Review of Things my mother never told me, Blake Morrison

Review of Things my mother never told me, Blake Morrison, Vintage, London, 2002

Tony Parsons, journalist and author, described this as a “must-read” book in a review in 2002.  It is still very much a must-read book in 2025.  Like Morrison’s memoir of his father, this is a masterpiece of family literature.  Since his father strode across the stage of life with great aplomb and sheer exuberance, it was obviously much easier to fill in the details of his life story.  His mother, who was also a medical doctor like her husband was, in contrast to him, so self-effacing, so taciturn that she revealed extraordinarily little about her past, and indeed not too much either about her real authentic feelings about her life to her offspring.  This, then, is a memoir in search of the elusive identity of his mother as well as a pursuit of his own identity as a very devoted and loving son.  In short, this double quest is riveting not alone because the story as it unfolds is so masterfully written but also because to read this classic of biography impels us to contemplate the intricacies of our own identity, too.

A further factor that makes this book so captivating for us is the throve of love letters written by his parents during World War II, when they were a young couple in love, that Morrison found after his mother had died.  Consequently, the book alternates between passionate letters, commentary thereon and prose reflections on his mother’s and father’s relationship, and the family life he experienced growing up.  The search for the elusive Agnes O’Shea is intriguing as we embark upon a riveting unmasking of the real woman by her determined, loyal and loving son.  The book slowly but surely manages to discover at least some of the truth about the remarkable Kerry girl who qualified as a medical doctor in Dublin in 1942 at the age of 25, worked in several British hospitals during the war, married Arthur Morrison when the war was over and reared a family in Skipton, North Yorkshire.

There is an all too familiar Irish tale in this poignant and moving memoir, that is, the blight of emigration that in many ways left the country bereft for many withering decades.  Agnes O’Shea was one among many thousands of Irish men and women who emigrated during the forties and fifties of the twentieth century.  She reinvented herself many times in England over her life after leaving Ireland, even changing her more “Catholic” name “Agnes” to “Gennie” and then to “Kim” along the way. These were two pet names used by her future husband Arthur in his letters to her.  Morrison states it succinctly: “Her acceptance of the rechristening plan proves she was ready to ditch her identity.  It was part of cutting the cord with Ireland.  He (her husband, Arthur) saw this and encouraged it.  But the impulse was already there.” (p.44)

Again, it’s her attempt at forming her identity that is explored by Morrison and it’s our inquisitiveness to get to know this elusive woman that keeps us reading.  “When my father died, it had been simple: he was there, then missing, and I grieved for the life – the spark, the energy, the intractable spirit – that had filled the vacancy.  With my mother, it was more complex.  She herself had been more complex, harder to pin down…. My mother had gone cold on me.  Who was she?  Or to get the tense right, who had she been?”  (p.   11).

We learn early on in the memoir that she was born the second last of some twenty children, seven of whom had died at birth and was born into a wealthy family, her father being a wool merchant who owned several other smaller businesses in Killorglin, County Kerry.  Morrison tells us that Agnes/Gennie/Kim was a loving but hard-working mother who practised medicine all her life, but she had never ever talked about her own family life much less her intimate feelings concerning her husband’s open affair with a mistress during a lengthy period. In short, then, this memoir reads like a detective story in part, a mystery tale in part and essentially a declaration of love and admiration for the sheer courage of a wonderful mother and strong woman who was all too self-effacing, or as he puts it himself too “taciturn, chameleonlike and self-erasing.” (p. 24)

Morrison traces her life story at once with tenderness and a dedication to telling the truth in love for this courageous woman.  If you choose to read this memoir you are in for a treat on many levels: the search for personal identity, how war affects how we relate to others and to ourselves, the trials, tribulations but also the joys and celebrations of family life and marriage.  We are especially treated to all this and more expressed in the wonderful, and at times poetic, prose of a master craftsman.  Furthermore, if you have psychoanalytical interests you will find many traces of the Freudian complexes associated with Oedipus and Jocasta.