J. Lanchester’s ability to compartmentalise her life had other costs. As Count Pierre Bezukhov comes to conclude in War and Peace, in order to be happy we must have the ability to imagine happiness, John’s mother had the ability to imagine she was not there and her son noted this absence whilst she was present. ‘Ways in which as a child my mother wasn’t fully present’.
The psychic cost was something he became familiar with. After his mother and father’s death he suffered from panic attacks. But that’s too bland a description. ‘I couldn’t breathe, let alone see straight or think straight. I felt as if my mind broke. I wasn’t just going to die, I had disintegrated.’
The remaining death in the family was his mother Julie/Julia’s career as a writer. She had published a short story ‘Minding Mother Margaret’, about a young nun taking care of an older nun that is nearing death, which was broadcast by BBC radio, and the story is reproduced in her son’s book. But Julie/Julia had published it under the pseudonym Shivaun Cunnigham. But after marriage Julie covered her tracks so effectively that she never alluded to that time and never wrote again. Her son mourns that great loss. In the words of Virginia Woolf, she had the time and the space, a room of her own, but as keeper of a secret identity left no wiggle room. John Lanchaster, of course, was their reason for being and he has successfully picked up that baton. ‘Language is an intimate betrayal.’
Lanchester suggests that ‘very few things in life are a revelation’, but his mother’s secret life, the longest and most compelling part of the book, must have come as a shock. He comes to the conclusion that if his mother ‘had not lied, I would never have been born’. In other words if it hadn’t happened, he couldn’t have made it up.
‘Julie Lanchester, who died on 6th August 1998, aged 77 years’ had shaved ten years off her age. Her father Bill when he got engaged and married her (she was already pregnant with son John) believed most of his life until his death at 57 that his wife Julie was ten years younger than she was. That when he married her, she was thirty-years old and not forty. Bill, as an only child, with knowledge of all that entailed, wanted to go on to have lots more little Lanchesters; something she also wanted. John, their only child, later found out his mother had suffered four miscarriages. But suffering was something Julie was practiced in.
Bill had no reason to disbelieve that his wife’s name Julie was also a lie. She was born Julia Gunnigan was born on 5th December 1920 in Lurgan, Ireland. Her father Pat was a subsistence farmer and her mother Molly (Mary) was the wife of a subsistence farmer with the family wed to the land. This was most graphically shown at the age of sixteen when Julia, a postulant nun, returned home from Sister of The Good Shepherd (made infamous by Peter Mullan, The Magdalene Sisters) to convalesce and decided not to go back or take her final vows. Her father and mother punished her by ignoring her and sending her to Coventry, but until an Uncle found her an escape route, she remained in the religious garb of the novitiate. Part of the reason for this was economical. She had by that time five other younger sisters. Four of whom also became nuns. And there was literally no money, but they could scrape enough to eat. But there seemed also to be something of the branding of the one that disgraced the family, the equivalent of Hester Pyrnne in The Scarlett Letter. And this experience John believed helped mark his mother for life. But perhaps more surprising is after a man she was engaged to in a sanatorium died of tuberculosis, which she also contracted whilst working there as a nurse, at the age of twenty-six, she joined another order of nuns, the Presentation Sisters in nearby Lurgan. She took the name Sister Eucharia and after taking holy orders was able to get herself sent to Madras in India, which she ran as head teacher of a Catholic school attended by the up-and-coming classes in that region.
John knew nothing of this part of his mother’s life, and was surprised to discover he had Catholic relations. But he comes to the conclusion: ‘some of the most important things that can happen to people can happen before they are born.’ This sounds decidedly to me like the importance of money and wealth and good connections – something Lanchester went to write extensively about for example How to Speak Money, and his recent television drama series on BBC 1 based on his book Capital. His father was a living example, a man who found his work boring and repetitive, but like many other ‘found it impossible to give up money’ and the need for financial security, ‘where money is concerned, [there’s] no such thing as enough’, something he’d learned from his own father. The boarding school John was sent to as a ten-year old, before taking a First at Oxford in English, was decidedly Anglo-Protestant. But Julia/Julie his mother had an almost preternatural way of hiding things she didn’t want to talk about or confront. ‘Julie wanted to be her own crypt’. And his father Bill, although an international banker, travelling the world, also didn’t like confrontation. In many ways they were made for each other.
