Grievance

She came to London in the naïve belief that she could reinvent herself. The anguish that drove her from home was in part because the daughter her parents saw bore no relation to the person she knew herself to be. She felt distorted and deformed by them. In London she would take control of her life and of the self she presented to the world.

She wasn’t so much determinedly suppressing the past, as refusing to be defined by what she had left behind. The mere telling of her story would skew people’s reactions to her. And as she listened to other people talk about their families, her own came to seem grotesque, to the point at which she wondered if she would even be believed. When she rehearsed her story in her own mind, it seemed – to a judgement as fastidious as hers, as alert to genre – like the worst kind of sensationalist fiction. And the longer she left the telling, the more likely it was that her motives, when she finally came to unburden herself, would be misinterpreted. She was so sick of the relish in unearned victimhood she’d seen at home that she shrank from exposing herself to the charge of courting pathos.

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