Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father's House

#229
Title: Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father's House
Author: Miranda Seymour
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2007
284 pages

I read this after reading some fairly negative reviews, so I was pleased to enjoy it. Seymour's memoir stresses the "father" of her subtitle more than the "house," though the house plays a great role in both their lives. While there are some passages evoking the house directly through Seymour's eyes, her perceptions, as well as the reader's, are heavily filtered through her father's. Some reviewers have summed the book up as, essentially, "Boo hoo, I'm rich but I hate my father!" This is an extremely superficial reading of a much more complex narrative. Seymour uses Catullus's pithy "I love and I hate" (odi et amo)  throughout to structure her account of many facets of her relationship with her father: Both extremes of her sentiment toward him, the poles of her certainty and doubt, her own negative self-regard, and other intertwined aspects of this relationship. Seymour's mother functions as a corrective narrator (though one presumes not always an accurate one), consistently serving up the refrain that Seymour is misunderstanding, or nursing old grievances, or airing the dirty linens. This device works well to allow Seymour to demonstrate how she questions her own interpretations and struggles to understand the intersecting and diverging truths of her own and her mother's experiences of their family history. This includes their reluctance to speak about whether her father had affairs with young men.

As to her father himself, I do wonder whether he had a temporal lobe disorder (which might account for his pedantry, his social difficulties, his often humorless and emotionally wounded interactions, the heightened importance and meaning with which he imbues some aspects of the world, and his obsessiveness). Seymour does not describe her father throwing tantrums as a child, but does highlight his irritability and great lability and anger as an adult; this description makes me wonder whether the concussion he suffered during his military service caused a closed-head brain injury that exacerbated his earlier difficulties. Just a speculation based on Seymour's descriptions.

For two additional accounts by children of parents passionately emotionally invested in an old house (as well as the financial and legal tangles of ownership and inheritance) intertwined with narratives about homosexuality and family secrets, read Nigel Nicholson's Portrait of a Marriage on his parents, Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West, and Alison Bechdel's graphic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.