"She Left Me The Gun - My Mother's Life Before Me"

"She Left Me The Gun - My Mother's Life Before Me" was written by Emma Brockes about her mother's life.  Emma writes for The Guardian's Weekend Magazine and has contributed to The New York Times, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Elle.   She has also won two British Press Awards -- Young Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the year.  While she was at Oxford, she won the Philip Geddes Memorial Prize for Journalism.  She has also written another book, What Would Barbra Do?  How Musicals Saved My Life" which was serialized on the BBC.  She currently lives in New York.

Emma's mother, Paula, moved from her childhood home in South Africa to London when she was a young adult, made friends, and started a new life for herself leaving her old life as a mystery for her daughter and husband to discover after her death.  She met and married her attorney husband in London then they moved out of the city after Emma was born.

Paula showed Emma the gun she'd smuggled into England upon her arrival and promised it to Emma as her inheritance but ultimately turned it in when the police offered a grace period for giving up illegal guns.  Paula also hinted that someday she'd tell her daughter the story of her life and that her daughter would be surprised.  Although there were a few hints along the way and some contact with Emma's aunts and uncles, that day didn't arrive because Paula died of cancer when Emma was a young adult.

Emma decided to go to South Africa, find what she could of Paula's family, and try to discover what Paula's life had been before England.  She discovers Paula's father was an abusive drunk, a murderer, and had incestuous relationships with some of his daughters.  Paula had accused him of molesting a younger sister but, when her stepmother changed her testimony, her father (acting as his own attorney) was acquitted.  It was at that point that Paula wavered between taking her own life or leaving the country but not before she shot her father five times.  He survived and she left.

Emma begins to understand that her mother compartmentalized her "before" and "after" lives to protect Emma from the horrors of her mother's childhood and try to give Emma as normal a childhood as possible.  Emma proves to be a gutsy woman when she goes to South Africa alone and begins to meet her mother's siblings and learn more of what her mother's life before was like.

Although the book could easily have been a "dark" read, it is not.  It shows how the human spirit can triumph against tough odds!  pazt