Julia Immaculata Gunnigan became Bridget Teresa Julia Gunnigan, or on her passport B.T.J Gunnigan before her marriage by applying for her younger sister Dilly’s birth certificate and getting an Irish passport issued in her new name. This is very John Le Carre, where I think I first read about this trick. But then after marriage B.T.J Gunnigan become B.T.J. Lanchester. Julia/Julie felt she had to cut all ties with her family in case this lie became revealed. But B.T.J. Lanchester’s ability to compartmentalise her life had other costs. As Count Pierre Bezukhov comes to conclude in War and Peace, in order to be happy we must have the ability to imagine happiness, John’s mother had the ability to imagine she was not there and her son noted this absence whilst she was present. ‘Ways in which as a child my mother wasn’t fully present’.
The psychic cost was something he became familiar with. After his mother and father’s death he suffered from panic attacks. But that’s too bland a description. ‘I couldn’t breathe, let alone see straight or think straight. I felt as if my mind broke. I wasn’t just going to die, I had disintegrated.’
The remaining death in the family was his mother Julie/Julia’s career as a writer. She had published a short story ‘Minding Mother Margaret’, about a young nun taking care of an older nun that is nearing death, which was broadcast by BBC radio, and the story is reproduced in her son’s book. But Julie/Julia had published it under the pseudonym Shivaun Cunnigham. But after marriage Julie covered her tracks so effectively that she never alluded to that time and never wrote again. Her son mourns that great loss. In the words of Virginia Woolf, she had the time and the space, a room of her own, but as keeper of a secret identity left no wiggle room. John Lanchaster, of course, was their reason for being and he has successfully picked up that baton. ‘Language is an intimate betrayal.’
April 27, 2020
My husband and I both read and loved this. Lanchester has created a work of poetry and humour and heft out of a story that might have left another writer too angry and bewildered to recount. This is an utterly unsentimental and lucid account of the adventures of his mother and father (both deceased when he first began to write).
This is biography of the highest order. Very much within historical context (World Wars I and II, The Feminine Mystique and much more), it is also specific to the Lanchester family. His parents were remarkable in their unremarkability and vice-versa. Intelligent, well-travelled and in their way loving to their son, they also would have needed a separate cupboard for the skeletons to fit in.
I simply cannot recommend this one highly enough. It works on so many levels - there is an element of family saga, it speaks in detail of the influence of the Catholic Church on Irish life and customs and it also works on its own terms as the story of one family.
This is biography of the highest order. Very much within historical context (World Wars I and II, The Feminine Mystique and much more), it is also specific to the Lanchester family. His parents were remarkable in their unremarkability and vice-versa. Intelligent, well-travelled and in their way loving to their son, they also would have needed a separate cupboard for the skeletons to fit in.
I simply cannot recommend this one highly enough. It works on so many levels - there is an element of family saga, it speaks in detail of the influence of the Catholic Church on Irish life and customs and it also works on its own terms as the story of one family.
January 14, 2020
How much do you really know about your parents? And how do you know the things you know? Did they tell you their stories or did you piece them together from incidental remarks, bits of information others let slip and subjects that were absolutely 'verboten' to discuss? This is a wonderful memoir about family life and how your parents and their stories - and the way these stories are told or sometimes not told- affect your own life. Bonus: the biography of Lanchesters parents is absolutely fascinating and I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in 20th century history. From growing up in rural Ireland and joining a convent which brought her to India (his mother) to colonial history, WWII and coming of age in Hong Kong and Australia (his father), not to mention his own youth in Hong Kong, it is all extremely interesting. I highly recommend this book.
