“So we’re breaking into a National Trust property full of horny deer in the dark.” Anthony gives Jack a look.
“It’s for poetry,” he says.
Can a work of memoir also be a work of poetry? Yes, I’d argue—and not only if it’s written by a poet, as is the case with Heather Christle’s In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir With Appearances by Virginia Woolf. Like a vivid poem, memoir can pursue elusive truths through image and resonance. Often this is the most approachable way into the mystery—or the only way. Some truths cannot be accessed directly. Some questions are hard to ask. Answers hide inside storms of trauma and beneath shrouds of time. You push toward them however you can.
With this memoir, Christle pushes herself literally to the limit. By the epilogue, she is hospitalized. Reading this book will hopefully not endanger your health, but it will push you as far as you let it take you.
Few questions are harder to ask than, “What happened between us?” Or this one: “Where were you?” This is the poetic project at the heart of the book: Christle’s search for a way to ask these impossible-seeming questions of her still-living mother.
I find it difficult to summarize Christle’s relationship with her mother, and to her credit, she never tries, either. It’s enough to say here that there is a beguiling, simultaneous intimacy and distance. A key difference is that while Christle is American, her mother grew up in England. Both women are devoted to documenting their lives. Christle has written and published multiple works of researched memoir—enough said there. Her mother is a diary-keeper, possesses an enormous collection of photo albums, and has a sharp memory. Yet there is so much unsaid, so much unrecognized about their shared pasts, and their shared but unshared experiences of trauma. As a reader, it feels as though their relationship has persisted in a kind of purgatory as Christle heads toward middle age, now with a child of her own.
A point of no return arrives. On a family trip back to England, Christle’s mother unexpectedly, and totally offhand, points in the direction of an alley, and discloses a childhood sexual assault. The story has eerie parallels to Christle’s own sexual assault—which also occurred in London—the details of which remain murky to her: she was never granted a full-faith accounting from the adults who were charged with her care. She’d never felt safe confronting her mother about her feelings of alienation and irresolution. She’d never been able to ask, “Where were you?”
Christle had never heard this story before. For a minute, as they walk past the spot where it happened, she focuses on consoling her mother. But then a memory surfaces—a teenage memory, from months after Christle’s assault, which carries with it a feeling of her own lack of consolation. She remembers how she’d finally been able to tell her mother: “I had had sex. I didn’t know what other words to use. It was the fastest way to say it.”
In a revelation, Christle remembers her mother deflecting the conversation back to herself, talking about a man “interfering” with her at a young age. Christle’s memory interferes with her own attempt to stay present with her mother. “I was angry that she was talking about herself, angry that I still needed her… Anger filled the space where connection could have formed.”
I think many people, even confronted with a moment this powerful, would find it difficult to recover from—would write off the connection as unrecoverable. There are certainly times in the book where I thought I could sense that Christle wanted to stop trying. But the book exists. As readers, we can see that Christle, whose narration and interiority and command of language, history, and imagery-rich memory carry us fluidly along, is equal parts compassionate and tenacious. She is a natural meaning-maker—a restless, relentless seeker. And we can also see that she has never stopped loving her mother.
Refusing to turn away, she digs in, ferociously, throwing herself into a quest to find out what really happened to her on that night in England, at a club called The Underworld. The quest sends her back and forth across the Atlantic during a pandemic, into a cramped closet where she conducts endless hours of literary and historical investigation—one of the more extreme forms of social distancing you’ll witness—and into the pages of her mother’s diary. And yes, eventually, it sends her trespassing onto the nighttime grounds of a country home once owned by the confidante and lover of literary icon Virginia Woolf.
Speaking of whom. As we accompany Christle on this deeply personal journey, she invites us inside her commendable and consuming Woolf obsession, which lends both Christle-as-psychological-spelunker and us-as-entranced-reader the comfort and safety of narrative and temporal distance; she uses Woolf, and Woolf’s England, to “perceive [her] mother indirectly, the way people will watch an eclipse through a pinhole viewer so the sun cannot burn their eyes.”
It’s not the reductive, whitewashed story of English history you find in taut chronological lists of kings and queens or in royal family fetishization rituals. Christle’s exploration of England adds its own layers of historical trauma to the story, as she reckons with the predations of late-stage empire which can’t help but infect Woolf’s mind and writing, and which remain present in Christle’s contemporary visits to the British Museum in London. The troubling reverberations of British theft and exploitation crash like rogue waves against the pristine shores of the England—her mother’s England—that the young Christle thought she knew.
For sure, this book is a heavy read. It’s also relatable and funny, and I treasured spending quality time with such an acute observer of the world and the mind. Christle isn’t afraid to let you laugh with her when she’s holed up a little too long in her research closet, when she’s communed with Virginia long enough to start hearing voices, or when she’s scampering blindly through a pack of rutting deer. And while the book’s subtitle smartly calls out to the legions of Woolf fans and literary Anglophiles out there, it’s a story that’s universal in its specificity.
Christle’s conclusion may not provide any easy answers, but with her parting words about her relationship with her mother, she sums up her reasons for persisting, and lays down a reminder for anyone else struggling to keep a flame burning:
“She is still alive. I am still alive.”
MEMOIR
In The Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf
By Heather Christle
Algonquin Books
Published April 15, 2025
