Hardback by Scribe, £16.99 (ebook £4.53)
One morning in December 1965, 29-year-old writer and mother-of-two Hannah Gavron dropped her youngest son off at nursery and drove to a friend’s flat in Primrose Hill, where she gassed herself. The author of A Woman On The Edge Of Time was that little boy who was at his nursery school and in this compelling memoir, he investigates why his mother, who seemed to have lived a life of gilded privilege and comfort, would do this.
Just two years before his mother’s suicide, Sylvia Plath, who also had two children, took her life in exactly the same way just one street away. Gavron suggests that they were both women on the edge of time – just a bit too young to benefit from the rise of feminism.
It wasn’t until he was 30 and clearing out his grandparents’ house that he learned the full truth from a newspaper cutting, that had his mother’s suicide note with the words, “Please tell the boys I love them terribly!”
In his almost exhaustive search for truth, Gavron uncovers an illegal relationship between Hannah and the headmaster of her boarding school, which began when she was just 14. She had bouts of depression and a lover, who was gay and whose rejection seemed to push her over the edge. A fascinating and beautiful read.
