Trouble in paradise | 12 April 2018

1991, the Harbourfront Literary Festival in Toronto. The novelist Rose Tremain and the South African writer Carolyn Slaughter are enjoying a lobster thermidor and Chablis lunch. Hearing about Slaughter’s abuse at the hands of her father, Tremain finds herself telling her lunch companion about ‘something I never normally discussed with anyone: the lack of love I’d had from my mother and father, and my emotional dependency on Nan’ (a beloved nanny). Slaughter — who is training to be a psychiatrist — responds that ‘any human life, if the childhood is devoid of adult love, will almost certainly be a troubled one’, but reassures Tremain that Nan almost certainly saved her from such a fate. ‘She was your angel,’ Slaughter says. Tremain ends the lunch in tears.

This epiphany offers a rare — and arrestingly intimate — glimpse of the grown-up Tremain in what is essentially a memoir of childhood. Yet the anecdote feels both pungent and necessary here; indeed it might easily have inspired the whole book.