Download She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me AudioBook Free
"One day I am going to tell you the storyline of my life," offers Emma Brockes' mother, "and you'll be impressed." Despite her mother's stories of the rustic youth in South Africa and bohemian years in London, Brockes grew up realizing that some crucial pieces of the past were still left unspoken. A secret to her friends and family, Brockes' mother, Paula, was glamorous, no-nonsense, and totally out of place in their quaint English village. What compelled her to emigrate to Great britain was never described, nor what empowered her huge strengths and strange fears. Seeking to unearth the reality after Paula's loss of life, Brockes begins a dangerous journey in to the land - and the life - her mother fled from years before. She Kept Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me is a tale of true change, the storyline of a woman who reinvented herself so completely that her past life appeared to simply vanish - and of a daughter who transcends her mother's fears and reclaims an empty history. Brockes soon learns that Paula's daddy was a drunk megalomaniac who terrorized Paula and her seven half-siblings for years. He is eventually taken to judge and vindicated of most charges - however, not before Paula shoots him five times, and does not wipe out him. She catalogs passage to London, never to return. She Kept Me the Gun provides Brockes to South Africa to meet her seven aunts and uncles, to ponder their stories against her mother's silences, and also to understand one of the world's most beautiful yet bloody countries. Brockes learns of the violent pathologies and racial propaganda where her grandfather was inculcated, recognizes the mine shafts and train yards where he proved helpful as an itinerant auto mechanic, and discovers buried in federal archives the startling court records that prove he was secretly imprisoned for murder years before he first wedded. An extraordinary work of internal suspense and forensic memoir, She Kept Me the Gun chronicles Brockes' attempts to walk the blade edge between understanding her mother's unspeakable traumas and embracing the happiness she chose for herself and her daughter.
