The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found

by Sylvia Brownrigg

Sylvia Brownrigg's “wise, intimate, and deliciously entertaining memoir" (Carol Edgarian) reconstructs a poignant story of fathers lost and found

When Sylvia Brownrigg received a package addressed to her father that had been lost for over fifty years, she wanted to deliver it to him before it was too late. She did not expect that her father, Nick, would choose not to open it. A few years later, she and her brother finally did.

Nick, an absent father, was a would-be writer and back-to-the-lander who lived off the grid in Northern California. Nick’s own father, Gawen—also absent—had been a wellborn Englishman who wrote a Bloomsbury-like novel about lesbian lovers, before moving to Kenya and ultimately dying a mysterious death at age twenty-seven. Brownrigg was told Gawen had likely died by suicide.

Reconstructing Gawen’s short, colorful life from revelations in the package takes her through glamorous 1930s London and staid Pasadena, toward the last gasp of the British Empire in Kenya, and from there, deep into the California redwoods, where Nick later carved out a rugged path in the wilderness, keeping his English past at bay. Vividly weaving together the lives of her father and grandfather, through memory and imagination, Brownrigg explores issues of sexuality and silences, and childhoods fractured by divorce. In her uncovering of this lost family, she writes movingly of daughterhood and of parenthood, gradually making her own story whole.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

336 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 23, 2024

About the author

Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of six books of fiction, including the novels Pages for You and The Delivery Room. Her most recent novel, Pages for Her, was published in July 2017 by Counterpoint in the US and Picador in the UK.

Sylvia's work has been included on the NY Times Notable list and the LA Times Best Books of the Year. Her reviews have appeared in the NY Times, The Guardian, and the TLS, and she has taught at the American University in Paris. Her novel for children, Kepler’s Dream (published under the name Juliet Bell), has been turned into an independent feature film.

She lives in Berkeley, CA, with her family, and continues to spend time in London.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) “The dead don’t come back, but they are not as far away as you think.” I knew Brownrigg’s name as a novelist, but when I read about this family memoir it piqued my interest more than her fiction might have. The Brownrigg clan are nobility (really – her brother has the title “Baronet”) but have rejected conventional Englishness over the past century. First her grandfather, Gawen, separated from his wife and moved to Nairobi to work as a journalist. He also published two obscure novels before dying at age 27. The empty bottle of Nembutal and recent changes to his will suggested suicide, though his mother resisted the notion vociferously. Gawen’s son, Nicholas, was raised in California by his mother, Lucia, and became an alcoholic who lived off-grid on a ranch and had an unpublished Beats-influenced novel.

After Nicholas’s death in 2018, Brownrigg was compelled to trace her family’s patterns of addiction and creativity. It’s a complex network of relatives and remarriages here. The family novels and letters were her primary sources, along with a scrapbook her great-grandmother Beatrice made to memorialize Gawen for Nicholas. Certain details came to seem uncanny. For instance, her grandfather’s first novel, Star Against Star, was about, of all things, a doomed lesbian romance – and when Brownrigg first read it, at 21, she had a girlfriend.

Along with the more traditional memoir sections, there are the documents that speak for themselves and extended passages of autofiction. I loved an imaginary letter by Gawen’s older brother, who died in young childhood, and a third-person segment about Beatrice’s life in England during the Second World War. But I mostly skipped over the 90 lightly fictionalized pages about the author’s (“Sophie’s”) life with her father in California. You might view this as a showcase of possible methods for engaging with family history, some of which work better than others. All of it is fascinating material, though.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Matthew Barmack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting story and structure. Ostensibly a memoir which focuses on the author's father's family. He was minor British nobility who was sort of a hippy in the Bay Area in the 1970s and ultimately moved back to the land in Mendocino. But as the author digs deeper, she finds an entirely different side to her father and his family, including his father, who enjoyed modest success as a novelist before moving to Kenya and taking his own life after he is jilted by a new lover and his 4x married mother, part Austrian or German, and maybe also some sort of minor noble. Structurally, the book switches back and forth between first and third person accounts of the author's own life and an almost novelistic treatment of her grandfather's life in Kenya. Also, lots of great and familiar NorCal settings. (I remember the drive to Mendo from when my son was MTBing there.). Overall, a great memoir that, to borrow a cliche, is almost stranger than fiction. 1* off because I got a little lost in the middle part about Kenya, which wasn't nearly as interesting as the author's account of her own life.

[Mollypputnam · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 - this book is a “staggering” achievement! It is a memoir about the author’s Father and his family written through prose, short stories, and her families’ letters. The author comes to her writing gift honestly - inherited and honed. This is not the average memoir, for the better. It did take some time to understand its outline - but well worth it.

[Ann Pierson · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like three and a half stars. Needs editing, repetitive. I did enjoy it but it bogged down partway through.

[Michele Dawson Haber · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the expected evolution of families, parents pass on their ancestral stories to their children, showing them they have a place on the continuum of family history. Of course, this doesn’t always happen, and children adapt, not knowing that anything is missing. But sometimes, as was the case for Sylvia Brownrigg, a family narrative emerges later in life and its arrival is received as a precious and extraordinary inheritance. The Whole Staggering Mystery (Counterpoint; April 2024) is that story. It is a memoir of fathers lost and found, and of children rebuilding bridges burned by their own parents.

Beginning with the fluke discovery of a box of letters and documents curated by her great-grandmother, Sylvia learns about the exotic life of her English grandfather, Gawen, who died a mysterious death in Kenya before he could establish any kind of relationship with his son, Nick. Young Nick, taken to America by his mother, is told almost nothing about Gawen, and later when he becomes a father himself, an early divorce followed by his retreat into the California redwoods to live off the grid prevent him from establishing much of a relationship with Sylvia and her brother. The mementos from her great-grandmother’s box highlight the parallels in the lives of these two men and inspire Sylvia to tell their stories, retying the threads between fathers and their children.

