Unforgetting

This memoir is the story of my extraordinary childhood and its effects on my adult life. It covers eight early years living in a large Victorian house with my younger siblings, dominated and manipulated by a psychotic nanny who was addicted to opioids. She abused us physically, mentally, and sexually, but we were so entirely in thrall to her that we were unable to tell our parents what was going on under their noses while they unknowingly pursued their illustrious careers – until my brother and I seized an opportunity to break out of our virtual prison.

I then describe how, after the nanny’s banishment, we came slowly to know our parents as human beings, rather than the unreachable gods we had supposed them to be. I explore my father’s work and its impact on New Zealand society; document my discovery, much later in my life, that he was gay; and interrogate my mother's complexities, my thorny relationship with her, and the reasons why it was so difficult.

My title, Unforgetting, reflects my discovery that I had been suffering from dissociative amnesia throughout my adult life – as had my siblings. Writing this memoir has served as a process whereby I reviewed my memories of a traumatic childhood and achieved a kind of closure.