She Left Me the Gun

April 1, 2013
The riveting memoir about how a prizewinning British journalist reclaimed her mother's traumatic past. Brockes' mother, Paula, was notoriously reticent about the years she had spent growing up in Durban, South Africa. Her family and friends knew that Paula had expatriated to England in 1960 for political reasons but not much else. Among the few things she brought with her from South Africa was a handgun that Brockes discovered "wrapped in a pair of knickers." Paula considered the gun among her prized possessions and bequeathed it to Brockes without any explanation of why it meant so much to her. After Paula died of cancer, her daughter decided to learn about the South African side of her family and the life story her mother had suppressed. A database search in England unearthed evidence that her mother's father, Jimmy, had been on trial for murder six years before Paula had been born. Despite misgivings that continued research into her mother's past was "unfair, unethical [and] possibly unforgivable," Brockes traveled to Johannesburg to talk to the maternal relatives she had never met and search through government archives for more details about her grandfather. Her aunts and uncles remembered the family patriarch as a drunken "psychopath" who brutalized his children. Paula, on the other hand, was the heroic elder sibling who called her younger brothers and sisters her babies and tried to protect them against her father's savagery by shooting him. Court records revealed still more: that Jimmy had also been tried and later acquitted for molesting his daughters. The story of Brockes' quest to understand her mother's past is powerful on its own, but the backdrop against which most of the narrative unfolds--a country with its own history of rapacious violence--makes the book even more poignant and unforgettable.

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December 1, 2012

Many families have secrets, but the one Brockes uncovered after the death of her rather mysterious mother, Paula, was a shocker. Raised in South Africa with an alcoholic father who roundly abused her and her seven half-siblings, Paula fled to London--but not before shooting her father five times yet failing to kill him. An award-winning journalist--she's been named Young Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year in Britain--Brockes should tell this story well.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2013
Most regular tourists want to look at places where great historical events occurred and drive to areas of natural beauty and feel uplifted by things that are bigger than we are. But for British journalist Brockes, her journey to South Africa after her mother's death is to uncover bitter family secrets and to find out what drove her mother to emigrate from Johannesburg to London. There is a lot Brockes does not know, groping for a language to talk about the things we'd never talked about. Does she want to know? With a mixture of sorrow and wry wit, she mocks those who find excitement in the scenic and the political as she uses her journalistic skills to access the national archives and discovers horrifying family abuse in her grandfather's 1950s court case. But just as heartbreaking are the revelations of the tenderness in her struggling white working-class family. The close-up personal story will hold readers who want to understand the history tourists neither seek nor find.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)