As an established novelist and children’s author, Sylvia never imagined herself writing a memoir, yet she feels compelled to preserve her family’s story, so it’s never lost again. Rallying her tenacity, memories, and imagination, Sylvia decides she doesn’t have to choose one genre over another. The Whole Staggering Mystery is a singularly inventive memoir that combines a nonfiction account of Sylvia’s encounter with her new-found family knowledge with the recreation of her father’s and grandfather’s lives through short stories of varying lengths and styles. It is a bold move.

After finishing the book, the stories — both fiction and nonfiction — stayed with me, as did the characters. It all felt exactly right, as if she couldn’t have told it any other way. I was eager to talk over my impressions with Sylvia when we sat down over Zoom a few months after the book’s release. Our conversation about craft, genre restrictions, and identity was delightful and underscored my admiration for Sylvia’s ingenuity

[Coleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although styled as a 'Mystery', a better description for this book would be a Memoir: reviewing the author's family history and family members, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, remarriages and stepparents. The number of divorces, remarriages and stepparents in my family history is incredibly short. So, I was somewhat amazed. And yes, I was intrigued. Yet...

I found the book interesting and kept pushing on, but at times I was confused. The author makes
her family somewhat easier to follow because she provides a short Family Tree in the back of the book. I found it accidentally while reading the book because I was looking at a list of readings that the author had included towards the end. Had I not discovered it early on, I would have been even more lost than I was. I wanted the Family Tree to be much more detailed and include more of the family [and extended family] members! I presume the author believed she wanted to note the more important members.

The Brownigg family have both British and American ties, always interesting to me. And there is a Baronet (?) in the family that descends with each generation! Of course, that only pertains to the males!

All in all, the author is a talented author and can write an interesting story. I would like to read some of her earlier books which appear mostly to be fiction.

I won this hard cover book in a Goodreads giveaway.

[Harriet · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunningly imaginative and moving memoir about the author's elusive, difficult and beloved father and his unusual English aristocratic origins. Sylvia Brownrigg approaches her subject with wryness and insight, as she weaves her own childhood memories of visiting her father off the grid in Northern California with new discoveries about his life and British family, including his own father, who died in Africa under mysterious circumstances. She weaves fiction, memoir, and research into a beautiful and intricately layered, very human account of a man who lived creatively and a little wildly, to the fascination and irritation and distress and delight of his family.

[Abi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an engaging memoir about a daughter’s relationship with her father. And about his father, or the absence of his father, too. I did enjoy the read, but found the structure of the novel a bit disjointed - in some parts the author writes in first person, some are fictionalized imaginings of points of view and others are fictionalized versions of herself and her father and brother. Overall I’m glad to have read it, and enjoyed the journey from California, to London, to Kenya and various other places too

[Kristen Moore · Rating 2 out of 5]

I won a copy of this book in a Goodreads giveaway.

I wish we could give half stars on this app. I enjoyed parts of this book a lot. And other parts were a slog to get through. Especially the fictionalized version of the author’s childhood. I enjoyed it for a chapter or two ?75 felt it went on for too long. I found the old letters from the family dull and confusing.

Overall the book was a lovely tribute to Nick, but maybe you had to actually know him to be fully invested.

[Catherine Fitzpatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book would have been better as fiction; then the author might have made the story line and characters be more coherent. Since she used fictional devices like having the child who died at the age of 3 narrate a section about his brother, it stands to reason it could have been a novel.

I found myself wondering "Who's Frank?" and other mysteries towards the end; Frank was not in the family tree. I would have stopped reading but there were some compelling passages.

[Debi Coish · Rating 3 out of 5]

How lives can turn out well in spite of it all. I feel like I knew Nick. I've certainly known those much like him. The Circle C ranch up in the hills is thoroughly familiar to many visits to other homesteads up in the North Coast hills. I watched "Kepler's Dream", enjoyed it, and it really helped flesh out the whole family.

[Eve · Rating 2 out of 5]

A memoir clearly motivated by the author's need to work through her ambivalence about her father and her father's family. While the central anecdote was genuinely intriguing and promising, in the second half of the book she was simply rehashing the same narratives over and over again from new writing perspectives, and it lost its appeal.

[Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Authentic memoir in spite of fictional passages. Jarring changes of characters and memories and fiction. Glad I read it though. Poignant experience of past happenings that affect current generations. Suppressed truths leave us in the dark. Good effort by writer to figure it all out and make peace with the past—if that’s possible!!!!

[BarbC · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir is brilliant. Hard to write historical fiction when you’re actually IN part of the story, but Brownrigg does it— the structure of this memoir is wonderful. Easy to follow. Very unique. Just like the people written about. I absolutely loved this book!

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like 3.5 stars. I still don't know what I think about the turn to fiction partway through, especially when some parts of it got a bit repetitive. I am also not entirely sure that there was a "mystery" here, though there was definitely an interesting story.

[Darlene Elliott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Convoluted

[Rebecca]

I liked this book but have put it aside for now. I found the story about the story more interesting than the lives of the fathers themselves.

[Jodie Siu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book: part first-person memoir, part fictionalized imagining of the author's father and grandfather. The themes of family and inter-generational patterns were subtle but intriguing.

[Jaime Angell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked the first part of the book, but then it lost me. I kept trying to go back to it, but I wasn’t interested.

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.75