First person: Miranda Seymour on her post memoir life
My father died, aged 73, in 1994. The last thought in my mind, back then, was that I would ever want to write about him. Talking about him was another matter: the patience of my friends was tested to the limits by stories of the man who had always been - who, devastatingly, still is - the most powerful presence in my life.
I thought about him, I dreamed about him, I struggled - having inherited the sizable country house the survival of which he had dedicated himself to with energy and passion - to carry on his task. I did not, however, want to write a book about him.
I had two reasons to be reluctant. One was that while the opening years of my father's life, given his generation and his background, seemed conventional - loveless boy forms a passion for his childless uncle's old-fashioned house and sacrifices everything to obtaining and defending it - the later decades exposed a different man.
In his 50s, my father reinvented himself as a high-speed motorbike rider. Jaguars and sporty MGs gave way, after this mid-life epiphany, to Laverdas, Nortons and Ducatis. A lack of technical skill, coupled with a strong dislike of solitude, sent him searching for pillion riders. In Robbie, a burly teenager from south London, my father found the ideal companion - and the love of his life. Robbie became part of a menage a trois in which my mother, who made no comment on her altered circumstances, became cook and housekeeper to two leather-clad tearabouts. The situation was maintained until 1993 when, just before Christmas, Robbie, aged 33, blew his brains out with my father's shotgun. My father, broken in spirit by the sudden loss of his friend, died of pancreatic cancer just five months after Robbie's suicide.
The obvious reason not to write anything down, then, was that I would be betraying the family code of honour, by which disturbing secrets can be whispered - and even spread - but never set down in print. ("There are so many versions of how things were," my brother commented, when I first mooted the possibility of writing what became In My Father's House. "But the published version is all that will be believed. And what on Earth would you do about our mother?")
What indeed? My brother had identified the more powerful argument for silence. Our mother still lived with me in our family house. She had no plans to leave; I felt no wish for her to depart. How, given this situation, could I even consider publishing intimate revelations about my family? The plans for a memoir were shelved.
In 2003, following 14 years of marriage, my husband left me. Back at the big house, alone with my mother, I shrank from discussing my failed marriage, or my dread of a lonely future. She, however, was ready at last to speak about her complicated relationship with my father. Carefully, we began to talk.
Sitting down to supper with her, just the two of us, night after night, I began to understand how well she had kept things from me. Struck by the quiet acuteness of her observations, I winced at my own failure to defend her from hurt. (The easy option had always been to take my father's side as he mocked and criticised his wife - her hair, her clothes, her manner, even.) Too busy pitying myself, as back then I was subjected to the same unforgiving treatment, I had given no thought to her sufferings. Now, sitting up late over our cosy kitchen suppers, I realised how little I had ever known my mother - and how much she could tell me.
It's a strange thing to write about other people for a profession (I've published four biographies) and then to discover you understand nothing about your own closest kin. The woman who became my chief companion for the next three years before I married again in 2006 was, as I gradually discerned, a stranger to me. My father, an unusually dominant personality, had always stood at the centre of our family circle. Volatile, witty and imperious, he called the tune to which his minions danced. I, who inherited his own hot temper, stepped out of line from time to time, flew at him, shouted back, made my anger known. My mother, from the earliest years of her married life, adopted the opposite tactic. Silence and retreat were the stratagems she chose for her survival. When voices rose, she looked away. When pressure built, she wandered out into the garden.
"I was weak," my mother said during one of our long discussions. I disagreed. Finally aware of how much unhappiness she had endured, how much it had cost her to pretend that all was well, I admired her dignity, her old-fashioned decency. I told her - and meant it - that she had been both loyal and brave.
It was at that point I knew I had found my story's heroine - and a voice for my own conscience. The only way to justify the act of betrayal I was about to make was to give my mother a platform in the memoir from which to speak out against me, her daughter.
