It’s never an easy ride on the love train
MEMOIR THE LOST PROPERTIES OF LOVE by Sophie Ratcliffe (Collins £16.99, 304 pp) BEL MOONEY
‘MAkInG an exhibition of yourself’ was the bane of a certain type of parent — a stern warning to the child who threatened a meltdown in public.
Showing off was something else we weren’t supposed to do: talent as well as tantrums had to be kept firmly under control.
But not in bookshops today, where confessional memoirs line the shelves and, if super- clever, they dazzle the critics, too.
Writer and academic Sophie Ratcliffe has produced such a book, in which she takes her readers on an odd, confusing, hectic journey by train — ‘Hull to Oxford Via Moscow’ — packing her bag with literary allusions.
Yet all the while she is mourning what she has carelessly left behind in the Lost Property Office of the soul, and no amount of busy literary allusion and quotation can console her.
This is a memoir about loss which skitters around its subject, as if afraid that focusing on it means being crushed beneath a train like poor Anna karenina.
It is also a book about love which shies away from the imprisoning commitment that real love (of husband and child) requires. That’s why, as a memoir, it is so maddening — jumping around as if terrified to stay still, on endless train journeys to nowhere.
But at the same time, these fragments are compelling, forcing the thought: ‘Yes, I’ve felt like that, too.’
Sophie Ratcliffe is an Oxford University lecturer whose father died when she was 13. Mourning him, she becomes a haunted, confused teen — school swot by day and needy, promiscuous girl by night.
Later, she hooks up with a married man (older than her dead dad) — a successful photographer. They have a lot of sex in his flat/ studio and she wonders about his wife and children.
This memoir is largely a love letter to that unnamed man for whom she still hankers, even to the extent of briefly forgetting her children.
Another loss she feels is that of freedom. Ratcliffe’s honesty about marriage and family life is actually refreshing, even if some
might find it uncomfortable. Many women chafe at the demands of motherhood and will share the author’s guilt at longing for time to herself, of hating the tedium of shopping, making packed lunches, cooking fish fingers day after day.
‘It feels as if there is never enough of myself that I can give my children. Even if I were to hold nothing back they would be left wanting … they deserve so much more than the fragmentary bits that I staple together, daily, into a person,’ she writes.
That is so revealing. Ratcliffe seems to be all over the place — within this strange, jumpy narrative as well as in her real, messy life.
No wonder she is always making lists: the contents of handbags; what’s left in a Lost Property Office; what’s left in her own fridge; old lovers, the stages of her marriage; the mind-numbing ‘tiny boredoms’ of motherly routine; moments of domestic strife. Subjects pile up.
We visit Brief Encounter (of course), speculate about the children’s book that Anna Karenina may have been writing and had in her red bag when she jumped under the train, and so on. It is as if Ratcliffe is trying to anchor herself by means of nervous itemising, to keep her panic, her feverish distraction at bay.
Fascinating though they are, the literary/historical strands and the personal memoir don’t always sit well together. You’re just settling into one when the train lurches off from the station and you long for the stop you’ve just missed.
It’s sad but irritating when Ratcliffe wonders (again) why she spends so much time away from her children, instead looking out of train windows and writing. You feel like giving the exhibitionist a couple of books on gratitude and mindfulness.