THE greatest LOVE

From pain to passion, author and commentator Clementine Ford’s new memoir explores her experiences with love in its many forms. Here, she writes about the loss of her adored mother and the intensity of the bond between parent and child

When we were children, my siblings and I used to sleep with words under our pillows. It was something our mother taught us, slipping books beneath our heads before turning out the light. “This way,” she’d tell us, “the stories will find their way into your dreams.”

For years, I thought this was where everyone kept their books at night. I didn’t realise it was a practice peculiar to our family, or that there were some people who didn’t read books at all. We had grown up surrounded by books, and my mother’s tastes varied wildly; she read everything from the collected works of Shakespeare to the crime novels of Ruth Rendell. She devoured books on politics and history, and was able to speak on these matters with an authority and confidence that belied her lack of a formal education.

After her death from bile duct cancer at the age of 58, my siblings and I took turns rifling through her library. Some of the books were older than us, older even than her marriage to our father, which was as old as we’d ever really let ourselves think of her, women’s lives so often being assumed to begin when they merge with a man’s. But as we pored through her collection, we understood something we’d always skipped over before.

These stories belonged to a different woman from the one we knew and loved. They belonged to a secret woman, the one who had signed her name Luciana Gouveia in blue ink in the top right-hand corner of the title page. These were the books she’d read when she was our age, younger even, dreaming of a world beyond her own and a life she might still get to live, even though it sometimes seemed to keep moving further out of reach.