A Woman on the Edge of Time: A Son Investigates His Trail- blazing Mother’s Young Suicide

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.” (Sept.)