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‘When I read my sister’s stories I think, that’s not what it was like!’: Esther Freud on the perils of writing about family

The Hideous Kinky author has always drawn inspiration from her own experiences. Now her sister Bella is writing her own version of their childhood. Does fact or fiction come closer to the truth, she asksI’m four and I’m pretending to be dead. I’ve been lying here behind the sofa, and I’m hoping I’ll be missed, but more than that I’m hoping it will make a story. The story of the games I like to play, and how I profess to remember my past lives. It is 1967, a few months before we set off for Morocco – my mother, my sister Bella and I – travelling overland by van, taking the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier, breaking down on the road to Marrakech. From then on everything becomes a story. The camel festival we visit, the path into the hills so steep that Bella and I are packed into saddlebags while the donkeys’ hooves skitter and slip. I can’t remember later whether it is a camel that is sacrificed when we reach the top, or a chicken. But either way I keep the description ...


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