Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?

In the grim locked-down winter of 2021, I drove three hours to Wales where I sat in an isolated cottage and wrestled with a memoir I could not figure out how to write. While I was there, my mother sent me a link to a two-page personal essay she’d published in a tiny but venerable magazine called the Literary Review of Canada. It was entitled ‘This Story is Mine’. After a preamble about feminism and #MeToo, she cuts to the chase: ‘In June 1964, a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday I was raped by a man old enough to be my father.’

My mother then went on to tell her life story, or the story she understands to be her life. It’s a story I’d heard many times before, one she’d published other versions of in other places.

The story is this: from the age of 12 to 15 my mother had a sexual relationship with a much older man – her riding instructor, a man I’ll call the Horseman.