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    She Left Me the Gun
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    She Left Me the Gun
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    She Left Me the Gun
    Audiobook8 hours

    She Left Me the Gun

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A journalist struggles to unearth the story of her mother's resilience and secrecy following an unbelievable childhood trauma in South Africa

    "One day I will tell you the story of my life," promises Emma Brockes's mother, "and you will be amazed." Despite her mother's tales of a rustic childhood in South Africa and bohemian years in London, Brockes grew up knowing that some crucial pieces of the past were left unspoken. A mystery to her friends and family, Brockes's mother, Paula, was glamorous, no-nonsense, and totally out of place in their quaint English village. What compelled her to emigrate to England was never explained, nor what empowered her tremendous strengths and strange fears. Looking to unearth the truth after Paula's death, Brockes begins a dangerous journey into the land-and the life-her mother fled from years before.

    She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me is a tale of true transformation, the story of a young woman who reinvented herself so completely that her previous life seemed to simply vanish-and of a daughter who transcends her mother's fears and reclaims an abandoned past. Brockes soon learns that Paula's father was a drunk megalomaniac who terrorized Paula and her seven half siblings for years. He is ultimately taken to court and vindicated of all charges-but not before Paula shoots him five times, and fails to kill him. She books passage to London, never to return.

    She Left Me the Gun carries Brockes to South Africa to meet her seven aunts and uncles, to weigh their stories against her mother's silences, and to understand one of the world's most beautiful yet bloody countries. Brockes learns of the violent pathologies and racial propaganda in which her grandfather was inculcated, sees the mine shafts and train yards where he worked as an itinerant mechanic, and finds buried in government archives the startling court records that prove he was secretly imprisoned for murder years before he first married.

    An extraordinary work of psychological suspense and forensic memoir, She Left Me the Gun chronicles Brockes's efforts to walk the knife edge between understanding her mother's unspeakable traumas and embracing the happiness she chose for herself and her daughter.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 16, 2013
    ISBN9781101620304
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for She Left Me the Gun

