Unravelled

In Unravelled the author unpicks the threads of her comically nuclear family with its deep silences to find what lay hidden, never to be spoken of. Beneath the carefully woven fabric of her family life, she finds clash of cultures – on one side Jews fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe, and on the other the highest levels of the British aristocracy, from the Earl of Erroll of White Mischief fame to the Twenties socialite Mimi Wimborne. The writer and thinker John Berger mysteriously links both worlds. She finds two grandmothers whose bids to find freedom and fulfilment ended in utter disaster. Her parents, shiny young communists of the 1950s airbrushed both women out of history. But what happens when you deny the past? How do you negotiate your sense of identity?