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Every family has secrets, but Juliet Nicolson’s antecedents had some pretty famous — if badly kept — ones. This makes her ideally suited to this fascinating hybrid of memoir and social history.
The juiciest details about her bisexual grandparents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, and her shame-hamstrung parents, Philippa and Nigel Nicolson, have already been explored in her memoir A House Full of Daughters. But here the author transforms the highly personal into something universal.
The Book of Revelations: Women and Their Secrets plots these family anecdotes against the wider canvas of changing British social mores, starting in the 1950s when husbands and wives were often utterly nonplussed by the mechanics of sex, adrift from the moorings of carnal delights. Nicholson excavates her parents’ unhappy sexless marriage alongside a startling account of listening to pioneering gynaecological consultant Joan Malleson’s ethically dubious secret recordings of her patients.
She shines a gentle light on queer histories, setting April Ashley’s gender transition in the 1960s against her own father’s skittishness around Dawn, the intersex daughter of the family chauffeur who reinvented herself in America, got gender affirming surgery, and scandalised Southern conservative Charleston by marrying a black man. Interracial relationships were taboo on both sides of the Atlantic, and Nicolson explores the confusing status of mixed-race children in post-war Britain.
Shifting from her mother’s generation, Nicholson unpacks the secrets of her own, and then her daughter’s. Cobbling together a sex education from literature and advice columns against a backdrop of Second Wave feminism, in her early publishing job Nicholson encounters filmmaker Barbara Gordon, who unburned herself of her secret Valium addiction and abusive relationship in her 1979 memoir. Secrets and shame begetting more secrets and shame is a recurring theme of The Book of Revelations.
Turning to the future, Nicholson is fearful that her own daughters are living in a world of scrutinised secrets. Reality television and social media have eroded privacy, making the public shaming of young women a bloodsport. Family secrets tumble out with some judicious Googling.
Society has a long way to go before women’s secret shames can be detoxified. But Nicholson’s airing of all our dirty laundry is a breath of fresh air.
The Book of Revelations: Women and Their Secrets by Juliet Nicolson is out now (Chatto & Windus, £22)
