My mother’s secret life was a Dickensian horror story

What happens to a child raised without love? This is the agonising question that the American lawyer Justine Cowan braces herself to address in a memoir that seeks to explain her relationship with Eileen, her monster of a mother. As her parent’s gaunt figure lay in hospital, vanishing within the fog of a disease that had robbed her of ‘a few words here, a memory there’, Justine forced herself to say the words that she thought her mother wanted to hear. However, long devoid of empathy for someone whose behaviour had baffled, undermined and almost destroyed her, Justine knew a false expression of love was ‘balm for a dying old woman’.

Continuously held up as inadequate, thoughtless and ungenerous, and forced to wear a strange, shapeless, brown serge shift because she was so ‘fat’, Justine’s Californian childhood had revolved around a regime of music and elocution lessons, diets, and discipline designed to emulate her mother’s bemusingly hazy aristocratic upbringing in Britain. In a book that moves between intensive historical research and equally rigorous personal analysis, Cowan unravels the puzzle of her own unhappy childhood and the secrets of her mother’s true identity.

She discovers that prior to Eileen’s emigration to the United States in the 1950s and her marriage to Justine’s mild-mannered father, Eileen’s privileged upbringing was a myth. As Justine herself grew up there were moments when her mother reached out in an effort to confide the truth with a telephone call, a letter, an invitation to London and a mysterious repetition of the unfamiliar name ‘Dorothy Soames’. But Justine had rejected every gesture of intimacy. By then, she explains, ‘it was too late’. But after her mother’s death she delved into the back of a filing cabinet where she had previously shoved Eileen’s confession unread, only to find that her mother, once known as Dorothy Soames, had been a ‘foundling’.