Absent fathers and family fictions

Novelist Sylvia Brownrigg found a scrapbook. Its revelations forced her to extract the truth from the family fictions she'd been told her whole life. How? By becoming a memoirist.

Young Sylvia and her father, Nick (left); Sylvia’s new memoir (middle); Nick’s elusive father, Gawen, also a novelist, in Kenya before his apparent suicide (right)

In 1939, novelist Sylvia Brownrigg’s great grandmother, Beatrice Brownrigg, created a scrapbook for her grandson, Nick, Sylvia’s mostly absent father. The point of this document was to let Nick know that he was deeply loved and not abandoned by his aristocratic British family, whose lives were torn asunder both by World War II and by the divorce and untimely death in Kenya of Nick’s young father, Gawen. Nick—who held the improbable British title of baronet, though he was “raised” (er, sent away to boarding school) in the U.S. by his gaslighting, eccentric mother, Lucia, and ended up living off the grid as a hippy in the California redwoods—would not “read” this document until 2016, just before his death from cancer. And by “read” I mean Sylvia, her brother, and their stepmother had to read it to him, and it’s unclear how much he understood at that point, as by then he was already well into alcohol-related dementia.

In other words, nearly a century after the creation of this scrapbook, it was suddenly left to Sylvia, who had never met any of the main characters in this thorny plot save her own emotionally walled-off father, to piece together the unvarnished truth of her family’s history. Why? Because the stories she, her brother, and their father had been told about their origins turned out to be if not outright lies then opportunistically twisted and deliberately misinterpreted versions the truth to fit the false narrative Lucia needed to create, if only to live with herself after what she did to Nick’s family.

Hence, The Whole Staggering Mystery, Sylvia’s first foray into memoir but with a novelist’s flair and necessary ability to fill in the many blanks she had to fill with her own imagination, which I devoured and discussed with her below.

Deborah Copaken: I just want to get right to it because I just finished reading The Whole Staggering Mystery. At first, in the middle of the book, I was slightly confused. Like wait, who are these new characters? And then I realized, ah, okay. You were writing part of this book as fiction. So it's a memoir. It's historical fiction. And it's kind of like real fiction. Explain what happened behind that because, once I understood what was happening, I was fascinated by the story.

Sylvia Brownrigg: Yeah, there's a family story at the heart of the book, which was this hidden set of documents that were found, that were related to my father who had been divorced by that point from our mother for fifty years. But nonetheless, they were stuck in a basement of my mother's family. So they were really lost and hidden from him and from all of us. And so my brother and I tried to get these documents to our father, assuming he would want to see what had been there that whole time, which he didn't. He didn't want to open this package. He didn't want to find out what was inside it.

Sylvia and her father Nick in his later years

Let me stop you just there. That fascinated me. I was like: “Not a Jew!”

Right. Well, it's a pretty counterintuitive move even for WASPs, which he was. But by the time we persuaded him to open it, he wasn't really persuadable because he was having cognitive decline. By the time we nudged him into opening it, he wasn't really making full decisions for himself at that point. So it was more the case that my brother and stepmother could find the package and just go, "Nick, we're doing this. We're opening it." So then when we opened the package…

---

I’m placing the paywall here for a reason. It costs, for example, $1 a minute to get these interviews transcribed, and then it takes several more hours to condense the material and make sure the transcript is correct. (It never is.) Everyone with a free subscription can watch the video with Sylvia above, no problem. Only paid subscribers, however, have access to the rest of this transcript, which I present in this form for easy consumption, along with extra family photos of the Brownriggs. What I’m trying to do by placing a paywall here (and by eventually placing all free stories behind a paywall after two weeks) is twofold:

1) To highlight books, ideas, and scientific studies I think are fascinating and worthy of coverage but that haven’t received as much press as I think they should, so I want the interviews to be free for all;

2) To have the means to continue to do this.

Thank you to all paid subscribers for helping me do this work. For anyone who cannot afford a paid subscription but would like one—single parents and pensioners, I see you!—I’ve got you covered. Just respond to this email, tell me you can’t afford it and would like a comped subscription, and I will provide access to all paid content—like this story of being gaslit by an ex-partner or this one about who killed HRT—no questions asked. I never want anyone to be deprived of stories or critical information because they can’t afford it. Those of you who have already been paying the $5 a month or $50 a year have helped me to be able to offer these free comps to those who can’t afford it, so thank you for that, too! Those of you on the fence? This is me asking you to please jump over that fence and help keep this publication—which I produce and write entirely on my own—alive and running. Thanks so much.