I bought a lot of memoirs on my vacation this summer and realized when I got home how many are about fraught mother-daughter relationships. I guess I’m working through something, or else I just like reading about dramatic psychological family structures. Either way, Diamonds at the Lost and Found fits in the template of the troubled mother and the put-upon daughter who’s dragged in her wake. This book takes a nested narrative format, where Aspinall simultaneously tells the story of her childhood and adolescence being dragged around the world while her mother searches desperately for a rich man to marry, and the story of her mother’s life as told by her and by friends and family. We get to uncover her mother’s past at the same time as Aspinall does, which was an effective and well paced way of exploring her history. I also liked the use of photos throughout, although I could have used a few more.
Aspinall is a good writer and the book moves along at a good clip. Her mother Audrey had such a dramatic life and one of such constant momentum and event that it would have been hard to write a boring book about her. You can tell how much she loves her and how she has come to a place of real forgiveness and admiration for Audrey’s spirit. I will say that the last few chapters felt like they rushed through that arc and I was left not feeling as forgiving. Personally the psychological upheaval and complete neglect of education would have left me more angry, but I know that I will hold a grudge forever and this was not my memoir. I just think that there seemed to be more to unpack here about the consequences and potential feelings left over.
Aspinall starts basically running away from home at 13 and has a miscarriage and an abortion before she’s 15, after which she is saved by her stepfather’s deep kindness and decision to tutor her so she can get her O-Levels and get into Oxford, which she does manage to do. Her mother recedes into the background a bit at this point in the book, left to complain that Aspinall will become a bluestocking and never get a husband this way. I really found this part of the book kind of shocking in how desperately her mother wants her to remain enmeshed and dependent on men, while also glossing over the predatory relationships with older men that her daughter is having. At the end of the book, Aspinall writes that “a harum-scarum life is no bad thing for a child. Having nothing to do, and a few books, will supply most of what we need for a vivid imaginative life and interesting self-education.” But her mother only ever owned two books, her stepfather had to come in and give her intense tutoring because she hadn’t really ever gone to school, and her descriptions of her childhood up until Peter enters the scene are almost relentlessly miserable. I felt like she was trying to compress what must have been a lot of internal forgiveness work into a short span of the text, but at that point I’d read 200+ pages of child neglect and it was hard for me to do a sudden turnaround on my opinion of her mother and to think that this was a good way to raise a child. Audrey was clearly a very magnetic and exciting person to be around, but I didn’t really buy that this was as non-destructive a way to raise a child as Aspinall wants me to think. I just don’t think being trained by age 8 to pick up men for your mom in hotel bars is probably good for you!
Warnings for: child neglect, child abuse (physical, sexual [not graphic detail, referenced obliquely by her mom], emotional), pregnancy at 14 that results in miscarriage, abortion at 15, death of a father
