What We Remember, What We Forget by Siobhan Harvey

This is not an easy read, but it is a very rewarding one. The subject matter is disturbing, but the skill of the author’s prose keeps you turning the pages. The prologue and early chapters detail Siobhan Harvey’s childhood in the UK and the emotional and physical abuse that she suffered at the hands of her parents.

The framework that Harvey takes for the structure of the book is inspired by a Harvard professor of psychology, Daniel L. Schacter, who said that there are three stages to retaining a memory: encoding, storage and retrieval. These are the section headings, and under each are three different chapters in which Harvey chronicles a life which has carried a number of burdens. It is not all about childhood memories, but develops into a longer narrative in which Harvey has to struggle with having a neurodivergent child of her own. It is in many ways heartbreaking to read what schools say they will do to help a child develop, and how they simply fail to cater for the needs of anyone who is slightly different. Not only do they fail to accommodate and nurture such a person, but they also fail to protect them.

As I said at the beginning, this is not an easy read. It is hard for most of us to understand how parents can be cruel to their own children. Harvey does not name names, but refers to her mother and father as Mr Y and Mrs Y. This makes them impersonal, but also somehow renders them more sinister, detached from the realities of childhood, and especially from someone that you might call mum or mummy. A childhood of being blamed for everything, ‘It was your fault, as usual’, being a familiar refrain, takes a toll, and makes a person feel worthless. When, as a girl, she did well at school, rather than being praised, it was ‘You think you’re better than the rest of us, don’t you?’. As an example of both the abusive treatment and at the same time the brilliance of the writing, this excerpt would be hard to beat:

‘I was seventeen years old when Mr Y told me no one would ever love me.

‘No one will ever love you,’ he said. Offered with that deep delivery of his, as if something belonging to darkness – or something coupled to it, like a night-terror – was trapped in his throat.

Trapped in my memory also, the day I came out.

That’s all it took for the room in which we stood to narrow like his eyes.’

The first chapter of ‘Encoding’ is called ‘A Jigsaw of Broken Pieces’, a wonderful device for bringing together fragments of memory. In all there are fourteen pieces and an end piece. Let me quote the end piece:

‘My dilemma is resolved. Memories, articles and my associated thoughts, I see now, can be sequenced as a creative work that might build a picture of something resonant for the present. In doing so, in their own small way, my memories might offer testimony, one of the many needed to enable us as a global community to remember that our differences over identity are longstanding, divisive and, therein, in need of resolving still.’

At one point Harvey looks back at her childhood and tries to rationalise what happened:

‘How to explain Mr and Mrs Y’s brutal behaviour, and the unspoken code they shared that endorsed and prolonged it?

Like many people who commit domestic violence against children, Mr and Mrs Y were the victims of abuse, physically and socially, when they were children. They grew up during the postwar decades when violence against children was a commonplace part of family life.

Mr Y spoke blithely, if infrequently, about his stepfather taking the slipper and leather belt to him for the most minor of transgressions. While, in Mrs Y’s household of threadbare hand-me-downs, there was never enough to feed eleven young mouths, and parental aggression accompanied complaints of hunger and sibling brawls.

…

Mr and Mrs Y’s childhoods might have led them to view violence as routine. The economic hardship they endured as parents might have exacerbated their anxiety and anger. But in adulthood, they made the choice to reinflict their abusive childhoods upon their offspring. As such, there are no excuses for their behaviour.’  

Siobhan Harvey is best known as a poet, and two of her collections (also published by OUP), called Ghosts and Cloudboy, contain her poetic response to some of the issues which are covered in longer essay form here. Cloudboy is the name that she gives to her son in this book, born from his love of looking up into the sky and watching the cloud shapes that form there. Harvey herself became the ‘Cloudmother’ and her memories of motherhood in this book are at times as hard to read as her own childhood memories.

The education system is, by design, made to encompass a broad spectrum of children and squeeze them into a rigid set of outcomes – rather like a tube of toothpaste with a narrow stream emerging from the much broader tube. When a child doesn’t fit that model, some schools simply do not have an alternative. Knowing her son was different, Harvey had him assessed by an educational psychologist who found him to fit into the top one percent academically but for social and emotional matters he scored less than 50 percent. This was one of the results:

‘The teacher’s initial openness to accepting Cloudboy’s divergent ways fades. Soon, another of his esoteric feats perplexes her. It’s associated with a self-portrait.

She makes me sit in a small seat while lecturing me about how a five year old’s ability to conventionally represent themselves is an educational and developmental milestone.

A second slips by before she conjures Cloudboy’s self-portrait from her bottom drawer. In doing so, I imagine her executing a difficult trick.

What I see before me is a white, puffy face and body; wings; black, beady eyes; marble wisps for legs and claws instead of toes.

I can’t help but look upon it with a mother’s eyes. See its imagination, its creative defiance.

But to the teacher, it’s tenuous and fake.

‘A wilful rejection of rules every other child has followed,’ she declares. Then turning to a wall decorated with safe depictions, she adds, ‘No, I can’t … I won’t hang this there.’

There are many more examples of failures to understand by both teachers and schools, and failures to protect the boy from bullying by other children who also didn’t understand. But the good news is, there is happiness at the end, there is a young man who emerges from all this to find his own way. There is also, in a chapter called “Another coming out’ the moment when her son confesses his orientation, which is left poignantly as ‘I want you to know, I’m…’ That too brings about a reflection:

‘Now, I place my memory of my coming out over my memory of our son’s coming out. They fuse, a single replication. Child and mother as one. Both revealing ourselves in the same way; apart from a slight shift. For two generations of parents fail to replicate themselves. One tells us we will be forever loveless; the other tells us we will be forever loved.’

This is an excellent book, hard to read, but so worthwhile. There is no question why it was a category winner in the 2025 Memoir Price for Books in the USA and Highly Commended in the Bridport Memoir Award in 2024 in the UK.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Otago University Press