Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country

""In most families, it is the children who leave home. In mine it was the parents."" So writes Gillian Slovo, the daughter of white South Africa's most famous radical couple: Ruth First and Joe Slovo. Now in her 40s, Gillian attempts to find answers to questions that resonate as if from a Nadine Gordimer novel: How much did her communist parents, who were fighting apartheid horrors, owe their three neglected children? Her perspective is less one of bitterness than ache, coupled with the psychological curiosity of the novelist she is. Gillian first reconstructs the circumstances of her mother's 1982 death by letter bomb (via South African agents) in Mozambique, then delves into her own dislocated youth, when her mother was detained by the state and the family's modus operandi was secrecy. In 1990, Joe Slovo returned to South Africa as one of the African National Congress's top negotiators; he later became the new government's housing minister. Once white South Africa's bogeyman, he was now lionized. But the pensive Gillian, down from London, finds her father resistant to talking about his past. Only after Joe dies peacefully does Gillian find out some family secrets: mutual infidelities, a half-brother fathered by Joe. Also, she has a remarkable confrontation with the evasive ex-cop who helped send that letter bomb. In the end of this fluid, often fascinating memoir, Gillian does find peace, judging her parents less harshly and feeling pride in the country, her country, that her parents did help save. (May)