All parents have secrets from their children, the most audacious of which is that they were actually alive before having them. My mother turned out to have more secrets than most, and they were Secrets with a capital S, almost comically lurid against the backdrop of our lives in a village in Buckinghamshire. But even if she'd had an uneventful existence prior to my birth, it would have been no less implausible to me.
The funny thing is that she couldn't keep a secret to save her life. As a child, I knew lots of things I wasn't supposed to, like which of my dad's colleagues were rumoured to be having affairs. I knew what my twelve plus results were before being officially told by the school. When I was mentioned, somewhat surprisingly, in the will of an old friend of the family, my mother was sworn to secrecy and managed to hold out from me for about a week.
We talked about everything, except for the things we didn't talk about, and while this was largely my mother's decision, it also rested on a profound lack of interest emanating from me. This was partly because I sensed there was something disagreeable there, but mainly because it seemed so remote. Her life before me was a rumour I didn't believe in.
All of this changed when she died. As I wrote in the book, the day after her death, I had the sensation of a van pulling up outside my house and of men unloading luggage onto the pavement.
"Oi," I said. "Hang on a minute, none of that's mine."
"Sorry, love," said the man. “Someone has to have it."
"OK," I said. (It was quite an elaborate fantasy). "Bring it in."
When a parent dies, your relationship with their history changes; it becomes your history, and you have a choice either to take it on or let it follow them into oblivion. But even without the impetus of a death, most of us reach a stage - probably on passing the age our parents were when they had us – when it suddenly becomes clear: that our experiences of personhood are no different to theirs. It's not the possibility of their deaths that strikes us in this moment, but of our own. Not to be morbid, but oh God: it is all so fleeting and so fragile.
Anyway, for all the emphasis put on transparency and confronting things these days, there is something to be said for keeping the space around your kids free enough of baggage to preserve their necessary delusion: that you, their parent, are immutable. Figuring out that you're not is for later, much later, perhaps the last stage of becoming an adult.
My mother couldn't keep a secret to save her life, but saving my life was another matter. And so she did.