There were moments of sharp regret in our three years of retrospective discussions. (Why had I always chosen to take my father's side against her?) But there were also moments of sweet compensation. As we both recalled, my father had deplored his wife's lack of humour. Disinterring the letters my mother had written my father during their engagement, I was enchanted to discover a young woman whose capacity for banter and mirth shone out of the yellowing pages. I read them back to her; across the kitchen table, I watched her face.
"Did I say that?" Her cheeks glowed pink as a girl's. "Did I really? Good grief! How did I dare?"
The conversations were both engrossing and chastening. We spoke, for the first time, as equals; forgetting she was my mother I rediscovered her as my friend. However, our new intimacy was not close enough for me to trust her with the text of my unfinished book. Fearful of her reaction, I hid it from view. I kept to myself the fact that its writing had conjured back into life all the unhappiness of the past.
"I keep dreaming about him," my mother announced on regular occasions. "He always looks so angry. I don't know why."
She dreamed, and my nightmares echoed hers. I saw my father glaring through my window while I lay in bed. I watched his fists try to break through the glazed surface of the garden lake, where Robbie used to fish, while the figure of my father stretched out at his side. I saw him seated at the head of the family table, back in control, back for ever more. A bad conscience - my own - was evidently at work. It couldn't be helped. The book was almost completed.
On the day I handed my mother the published volume, she asked for time to read it alone, without interruption. She took it into her room and closed the door. The following morning, she told me I'd made mistakes. Sick with dismay, I asked her to identify the errors.
"First of all," she announced, her face severe, "I never had freckles. And I don't know what made you say my nail varnish is always chipped. Look!"
The hand she held out presented five bright-pink moons and not a chip in sight.
Later, my mother admitted to my husband that she had needed a double whisky to help her through that first reading. She made no such confession to me; loyalty, as always, triumphed. I had no inkling, back then, of her real feelings. I still don't. She says, kindly, what she senses I most want to hear.
Yet late in widowhood my mother has recovered the zest of an earlier, more vibrant self. My father's subdued consort of former years would not recognise herself in the outspoken and unpredictable old lady of today: colourful in costume, dazzling in footwear, it delights her to see the effect she can achieve through tendering subversive remarks. Nowadays, my mother follows the career of Johnny Depp with eager interest and examines the pages of Heat and Grazia with a keen eye for a muscular torso. Yesterday, she mentioned her wish to winter in Marrakech. When a London mugger tried to snatch her bag, my mother swung out and sent him flying. Back at the house, we cheered.
I can't tell how much this upsurge of spirit has to do with the laying of ghosts, but my mother declares that the book has proved cathartic. My father, on the rare occasions that he still visits her dreams, wears an approving smile. She has ceased to question what he would say about our having transformed his venerated home into a venue for weddings and corporate events. My friends say she looks younger and happier than she has for years.
I thought, when I began to write this most difficult of my books, that it would act for me, too, as a form of exorcism. I was wrong. How could I hope living in this house - over which my father presided for almost 50 years - that a mere book could banish him? "God send I never have to leave for ever," he wrote when he was 21. He's here, still. My mother's nights have grown quiet. My own dreams are worse than before. I see beds threatened by fire, sheets laden with ancient sea-rocks, the garden lake surrounded by small, watchful figures, keeping vigil. All these fragments originate in and issue from the pages of my own published account of our troubled home. That knowledge doesn't help.
"It's not so bad as you think," a Jungian therapist reassures me when, learning of her profession, I admit to despair. Soothing me, she interprets the images of my dreams. A lake represents the subconscious; the smouldering bed is not sinister, since no blaze breaks out; the watchful figures at the water's edge are attendant aspects of myself, not evil strangers. I'm less comforted when she warns me to expect no moment of closure, no blissful catharsis.
I do (on that point) believe her. Writing and talking about past experiences has brought my mother and I much closer. Old and painful memories of our former life, however, cannot be entirely effaced. Not while, as sharers in the profound attachment that he felt for the place, the two of us continue to reside within the deceptively mellow brick walls of my father's house.
· In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love by Miranda Seymour is published by Simon & Schuster, priced £7.99. To order a copy for £7.99 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875