Anthony Sattin

Marina Warner becomes her mother’s ‘shabti’

Through carefully chosen inherited objects, Warner imaginatively reconstructs her parents’ marriage and bears witness to her mother’s difficulties

Dame Marina Warner at the Annual Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2016. Credit: Getty Images

There comes a time after the death of parents when grief subsides, the sense of loss eases, and you, the child, are left wondering who those people were. What were they like? Not as you knew them as parents, but as people? For most of us, as the cliché goes, time is a healer, and these questions, thoughts, urges and memories lose their urgency.

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