Trouble in paradise | 12 April 2018

1991, the Harbourfront Literary Festival in Toronto. The novelist Rose Tremain and the South African writer Carolyn Slaughter are enjoying a lobster thermidor and Chablis lunch. Hearing about Slaughter’s abuse at the hands of her father, Tremain finds herself telling her lunch companion about ‘something I never normally discussed with anyone: the lack of love I’d had from my mother and father, and my emotional dependency on Nan’ (a beloved nanny). Slaughter — who is training to be a psychiatrist — responds that ‘any human life, if the childhood is devoid of adult love, will almost certainly be a troubled one’, but reassures Tremain that Nan almost certainly saved her from such a fate. ‘She was your angel,’ Slaughter says. Tremain ends the lunch in tears.

This epiphany offers a rare — and arrestingly intimate — glimpse of the grown-up Tremain in what is essentially a memoir of childhood. Yet the anecdote feels both pungent and necessary here; indeed it might easily have inspired the whole book.

And what a book it is. So much more alert and open and alive than so many slightly disappointing memoirs by otherwise great writers, with their plodding lists of relatives and schools and terraced homes and who had lunch or sex with whom. Much of Tremain’s canvas is heartsinkingly familiar — anyone with neglectful or absent parents will identify — but somehow the young Rosie Thomson never quite relinquishes either hope or joy. Perhaps that’s the nascent writer in the woman who would eventually become Rose Tremain. Again and again, she finds ‘wonder’ in the emotional and actual landscape around her, as she waits, sometimes with an almost excruciating trust and patience, to ‘find my place in the world’.

Still, Slaughter’s diagnosis was largely accurate.