I want you to read this book. It’s going to win a basket of awards. It’s the memoir of the year, for certain. I don’t care who writes a memoir this year, Brockes has the top spot sewn up. There are some second half issues and the author occasionally loses her way but it doesn’t matter. Because this book is everything. She Left Me The Gun is about the complexity of the mother / daughter relationship. It’s about clashes of culture and class. It’s about the inability to have cross generational understanding until one of the parties has gone. The questions come too late, the understanding of what we didn’t know part of the hole left in the leaving.
Brockes and her mother speak different languages. They come from different countries, homes, classes and times. The thing that holds them together is the parent child bond, something Brockes mother has had to create from whole cloth. I found She Left Me The Gun compelling because Brockes is very clear eyed about her own reactions. She sees where she resisted when her mother would allude to her life. She sees the involuntary judgements she makes on her distant family as she meets them. Brockes is aware that she has not lived the experiences they have, that she is unknowingly shaped by them but apart from them. There is a passage midway through the book between Brockes and a friend that I think (by it’s inclusion) sums her self awareness up.