A Woman on the Edge of Time

July 11, 2016
In this moving memoir, British nonfiction author and novelist (An Acre of Barren Ground), explores the ways in which suicide dramatically affects those left behind. Gavron was four years old in l965 when his 29-year-old mother dropped him at nursery school, went to a friend’s London apartment, and used a gas oven to commit suicide. For years, the family cloaked the tragedy in silence, but the author, stunned when his brother later dies of a heart attack, finds that an older grief, long buried, is also “dislodged.” He decided to investigate his mother’s life and death, embarking on a relentless search to answer the question of why Hannah Gavron made that irreversible choice. Gavron reconstructs his mother’s childhood, her apparent involvement with her boarding school’s headmaster at the age of 14, and her rocky marriage; only when Gavron was 16 did he learn that his mother, still married, had been seeing another man at the time of her death. He also probes the fascinating years on the cusp of the women’s movement in which the vivacious Hannah forged a path in the field of sociology, gained her Ph.D., and produced a thesis (posthumously published as The Captive Wife: Conflict of Housebound Mothers). As the author interviews Hannah’s classmates, friends, and family members, and studies old diaries, films, and letters, his writing poignantly touches the enigmatic interior life of a mother “forever out of reach.”

July 1, 2016

To her friends and colleagues, Hannah Gavron (d. 1965) was a mercurial and charismatic force of energy. To her parents, siblings, and husband, she was both exhilarating and exhausting. To her son Jeremy, who was only four years old when she committed suicide in a flat not far from poet Sylvia Plath's residence, Hannah was always a mystery. As an adult, the journalist and author (King Leopold's Dream; The Book of Israel) embarked on the task of piecing together the story of his mother's life and early death through letters, diaries, photographs, and interviews with those who knew her. An intelligent and ambitious sociologist and academic whose groundbreaking work The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers was neither valued nor respected by the dominant male establishment, Hannah was caught on the cusp of a new feminism. This volume succeeds as both a poignant memoir and a well-researched and -constructed investigation of a life ended too soon. VERDICT An engrossing and highly recommended portrait of a woman who burned too brightly for her time and the long-term effects of suicide by a child left behind.--Linda Frederiksen, Washington State Univ. Lib., Vancouver

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2016
Why did a bright, vivacious young woman, the author's mother, kill herself?In 1965, when he was 4 years old, Gavron (Creative Writing/Warren Wilson Coll.; An Acre of Barren Ground, 2005, etc.) was told that his mother, Hannah, had died of a heart attack. He grew up knowing nothing more until, at the age of 16, his father revealed another story: in a friend's apartment not far from where Sylvia Plath had lived and died, his 29-year-old mother had committed suicide after she was rejected by a lover who turned out to be homosexual. In 2005, two life-altering events--his older brother's sudden death and his own heart attack--unleashed a desire to finally learn the truth about his mother. Like an archaeologist "conjuring a jar out of a few shards," Gavron found fragments of elucidation in his grandfather's diaries; his mother's writings; and from interviews with family, friends, and even her last lover. In calm, temperate prose that belies his pain, anger, and frustration, he recounts his journey into his mother's life and last days. Hannah had been a sexually precocious teenager who may have had an affair with the headmaster of her boarding school when she was 14. She studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, married at 18, and, with her husband's encouragement, enrolled in college. Eight years later, already the mother of two sons, she emerged with a doctorate in sociology. Her thesis, published posthumously, was titled "The Captive Wife." Based on interviews, Hannah argued, "some women felt trapped and depressed rather than happy and satisfied at home with their children." She may have shared those feelings, but they were complicated by narcissism, anxiety, panic, and "sudden 'fits of despair' " when things did not go her way. As he delves into his mother's personality, Gavron astutely concludes that "no suicide is the product of only one thing," and all have shattering consequences for survivors. A thoughtful meditation on a ruthless, mysterious final act.

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September 1, 2016
In 1965, Gavron's mother dropped him off at his preschool Christmas party just before killing herself at a friend's home. Only 29 at the time, Hannah, as English author and journalist Gavron (An Acre of Barren Ground, 2006) refers to his mother here, was well loved and had already achieved many great successesacademic accomplishments, including the near completion of a doctorate, and a forthcoming book, all while maintaining her marriage of nearly a decade and raising two young sons. What, then, did everyone miss? In his forties with children of his own, Gavron pursues the question, never much discussed in the intervening years, with a newfound and focused obsession, following every potential personal connection to the mother he barely knew and reading every word she wrote that he can get his hands on. His careful work conjures not only one remarkable woman but also a snapshot of the fractured lives of women in general during the rapidly warping 1960s, with moving and revelatory conclusions. In a book with suicide in its subtitle, Gavron reminds readers of art's work in raising the dead.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)