When she turned ninety, my mother sprang a final surprise on us. She started speaking in the voice of a stranger.
Peter’s mother is dying. Born in England and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister’s London apartment, her accent having overnight become posher than the Queen’s.
Unsentimental, fiercely stubborn and at times hilarious, she finally drops her guard, losing all fear of conflict to become the family provocateur. While confronting the revelations of what his family was – and wasn’t – and the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, Peter also mourns the ending of his long marriage.
At this point of rupture and healing, Peter reflects on his family’s legacy of exile and their tenuous hold on home.
In Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars, Peter Godwin considers, with both tenderness and candour, the life of émigrés, exiles and refugees, and grieves the many losses that make life both magnificent and unbearable. He brings us into the spaces which make us question, suffer and celebrate the relationships we have among family and friends, and the healing of our own wounds.
“In this moving new memoir Peter Godwin opens up a vein of loss and bewilderment. It is a deeply vulnerable and affecting portrait of a man soldering his disintegrating world with words, defying the ground shifting beneath him.” — Michele Magwood
