Gordon's book uses the relationship between her mother and herself, first in Cape Town and then as she travels to the US and the UK, to tell a biographical story. She focuses, in a narrative that will be familiar to those who have read Karen Armstrong, on her mother's (awful) experiences being told that she can somehow personally 'control' her epilepsy through force of will. And that the seizures that result are perhaps the result of her own moral failure.

She is aware of the problems of apartheid, but this is not a book to read to find out about women's protest groups e.g. the Black Sash. For her family, emigration to Israel is the solution to complicity in apartheid, as visitors from Israel urge members of the South African population to migrate in the 1950s and 60s, running children's groups and hebrew classes, and even encouraging young people to give up their studies as their degrees will be of no use in the new state (fortunately, she records, South African members of the youth groups ignore this instruction). I said in an earlier post I had been to much of the coastline she describes. The black and white photos here don't do justice to a beautiful part of the world that she lovingly describes. Here she is talking in terms of her homesickness
The alternative that isn't on offer is what I want, but can't voice: to return to the roar of the breakers on the rocks and the gulls overhead beating their wings against the wind.

Yet for me the most interesting section of this book is where she writes about herself: her own battle with postnatal depression (and homesickness) in New York, where she studied literature as her husband worked on scientific research. Her self-doubt at moving her daughter to Oxford when she was appointed to teach, following her thesis on T.S. Eliot. The responses to her work are not all positive, and reflect resistance from critics convinced by 'the death of the author':
Some reviewers are outraged though. These men own Eliot. Who is this female scurrying around, sifting papers? I try (though don't quite manage) to console myself with Virgina Woolf's comic portrait of the gentleman put out to find the housemaid turning over books in his library.
She offers insight into the process of the biographer, her own ability to see a narrative in the lives of others such as Emily Dickinson, and connects this to her experiences as a child, reading with her mother, caring for her mother.
...the deep pursuit will be that question Woolf asked about what is obscured in our nature: the authenticity of unuttered thoughts, the pressure to communicate the incommunicable - to say directly, even awkwardly, what's in the mind
I have a copy of Lives Like Loaded Guns on my shelf and reading this bio has made me want to go back to it again, to see the points of similarity with her descriptions of her mum's experience of epilepsy and isolated creativity. I don't think this bio works because she never addresses the key question at the heart of her mother's life (was she a good poet?), even though she is more than willing to expose other personal questions (her mother's affair) that you might expect from a family member writing a biography to hide or downplay. I wondered if this is because for her this question of literary worth *is* the most personal question, given her career as a literary scholar and writer. The book works though if read as a love letter to her mother, demonstrating her feelings through her investigations of connections, papers and experiences to find a woman who had aspired to the writing life Gordon successfully achieved: perhaps in some ways this is also an apology. Her mother's one bid to follow her work, taking a short trip to London where she joined the City Lit and was beginning to see her work published, was cut short for the sake of the children (Lyndall Gordon and her brother) back in Cape Town. ( )