Divided Lives
Dreams of a Mother and a Daughter
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Lyndall Gordon was born in 1941 in Cape Town, a place from which `a ship takes fourteen days to reach anywhere that matters'. Born to a mother whose mysterious illness confined her for years to life indoors, Lyndall was her secret sharer, a child who grew to know life through books, story-telling and her mother's own writings. It was an exciting, precious world, pure and rich in dreams and imagination - untainted by the demands of reality.
But a daughter grows up.
Despite her own inability to leave home for long, Lyndall's mother believed in migration, a belief that became almost a necessity once the horrors of apartheid gripped their country. Lyndall loves the rocks, the sea, the light of Cape Town, but, struggling to achieve a life approved by her mother, she tries and makes a failure of living in Israel and then, back once again in her beloved South Africa she marries and moves with her husband to New York.
It's in America in 1968 when suddenly Lyndall realises she cannot be, and does not want to be, the woman, the daughter and the mother her mother wants her to be.
This is a wonderfully layered memoir about the expectations of love and duty between mother and daughter. The particular time and place, the people and the situation are Lyndall's, but the division between generations, the pain and the joy of being a daughter are everywoman's.
But a daughter grows up.
Despite her own inability to leave home for long, Lyndall's mother believed in migration, a belief that became almost a necessity once the horrors of apartheid gripped their country. Lyndall loves the rocks, the sea, the light of Cape Town, but, struggling to achieve a life approved by her mother, she tries and makes a failure of living in Israel and then, back once again in her beloved South Africa she marries and moves with her husband to New York.
It's in America in 1968 when suddenly Lyndall realises she cannot be, and does not want to be, the woman, the daughter and the mother her mother wants her to be.
This is a wonderfully layered memoir about the expectations of love and duty between mother and daughter. The particular time and place, the people and the situation are Lyndall's, but the division between generations, the pain and the joy of being a daughter are everywoman's.
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- Published: Feb 05 2015
- Pages: 336
- 197 x 128mm
- ISBN: 9781844088911
Press Reviews
- Guardian
Lyndall Gordon manages to avoid being undaughterly about her exciting, difficult, self-obsessed mother . . . as racy as a novel
- Observer
A biographer with soul, she reaches into the hearts of those she brings alive for us. She makes the meaning of their lives sing and sweat as she invites us into their experiences, their longings, their struggles and their disappointments . . . [a] fascinating mix between memoir and biography
- Independent on Sunday
[A] beautifully written and troubling memoir
- Sunday Times
[A] sensitive exploration of the complexities of motherhood and daughterhood
- Mail on Sunday
This quietly devastating book takes us into many strange terrains but it is to the 'inner life of that room' in Cape Town that Gordon finds herself returning. It was there she fountained into one of our most sensitive writers
- Literary Review
In Divided Lives, [Gordon] devotes to her mother the kind of care and attention she has previously devoted to the Modernists, and - goodness knows! - her mother, Rhoda, certainly deserves it
- Times Literary Supplement
Lyndall Gordon's intrepid and astute biographies of writers . . . frequently yield insights that have eluded previous scholars . . . Now Gordon brings her gift for uncovering startling truths to bear on her own upbringing in 1950s and 60s South Africa
Elizabeth Lowry
Times Literary SupplementMemoir of the year? Divided Lives, Lyndall Gordon's enthralling and painful account of her relationship with her mother
- Sunday Herald
A wonderful read that's both frank and delicate