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She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me
Author:
Brockes, Emma
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Class:
968.0009
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: CT1929
Print Run: 50000
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ISBN-13: 9781594204593
LCCN: 2012039706
Imprint: Penguin Press
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Pub Date: 05/16/2013
Availability: Out of Print Confirmed
List: $26.95
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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xvi, 298 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
H 9.25",
W 6.5",
D 1",
1.19 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
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Bibliographies:
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Awards:
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Starred Reviews:
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TIPS Subjects:
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History--1900-1999
Crime/Law Enforcement
Family Life
Sex
Africa
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BISAC Subjects: |
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Abuse / Child Abuse
TRUE CRIME / Murder / General
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LC Subjects:
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Abusive men, South Africa, Case studies
Brockes, Emma, Family
Brockes, Emma, Travel, South Africa
Brockes, Pauline Dulcie, Childhood and youth
Child sexual abuse, South Africa, Case studies
Fathers, Violence against, South Africa, Case studies
Mothers and daughters, Biography
South Africa, Biography
South Africa, Description and travel
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SEARS Subjects: |
Abusive men, Case studies
Brockes, Emma, Family
Brockes, Pauline Dulcie
Child sexual abuse, South Africa, Case studies
Fathers, South Africa, Case studies
Mother-daughter relationship
South Africa, Description and travel
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Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 01/01/2013 |
| Protective and mysterious. That is what Emma Brockes called her mother, who swapped South Africa for London without a word as to why. Paula's death-bed confession reveals all. Now Emma heads to South Africa to find answers about the mother she never really knew and learns of the violence surrounding her grandfather. 320pp., 50K, Auth res: New York City |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 05/01/2013 |
| If Emma Brockes' memoir She Left Me the Gun reminds you of Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, don't be surprised. Both books grapple with a larger-than-life mother whose formative experiences in the harsh landscape of southern Africa turned them somewhat eccentric, even melodramatic. But while Fuller's mother held on for dear life to their farm in what was then Rhodesia, Brockes' mother, Paula, fled South Africa as soon as she could manage it and lived the rest of her life in England, raising her daughter in the kind of sleepy suburban security she could only have dreamed of as a child. Furthermore, as it turns out, Paula wasn't just escaping the heat, the scorpions or the poisonous racial politics in the country of her birth. She was also leaving behind a brutal past marked by abuse. Throughout Brockes' childhood, her mother kept the truth about her family under wraps. It was only after she became very sick with cancer that Paula revealed she had testified against her father at a trial. "Deathbed revelations weren't something people had," Brockes writes. "That my mother, who would ring me at work with the newsflash that she'd found the socks she was looking for ... had managed to keep this from me was extraordinary." Still, even then, Paula wasn't entirely forthcoming about the details of the disturbing charges against her father. Brockes, an only child, felt unmoored after her mother's death; she thought there was more to Paula's past than she'd let on, but she also craved a connection with her mother's family back in South Africa, many of whom she'd never met. Flying to Johannesburg to meet her mother's siblings and oldest friends, Brockes was seeking some grand revelations, and she was not disappointed. These stories are doled out in bits and pieces, foreshadowed and then fulfilled. Along the way, a remarkable family narrative emerges, one with more than its fair share of darkness. Yet Paula herself is not only a sympathetic figure, but even a triumphant one. The love that her seven younger siblings still feel for her is palpable, and her daughter's admiration only grows with her deeper understanding of her mother's past. She Left Me the Gun illuminates the necessary fictions we create when trying to understand our family history, as well as the relief, and even pride, that comes from knowing the truth of our origins, however sad or strange they may be. Kate Pritchard. 320pg. BOOKPAGE, c2013. |
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| Booklist | 04/15/2013 |
| Most regular tourists want "to look at places where great historical events occurred and drive to areas of natural beauty and feel uplifted by things that are bigger than we are." But for British journalist Brockes, her journey to South Africa after her mother's death is to uncover bitter family secrets and to find out what drove her mother to emigrate from Johannesburg to London. There is a lot Brockes does not know, "groping for a language to talk about the things we'd never talked about." Does she want to know? With a mixture of sorrow and wry wit, she mocks those who find excitement in the scenic and the political as she uses her journalistic skills to access the national archives and discovers horrifying family abuse in her grandfather's 1950s court case. But just as heartbreaking are the revelations of the tenderness in her struggling white working-class family. The close-up personal story will hold readers who want to understand the history tourists neither seek nor find. Rochman, Hazel. 298p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2013. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 04/01/2013 |
| The riveting memoir about how a prizewinning British journalist reclaimed her mother's traumatic past. Brockes' mother, Paula, was notoriously reticent about the years she had spent growing up in Durban, South Africa. Her family and friends knew that Paula had expatriated to England in 1960 for political reasons but not much else. Among the few things she brought with her from South Africa was a handgun that Brockes discovered "wrapped in a pair of knickers." Paula considered the gun among her prized possessions and bequeathed it to Brockes without any explanation of why it meant so much to her. After Paula died of cancer, her daughter decided to learn about the South African side of her family and the life story her mother had suppressed. A database search in England unearthed evidence that her mother's father, Jimmy, had been on trial for murder six years before Paula had been born. Despite misgivings that continued research into her mother's past was "unfair, unethical [and] possibly unforgivable," Brockes traveled to Johannesburg to talk to the maternal relatives she had never met and search through government archives for more details about her grandfather. Her aunts and uncles remembered the family patriarch as a drunken "psychopath" who brutalized his children. Paula, on the other hand, was the heroic elder sibling who called her younger brothers and sisters her babies and tried to protect them against her father's savagery by shooting him. Court records revealed still more: that Jimmy had also been tried and later acquitted for molesting his daughters. The story of Brockes' quest to understand her mother's past is powerful on its own, but the backdrop against which most of the narrative unfolds--a country with its own history of rapacious violence--makes the book even more poignant and unforgettable. 320pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2013. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 11/19/2012 |
| Many families have secrets, but the one Brockes uncovered after the death of her glamorous but rather mysterious mother, Paula, was a shocker. Raised in South Africa with an alcoholic father who roundly abused her and her seven half siblings, Paula fled to London--but not before shooting him five times yet failing to kill him. (The father was later taken to court for his abuses but was cleared of all charges.) An award-winning journalist--she's been named Young Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year in Britain--Brockes should tell this story well; an initial read suggests that she maintains a reporter's sharp eye about a personally painful story. 288p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2012. |
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9781594204593,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 06/09/2013 |
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