The book:
Jeremy Gavron was just four years old when his mother committed suicide. A Woman on the Edge of Time is his moving reconstruction of his mother’s life and the society she struggled to live in.
Hannah Gavron was intelligent, beautiful, privileged and married with two young boys. Her death shocked all those around her. Jeremy was only fully aware of how his mother died when he stumbled across a remnant of her suicide note, as their father limited talk of her. Stunted by the misogynistic society at the time, and involved in a series of complicated relationships, she used the gas oven in a friend’s apartment – the same way Sylvia Plath had killed herself, also leaving behind two children, two years earlier. Unearthing letters, diaries and photographs, and talking to her friends, he pieces together her story and what drove her to suicide. Both writers, Gavron suggests, were women born on the edge of time: just too young to benefit from the changes that would be introduced with the onset of feminism.
Jeremy Gavron’s memoir of his mother is as fascinating as it is moving. We hope you enjoy this unique history as our Shelf Improvement pick this month.
What the Guardian thought:
Hannah Gavron was 29 and, on the face of it, had it all: two children, a successful husband, close friends, supportive parents, an affluent lifestyle, a book due to be published within a few weeks and a successful career, with recent radio and television appearances. Someone with everything to live for, you’d think. And yet, on a cold Tuesday afternoon in December 1965, she dropped the younger of her sons, Jeremy, at his nursery school and drove to a friend’s flat in north London.
Jeremy was four years old. The manner of his mother’s death was kept from him throughout his childhood. Out of sight, out of mind: she wasn’t mentioned again and there were no photos. At 16, he learned the truth, or some of it, from his father. At 30, while clearing out his grandparents’ house, he came across an old newspaper cutting giving the stark facts and his mother’s suicide note with the words “Please tell the boys I did love them terribly!” scrawled on the back. But it wasn’t till 2005, when his brother died suddenly and Jeremy himself, by then in his mid-40s, had a heart attack, that the mystery of his mother’s death began to preoccupy him. A piece written for the Guardian in 2009, as much about what he didn’t know as what he did, might have provided catharsis and the means to move on. But it was only the beginning – the first step in a quest that has led to this book.
The tenacity with which Jeremy pursues his goal is extraordinary. Childhood friends of Hannah, fellow students, colleagues, a former au pair – however hard they are to track down, he finds a way to meet and interview them. He builds up a picture of a charismatic girl: lively, rebellious, a champion show-jumper till she moved on to boys.
At 16 Hannah successfully applied to Rada, but she left after a year and married soon afterwards. Her husband, Bob, had qualified as a barrister but joined a printing company and within a short time was running the business. Too energetic to stay home and play second fiddle, Hannah took a sociology degree at Bedford College. She had her first child, at 21, before she graduated, and her second, Jeremy, while doing a PhD.
Hannah’s thesis was about housebound mothers, and the fieldwork meant interviewing 96 women, many from working-class backgrounds. Highly privileged though she was in comparison, the choice of subject had a personal element: she too found it hard to hang on to a sense of identity and purpose while being a wife and mother. The thesis became a book, The Captive Wife. The negative impact of marrying early was one recurrent motif.
There is no golden key at the end of the quest. But the taboo of silence that shrouded Jeremy’s childhood is broken. Those complicit with it aren’t arraigned; the tone is patient and compassionate. But Hannah steps out of the shadow, 50 years on, and “the great unsaids” are finally spoken.
Blake Morrison - Read the full review:
If you liked this, then try:
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History of Suicide by Jill Bialosky
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The Scent of Dried Roses by Tim Lott
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A Notable Woman by Jean Lucey Pratt
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