March 5, 2021
Yeah this book is just really really good. It captures the fundamentals of human nature better than probably all of the nonfiction I have read. If you are in search of that grey, British, "life is hard," collar to the wind ethic, this book is perfect. The author writes deftly about what made life what it was for generations of people for whom life was a sad, outrageous, taxing journey, in (mostly) relatable ways. It made me depressed, honestly, in the way that only the best writing can. I don't think wisdom is the right word for what the book so generously imparts, but the kind of wisdom-adjacent awareness that this story offers is more edifying than any piece of wisdom I can imagine.
September 14, 2023
Lanchester is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. The story dragged at some points but since it's a essentially a family biography, it's not really the author's fault. I found the mother's story and the author's struggle with his mental health to be the most interesting parts His writing style is very biting and funny - I found myself smiling or laughing out loud several times. All in all, a very good read!
June 28, 2024
When the holiday came, though, there was to be a complicating factor, because the low-slung sports car and the twisty roads combined to worsen the acute morning sickness from which Julie was suffering, caused by me.
I found it to be rather interesting, though I could see the info-dense prose style turning people away from this book. There's a very high level of "information-per-paragraph/quote", if not "information-per-sentence" which I do somewhat like.
I found it to be rather interesting, though I could see the info-dense prose style turning people away from this book. There's a very high level of "information-per-paragraph/quote", if not "information-per-sentence" which I do somewhat like.
September 27, 2018
I read this because I loved "Capital" by this author.
Interesting family dynamics to say the least, and they lived in several different countries as John was growing up. Mother was first a nun, for many years, and this haunted the rest of her life - she was definitely the focus of the book.
Interesting family dynamics to say the least, and they lived in several different countries as John was growing up. Mother was first a nun, for many years, and this haunted the rest of her life - she was definitely the focus of the book.
October 17, 2018
Started listening to this as an audiobook. In fact I started it several times, and kept going for several chapters, but couldn’t get into it. The story was so dull. The narrator’s monotonous and slow reading of the book didn’t help.
July 10, 2019
I very much empathized with the author and also his mother. I'm glad I read this after not-so-much liking the author's first novel. I'm going to try his historical novel Fragrant Harbor about Hong Kong. I greatly enjoyed Jane Gardam's trilogy on the place and hope to compare.
July 23, 2019
I loved the beginning of this book but it lost some of its momentum for me as it went on. I do admire his writing: there are some descriptions, especially about relationships and suggested motives that are beautifully nuanced.
May 1, 2020
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The tag line 'Every family has secrets. Some families have lies' pulled me in. A frank and honest account of what the author found out about his mother after her death, and what a story it is.
October 4, 2021
This is a long-winded autobiography. Probably a therapy after discovering at the death of his ex-nun mother had lied all her life about her past. It made me discover that the Irish Church in the 30’s and 40’s was very similar to the Talibans.
January 22, 2022
A (fairly) frank memoir about his parents and him and his panic attacks, emotional stuntedness and so on. The style is more low key and factual than the best of his journalism. Still puzzling how he has won a number of awards for his fiction.
July 20, 2023
An unusual and touching family story that shows how very entrapped we all are by our own family cultures and the lengths we often go to to free ourselves from them. Full of wisdom and affection for his own flawed parents I found this an absorbing and illuminating read.
November 28, 2017
A beautiful book, extremely well researched and told with such love.
June 9, 2018
never-boring memoir of the author's mother. frank introspection too.
April 20, 2019
Fascinating story. Unputdownable really, until the end as I don't think he was able to get enough distance from his own experience to write well about it.
March 17, 2023
4.5 stars. Very good as an audiobook.
June 15, 2025
Intriguing. What the author discovers about his parents, particularly his mother, after her death. His mother, a very accomplished woman, has lied about her age after leaving life as a nun so that she can marry a man who wants a family as much as she does.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 6, 2017
"Have you read the book?" Was one question going around my grandmother's funeral, the book was considered not a good thing and when my father bought it I assumed it was to be some daft piece of mediocre sentimentality. Turns out I was wrong!
to clarify this book is about Lanchester's revelation that his mother, an ex nun was something like ten years older than she had been letting on. Her youngest sister (Mary) was my paternal grandmother, there is a picture of her in the book. the book itself is a very personal one, but not mawkish, my family (especially the Waldrons (the offspring of the one brother), who put up a website about their side of the family, cutting out the women, generally hate it.
