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My mother’s secret life was a Dickensian horror story

6 February 2021

9:00 AM

6 February 2021

9:00 AM

The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames: A Memoir Justine Cowan

Virago, pp.320, 20

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.

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