Mum’s the word for a difficult childhood
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DEBORAH Orr grew up with two loving parents in an immaculately kept council home and had the best education the state could offer. There were holidays, days out in the family car and the occasional unexpected treat courtesy of a timely win on the horses.
Then, at 18, she fled. Her rupture with her family, following years of growing unhappiness, was drastic and irreparable.
And though Orr went home often and desperately longed for a rapprochement with her parents John and Win, it was not to be.
Motherwell: A Girlhood is her excoriating search for the truth about her family and her life, embarked upon at the age of 55 after both her parents had died.
She tells the story of her childhood through the tiny, treasured items she finds in the family bureau after her mother’s death – a lock of hair, a wedding photo, two macramé pot hangers.
These cheap, priceless trinkets are also a gateway to her home town of Motherwell and from there, on to the destruction of industrial Britain and its proud communities, desolated for generations. Orr loves and hates her birthplace with equal passion and describes the “stunning, dystopian panorama” of Ravenscraig steelworks and the lush marshlands and meadows where she finds peace.
Against this background her life unfolds. She is bullied, marginalised and raped. But the greatest cruelties seem inflicted by a mother and father trapped by a loving but dysfunctional marriage and the Edwardian values that society had rejected years before.
They cannot contemplate her going to university, having a career or eschewing the patriarchal values that governed their own lives.When they discover she’d had sex with her boyfriend, the family implodes.
“You are no better than a common whore,” her father fumes. “You are a stupid, disgusting little fool and there is nothing more we can do to help you now.”
Orr moved to London and became an awardwinning journalist and acclaimed editor. But her relationships were torturous, not least her marriage to the novelistWill Self.
“Two thirds of my life had passed before I allowed myself to recognise that this toxic experience of love was something I’d sought out… in the hope that I could create a different trajectory, make the mess turn into a normal, adult, loving intimacy,” she writes.
It is only years later and through the rigorous, bold self-analysis
that became this book that she makes peace with her past.
Motherwell is an unflinching memoir of one family and a lost world. It is also an extended essay on how not to mother well and the terrible legacy that can leave.
Orr died last October aged 57 before her beautiful book could be published. It is a triumph of love and humanity over the jealous, narcissistic forces which blighted much of her life.
“Win was in charge of all the words,” she says of her mother near the beginning of Motherwell. By the final page, Orr has taken “complete control of my own family, in my own words”.