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Memoir

Surviving a Father

by Joy Hooton
May 2003, no. 251

Belonging: A memoir by Renée Goossens

ABC Books, $27.95 pb, 284 pp

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

Renée Goossens, born in 1940, is the youngest daughter of the composer and conductor Sir Eugene Goossens. Married three times, he had three daughters with Dorothy Millar, and two more with his second wife, and Renée’s mother, Janet Lewis. His third marriage, to Marjorie Foulkrod, was childless. It is characteristic of this memoir that Renée Goossens remarks early in the narrative that she never met one of her half-sisters and that it was decades before she met the other two. Her life seems to have been marked or scarred by a series of disappearances on the part of significant family members and by unexplained absences.

 


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Belonging: A memoir by Renée Goossens

ABC Books, $27.95 pb, 284 pp

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.


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