Bøker av Emma Brockes

Parenting in each other's general direction?Brockes navigates these decisions against a background of uninvited opinion, scolding, and the general hysteria that always accompanies a woman's decision to have (or not have) children.

Emma Brockes is thirty-seven, lives alone, and wants children. And that's just the beginning - there are a million choices to make when taking the untraditional route to motherhood. With generous heart and humour, Panic & Joy examines essential questions about motherhood and the modern family.

When Emma Brockes was ten years old, her mother said 'One day I will tell you the story of my life and you will be amazed.' Growing up in a tranquil English village, Emma knew very little of her mother's life before her. She knew Paula had grown up in South Africa and had seven siblings. She had been told stories about deadly snakes and hailstones the size of golf balls. There was mention, once, of a trial. But most of the past was a mystery. When her mother dies of cancer, Emma - by then a successful journalist at the Guardian - is free to investigate the untold story. Her search begins in the Colindale library but then takes her to South Africa, to the extended family she has never met and their accounts of a childhood so different to her own.She encounters versions of the life her mother chose to leave behind - and realises what a gift her mother gave her.Part investigation, part travelogue, part elegy, She Left Me the Gun is a gripping, funny and clear-eyed account of a writer's search for her mother's story.

Film musicals: you either love them or they make you want to kill yourself slowly with plastic cutlery. Nothing has the power to lift your heart or turn your stomach like Howard Keel in fake sideburns singing 'Bless Your Beautiful Hide' or Julie Andrews singing... well, just about anything.