BRITANNIA STREET

In this memoir, a retired psychotherapist attempts to untangle a relative’s personal life as a way of understanding her own.

Cox first heard the story of her great-grandmother Elizabeth from her parents when she first got married—how the woman had borne two children out of wedlock and how no one, even their descendants, knew who the children’s fathers were. The story held a special significance for Cox, both because she shared her great-grandmother’s first name—Elizabeth—and because the author had gotten pregnant with her first child when she was an unmarried teenager. It was not until 2004, four decades later,in the aftermath of her marriage’s dissolution, a disastrous love affair, and a severe depressive episode, that Cox decided to try to find out the truth of her great-grandmother’s life: “I have a strong feeling that there is something in it I need to discover….In order to find myself today, I need to know where I have come from, who my ancestors were and what that means for me.” The retired author set about to understand the life of that other, earlier Elizabeth through research and travel; while doing so, she began to unpack her own difficult adolescence, which was further complicated by fears brought on by her parents’ poor health. Cox, a psychotherapist, uses her expertise to delve into her own psychology as well as that of her great-grandmother. Here, for instance, she speculates on how Elizabeth’s experience with her own father (an ill man, like Cox’s own) affected her: “Did Elizabeth shoulder more of the burden than a twelve-year-old girl should have to?...Children did work in the mills at a very young age and there would be no money coming in if William couldn’t work.” Overall, the author manages to excavate quite a bit from the historical record, filling in gaps with a novelist’s sense of narrative. Although there are no real groundbreaking revelations here, she manages to say quite a bit about the complicated dynamics of families—many of which seem to repeat themselves generation after generation.

A penetrating work of family history and self-reflection.