A Woman on the Edge of Time
A Son's Search for a Mother Who Wanted More
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The memoir of a journalist investigating the mystery of his sociologist mother’s suicide forty years later.
London, 1965: A brilliant young woman has just gassed herself to death, leaving behind a note, two young sons, and a soon-to-be-published book. A promising academic and feminist at the dawn of modern feminism, no one had imagined Hannah Gavron might take her own life. Forty years later, her son Jeremy attempts to solve both this mystery of his mother’s death and the mystery of the mother he never had the chance to know. From the fragments of life she left behind, he ultimately uncovers not only Hannah’s struggle to carve out her place in a man’s world; he examines the constrictions on every ambitious woman in the mid-20th century.
An Observer, London Times, and Sydney Morning Herald book of the year
Praise for A Woman on the Edge of Time
“Jeremy Gavron’s quest to find his mother has produced a groundbreaking book and moving portrait of a spirited young woman—a “captive wife”—who refused to accept the social constraints of her time. Unforgettable.” —Tina Brown
“Beautifully written—wholly unique—A Woman on the Edge of Time is an elegy/memoir that is also a kind of detective story—in which the author investigates, with as much dread as hope, the circumstances leading to the suicide of his charismatic and accomplished mother many years before. It is difficult not to rush through Jeremy Gavron’s compelling story which would translate brilliantly into cinematic form.” —Joyce Carol Oates
“A thoughtful meditation on a ruthless, mysterious final act.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Gavron’s] careful work conjures not only one remarkable woman but also a snapshot of the fractured lives of women in general during the rapidly warping 1960s, with moving and revelatory conclusions. . . . Gavron reminds readers of art’s work in raising the dead.” —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this moving memoir, British nonfiction author and novelist (An Acre of Barren Ground), explores the ways in which suicide dramatically affects those left behind. Gavron was four years old in l965 when his 29-year-old mother dropped him at nursery school, went to a friend's London apartment, and used a gas oven to commit suicide. For years, the family cloaked the tragedy in silence, but the author, stunned when his brother later dies of a heart attack, finds that an older grief, long buried, is also "dislodged." He decided to investigate his mother's life and death, embarking on a relentless search to answer the question of why Hannah Gavron made that irreversible choice. Gavron reconstructs his mother's childhood, her apparent involvement with her boarding school's headmaster at the age of 14, and her rocky marriage; only when Gavron was 16 did he learn that his mother, still married, had been seeing another man at the time of her death. He also probes the fascinating years on the cusp of the women's movement in which the vivacious Hannah forged a path in the field of sociology, gained her Ph.D., and produced a thesis (posthumously published as The Captive Wife: Conflict of Housebound Mothers). As the author interviews Hannah's classmates, friends, and family members, and studies old diaries, films, and letters, his writing poignantly touches the enigmatic interior life of a mother "forever out of reach."
