A poet’s memoir of family, trauma, and Virginia Woolf pulses with feeling and intelligenceLike most kids, Heather Christle was drilled about “stranger danger”. Like some, she had a family codeword designed to show that an adult picking them up from school when her mother was busy could be trusted. But, in her American home town in the 1980s, no other kid’s word was a bygone British sweet. And so “Dolly Mixture” joins the growing list of things learned from her English mother that Christle, looking back, finds out of place. Things such as dining etiquette, cardigans, M&S outfits, margarine. But also bigger stuff: beliefs and behaviours. Assumptions. Silence. Shame.With her mother in her 70s and their relationship strained, Christle, a poet and academic, embarks on a quest for new understanding – of her mother, of “Englishness”, and of herself. In a memoir that pulses with feeling and intelligence, she excavates the past to expose difficult truths. As she proved with her acclaimed...