Well, the exciting news is that I’ve written a book! It’s in my non-therapist name, Rosanna Moseley Gore, but it’s still me.
It’s not about being a therapist, but it does in some way explain the reasons that led me to become one.
It’s called Songs from the Suitcase: Inhabiting an Inheritance, and this is what the book blurb says:
Home life in suburban London in the 1960s and 1970s for Rosanna Moseley Gore was both ‘normal’ and quite the opposite. With a German Jewish father who had escaped Nazi Berlin on a Kindertransport in 1939, a Russian mother who was born in Manchuria, and a beloved Russian grandmother who fled her homeland during the post-revolution civil war, she grew up feeling legally British but never English. Driving holidays in Europe were normal, friends and family with strong accents were normal, baked beans and rice pudding were not.
When her parents died in 2015 and 2017, and the huge family archive of letters, photographs and documents found its way back to her, memories of childhood came rushing back. Alongside those memories came also a growing awareness of how her family background, the inherited gifts and inherited traumas, had moulded the way she thinks, feels and acts.
This is more than a family story. It is a story of individuals and of how huge world events act upon them. The ‘songs’ resonate as much now as they did when they were first stashed away in the suitcase.
“This is a gem of a memoir; sparkling, multifaceted, and full of depth and colour. At once a memorial and a meditation, it celebrates one unique family, and the power of ties that bind.” Heidi Thomas, screenwriter.
You can order your copy here. I will be making donations out of any profit made from sales to the charity Safe Passage, which campaigns to reunite child refugees with loved ones.