FAMILY SECRETS: A Writer's Search for His Parents and His Past

by David Leitch ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 1986

The story is so strange it makes me shiver to begin. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again""; this opening evokes a frisson of expectation of puzzling revelations, the ghostly fingers of the past reaching out to touch the present. It is also an exceedingly daring beginning for a book that could devolve into yet another bathetic recital of a man's search for the parents who gave him up many years before. But Leitch, an acclaimed British journalist, is no ordinary writer; and his story turns out to be as wondrous as its original promise. He describes in luminous prose how he finally meets his now-widowed biological mother, an essentially private, self-centered woman who, during the six years of their acquaintanceship, tells him of his lineage but provides only bits and pieces about his father and her own private life. To the son, his mother Truda's emotions are ""frozen in layers of some exquisite crystal through which no light or sound could pass."" At her funeral, he meets a younger sister, Margaret, who fills him in on their charming father who, to Truda's consternation and disapproval, lived on the fringes of respectability and the law. Margaret also believes that her mother has left behind yet another family secret: a third sibling, possibly legitimate, possibly not. She and Leitch collaborate to fin d a birth certificate of a little girl, Linda Elizabeth Chester (one of their father's surnames), born to Truda in 1950 and presumably put up for adoption. Leitch had written his earlier God Stand Up for Bastards to lure ""out of the shadows"" the mother, ""crafty as a trout,"" who had sold him eight days after his birth ""to the highest bidder."" Here, he is sending up a ""smoke signal"" to his second sister which, he hopes, will lead to a phone call, like that from Margaret, who dialed a number in her deceased mother's phone book to discover she had a brother. In sum: a small gem, so perfect in its own way that we set it aside at the final page with a touch of regret.

Pub Date: April 25, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION