sections:
My parents’ lives were brief, fragmented and intense; ruled by romance, their frenetic relationships included my father’s S&M entanglement with a prime minister’s daughter and my mother’s first marriage to a psychotic Italian Count. Ultimately, they were destroyed by love, but not for each other. Viewed up close, their personal dramas were of operatic dimensions – grand passion, rejection, jealousy, revenge – and could only end in tragedy.
The book’s insidious protagonist is the 1950s itself. Glamorous and grim, emotionally repressed yet sexually uninhibited, it was a decade of contradictions, class consciousness and, allegedly, innocence and hope. It was also infused with a post-war despondency; with peace came anti-climax. Death was still in the air, and for many in this story it beckoned like a treacherous lover.
As the evidence accumulates it exposes the events that led to my parents’ deaths and the whispered rumours and half-truths I grew up with. My research has uncovered confessions, betrayals, addictions, promiscuity, bisexuality, infidelity, familial estrangements and hatreds, fraternal negligence, a custody trial and thirteen suicides (four in my immediate family). These discoveries have forced me to recast my perspectives on the main players, including myself. My parents’ story and my own dovetail in the final chapter, which draws unsparing conclusions and reassesses the long-term repercussions of their actions.
book reviews
- Jeremy Lewis, The Mail on Sunday
‘Anna Swan tells their story with admirable restraint, and shows an almost intuitive understanding of literary and social life in the decade before she was born.’ - Western Mail
‘Her book generates the excitement of a detective story.’ - Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times
'Written with style, courage and compassion . . . perceptive, immaculately constructed, and spiced with black humour, this is a model for how a candid memoir can be truthfully written without robbing the dead of their dignity. It suggests comparison, in its own admirable way, with Lorna Sage’s marvellous Bad Blood, that standard against which all studies of family history must be measured.' - The Times
'A candle in the dark of family life.' - YOU Magazine (Mail on Sunday)
'A thoughtful memoir, full of poignant reflections on the nature of loss and the importance of understanding the past in order to shape the future.' - Elle
'Compulsive.'
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