Emma Kennedy's moving chat at Literature Festival explores complex relationship with mother
Sometimes, it takes a while to get behind the way a person was to understand who they really were.
Emma Kennedy found this was the case with her mother Brenda, with whom she had a complicated relationship - and she says she only fully understood what her mother was going through following her death.
The writer, actress and presenter was appearing at the Georgian Rooms in Wolverhampton Art Gallery on Sunday to speak about her new book 'Letters from Brenda', a book she said she felt she had to write after the events following her mother's death.
She said the discovery in her parents' old home of 75 letters written by Brenda had opened up on the woman Brenda was - a woman who, Emma admits, she only knew bits about.
In a chat with presenter Mark Cartwright that was at times very moving, but also very funny, Emma opened up about her mother's mental illness, saying that she could be Good Brenda and Bad Brenda, equating her to a horse that could be docile, then suddenly go wild.
Brenda, according to Emma, had lived a complex life, having tried to commit suicide when she was 11, but surviving and being told to "go round to her aunt's house for a piece of cake".
She said it was symptomatic of the time that Brenda had hidden her illness as - in the early 1960s, she feared she would have been sectioned or institutionalised, so kept it to herself.
The conversation covered a lot of ground over Emma's life with her mother, including a story of how proud Brenda was to say "my daughter, the lawyer", only to be dismayed to find Emma had left the profession to go into TV, although Emma said this dismay ended when she introduced her to Rory Bremner.
It was very eye-opening to see Emma speaking candidly about her mother's illness and the effect it had on her relationship with her, saying that as a child, she was scared, while in her 20s, she resented her, but understood it in her 30s.
What was clear was that despite everything that had gone on, Emma still loved and missed her mother, saying that Good Brenda had such lovely energy, with one story about her showing her standing in bookshops near Emma's release 'The Tent, The Bucket and Me' and offering to sign copies, as she was featured in it.
Emma said the book was about giving a sense of who Brenda was through the letters, not just her own interpretation, and said it had been almost a weight off to hear from a clinical psychiatrist what Brenda had suffered, something she said people will have to read the book to find out.
Letters from Brenda is available to buy at waterstones.com/book/letters-from-brenda/emma-kennedy/9781529371970 and other book retailers.