It does what is set outs to do in a very genuine and heartfelt way, without going too much into mawkishness. Not sure if I would have been keen to read it if it wasn't about the family of my great aunt and by extension their story but glad I did. (cheeky git never replied to my letter or random tweet mind, but I forgive him, the man can write)
to clarify this book is about Lanchester's revelation that his mother, an ex nun was something like ten years older than she had been letting on. Her youngest sister (Mary) was my paternal grandmother, there is a picture of her in the book. the book itself is a very personal one, but not mawkish, my family (especially the Waldrons (the offspring of the one brother), who put up a website about their side of the family, cutting out the women, generally hate it.
It does what is set outs to do in a very genuine and heartfelt way, without going too much into mawkishness. Not sure if I would have been keen to read it if it wasn't about the family of my great aunt and by extension their story but glad I did. (cheeky git never replied to my letter or random tweet mind, but I forgive him, the man can write)
May 15, 2012
John Lanchester is one of those authors that I keep forgetting that I love. Every one of his books is like a fresh, delightful new voice in my head and then I remember that I have admired his work before. Part of the reason for this may be because each of his books is quite different. I still recommend The Debt to Pleasure often as though it came out yesterday rather than 15 years ago. It is a sly and witty mystery about a cookbook writer who is not quite what he seems.
Family Romance is a smart memoir about a complex set of parents. Lanchester discovers his mother's past after her death and spends the book unraveling the person that she was from the person that he thought he knew. Absolutely filled with witty, observent asides about the choices that we make in life. I just loved this book on so many different levels. My poor husband had to listen to me read paragraphs aloud at least ten times, and that is a rare enough occasion to distinguish the book as a new favorite.
Family Romance is a smart memoir about a complex set of parents. Lanchester discovers his mother's past after her death and spends the book unraveling the person that she was from the person that he thought he knew. Absolutely filled with witty, observent asides about the choices that we make in life. I just loved this book on so many different levels. My poor husband had to listen to me read paragraphs aloud at least ten times, and that is a rare enough occasion to distinguish the book as a new favorite.
August 5, 2011
The depth of thought and care in this book in terms of how the author muses on the impact of the stories he's telling, both on himself (bookending the parents' stories) and on his parents, is - startlingly luminous. The first chapter's writing is just a little twee but a good twee - the storyteller weight to it rather than some ironic twisty bit.
So ultimately this book felt a bit personal: He reflects a lot on the impact of his mother's (hidden) life as a nun, and the lie she told in order to marry his father (changed her age and took on her sister's legal identity; thus she had to keep away from her family). There's also some neat bits around the end of the British Empire.
It did drag a bit around his father's story; it felt like he was trying to give it equal weight, to be fair, when really it was less of a story.
This was a random library select and really fortuitous.
So ultimately this book felt a bit personal: He reflects a lot on the impact of his mother's (hidden) life as a nun, and the lie she told in order to marry his father (changed her age and took on her sister's legal identity; thus she had to keep away from her family). There's also some neat bits around the end of the British Empire.
It did drag a bit around his father's story; it felt like he was trying to give it equal weight, to be fair, when really it was less of a story.
This was a random library select and really fortuitous.
September 27, 2013
A gentle and complex memoir that traces Lanchester's attempt to wrestle with the secrets, half- truths and lies his parents told in order to maintain their English respectability and their pride. Unlike Jeanette Winterson's dramatic life- story of abuse, Lanchester's story has plenty of surprises and twists, but remains utterly and poignantly ordinary. I admired his bravery in exploring a hurtful legacy of repression and secrecy and his reluctance to judge. As a parent himself, he eventually begins to accept his own parents' foibles, but not before he is exasperated by them. The style of this memoir is obviously very different to the flamboyance of his novels, but it helps you to understand the life experiences and places he draws on in his fiction and it made me admire one of my favourite authors even more.
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