If her mother had still been alive, Rose Tremain said, she could not have written her memoir called, Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life. “Why did I not just scream and stamp my foot and yell at her?”, Tremain wondered aloud.
With an uncle killed in the war, an absent father and a mother who treated her daughters to “a litany of criticism”, Tremain said her childhood as grief-stricken, but that it made her persevering, and a great believer in the importance of friendship, “a passionately important thing in our lives”.
She said that memoir had, in some ways, been restricting, as she had to stick to the truth of the painful stories and events of her childhood, but it was also a cathartic process. She said she now feels more angry with herself than with her mother for not following her younger self’s ambition to attend Oxford University.
Tremain told the audience how she came to realise she could be a writer. “Stories are healing. Stories are universal. Stories take one out of oneself. They can do the most magical things. And if I can be a creator of stories, my life can have some meaning,” she decided. To which Peter Florence responded, “That’s what we’ve been looking for here for 30 years, that answer”.
If you missed this, you might enjoy event 254 , ‘You’ll Never Walk’ with Andy Grant on Wednesday 30 May at 7pm.