    3.5/5

    63 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This a non fiction , memoir of the authors journey to discover more about her mothers family after her death. Emma the author travels to South Africa to visit family members and discovers horrible truths about the sexual abuse the family members were subjected to by their father.I don't like reading non fiction very much as I feel bogged down. This book however didn't read like a non fiction book. The authors narrative is very chatty and at times quite down to earth and funny. Some parts in the book however are quite harrowing.I was expecting something more with this book because of its title. At times I felt the book perhaps came away from the main point and went off on a tangent. I really have mixed feelings about this book. At times I was quite engrossed and at other times I was really fed up. I have to own up to skipping a few pages along the way.Not too sure who I could recommend this book to. Its out of my comfort zone a little although at times it held my interest.
    • 4/5
      It's a damn shame Paula was such a bad shot.
    • 2/5
      Not a psychological thriller nor did her mother leave her the gun. As someone who's been working on both my parents' families I've never interviewed any of my relations under the influence. If you want answers, as the author did, you either commit yourself to finding them or leave that door closed. Some of my mother's relatives moved to South Africa from Scotland so I was interested in Brockes impressions of the country and its archival resources. Her visits with her relatives and her mother's Dutch ancestors painted a picture of dysfunction that started with the man known as the grandfather, tyrant Uncle Arie, and her grandfather Jimmy. I am perplexed by the fact that the molestation trial didn't make the newspapers unless women and children weren't/aren't valued or family violence is so commonplace. The drinking parties were the author wound up with a hangover or couldn't remember what happened the next day weren't of interest
    • 2/5
      memoir (sort of)/abusive childhood. kind of meandering--interwoven with personal stories from relatives as the author uncovers the truth of her mother's life before her.
    • 4/5
      Despite a title that sounds to me more suited to a not-very-good western, I found this memoir quite engaging. I had an advance copy, so this quote might have changed in the published edition, but these first two sentences really caught my imagination: “ My grandmother thought she was marrying someone vibrant and exciting, a man with wavy hair and tremendous energy. He was a talented carpenter a talented artist, a convicted murderer and a very bad poet.”A woman who very much tried to protect her child alludes to a horrible childhood, but both mother and daughter retreat from the subject. So little is known by the daughter until after the mother passes, and the daughter, the author of this book, feels she needs to know more.Much of the book is about connecting with the mother's family, and about their various ways of reacting to their childhoods, where life has led them as adults. Everyone was affected, and their subsequent lives reflected how no one escapes unscathed.It would have helped to have a “cast of characters” or a genealogy chart because there were so many that I had trouble keeping track of them. There were photographs included, and those made the story all the more real.I feel like a voyeur when I read such personal accounts of people's lives but I find them fascinating. This one had a couple of spots where it dragged a bit for me, but I still very much appreciated (enjoyed isn't the appropriate word) this memoir.I was given an advance copy of this book for review.
    • 4/5
      This was a different book than I thought it would be. The title She Left Me the Gun led me to be that this would be a dramatic true-crime memoir, but it isn't really. Rather, along with After Visiting Friends and The Mistress's Daughter, it is another entry in the growing sub-genre of memoirs in which the writer uses his or her research skills to uncover long-buried family secrets.The author, journalist Emma Brocks, reconstructs her mother's life after her death, by reconnecting with the aunts and uncles she had little or no contact with while her mother was still alive. Her mother, Paula (née Pauline) grew up in South Africa. She and her half-sisters were the plaintiffs in a well-publicized incest trial. They were subjected to the horrible experience of having to be cross-examined by their father, who represented himself at the trial. The prepubs's back cover says that Paula tried to shoot her father five times (the New York Times Book Review said six) before fleeing to England, but I was unable to find that scene in the book. I wasn't even able to figure out if the back cover meant to say that Paula tried to shoot her father on five or six different occasions, or on one occasion, with five or six different bullets. After finishing the book, I skimmed through it again to see if I missed anything, but I didn't find this scene on this second look either. It's odd that what should have been a pivotal scene (or scenes) is missing or very easy to skip over, There is a picture in the book of Paula and her father "on the day she left South Africa for England, November 1960" (p. 269). He doesn't look like he's been shot at at all.Instead of drama, there are a lot of recalled conversations with her aunts and uncles, and descriptions of the author's visit to post-Apartheid South Africa. She Left Me the Gun is a well-written book and a thoughtful tribute to the author's mother. But it was definitely not what I expected.
    • 4/5
      For most, it is difficult to imagine the lives our parents lived before we were born. We (with a bit of luck) bonded with our parents when we were children, and no matter how old they live to be, to us they largely remain the people they were when we were growing up. We are forever their children, they our parents.Although her mother sometimes hinted at some rather dark secrets in her past, She Left Me the Gun author Emma Brockes was never curious enough to press her for details. Paula, her mother, only offered the occasional hint, immediately shutting down the conversation if Emma asked even the most innocent question - and Emma never pushed her hard enough to learn anything new. She did know that her mother had immigrated to England from South Africa in 1960 and maintained only limited contact with her South African family and friends from her new home. Then, when Emma was 27 years old, her mother died and she was surprised to learn that her father did not know a whole lot more about her mother's past than she did. Determined to learn the truth about her mother's first thirty years, and regretting that she had not insisted that her mother tell her more before it was too late, Emma decided it was time to visit South Africa. What she would learn there turned out to be more tragic than anything she ever imagined.She Left Me the Gun (subtitled My Mother's Life Before Me) is the story of a dysfunctional South African family whose family-dynamic seems to have crippled the emotional lives of at least two generations. Old grudges seem to die hard in this family, and Emma’s relatives were generally eager to share the worst tales of the family's past with their British visitor. Unbeknownst to Emma, her mother was still somewhat of a hero to the rest of the family, someone who, after displaying the courage to fight the pure evilness that was such a part of her daily life, had the equal courage to begin a new life for herself thousands of miles away from everything, and everyone, she knew.Bottom Line: one gets the impression that, despite learning that her mother had lived two very different lives, Emma still has a hard time emotionally connecting that first life to her mother. To Emma, Paula will always be the British mother with whom she grew up. To her, it is almost as if her mother’s first thirty years happened to someone else. Fans of frank, unusual memoirs will want to take a look at this one.