Some of these are downers and others not

[oursin]

Actually, I can't find that the article by Molly-Jong Fast in today's Guardian Saturday is currently online, alas - clearly she had a sad and distressing childhood, even if I was tempted, and probably not the only one to be so tempted, to murmur, apologies to P Larkin, 'they zipless fuck you up...', the abrupt dismissal of her nanny, her only secure attachment figure, when Erica J suddenly remarried (again) was particularly harsh, I thought. No wonder she had problems.

And really, even if she does make a point of how relatively privileged she was, that doesn't actually ameliorate how badly she was treated.

Only the other day there was an obituary of the psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, who wrote Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the “Privileged” Child.

***

Another rather traumatic parenting story, though this is down to the hospitals: BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.:

[V]ery gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.
"The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife," says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.
"It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well."
It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.
To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby's name, mother's name, the date and time of birth, and the baby's weight.
"Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen"

Plus, this was the era of the baby boom, one imagines maternity wards may have been a bit swamped....

***

A different sort of misattribution: The furniture fraud who hoodwinked the Palace of Versailles:

[T]his assortment of royal chairs would become embroiled in a national scandal that would rock the French antiques world, bringing the trade into disrepute.
The reason? The chairs were in fact all fakes.
The scandal saw one of France's leading antiques experts, Georges "Bill" Pallot, and award-winning cabinetmaker, Bruno Desnoues, put on trial on charges of fraud and money laundering following a nine-year investigation.
....
Speaking in court in March, Mr Pallot said the scheme started as a "joke" with Mr Desnoues in 2007 to see if they could replicate an armchair they were already working on restoring, that once belonged to Madame du Barry.
Masters of their crafts, they managed the feat, convincing other experts that it was a chair from the period.

***

I am really given a little hope for an anti-Mybug tendency among the masculine persuasion: A Man writes in 'the issue is not whether men are being published, but whether they are reading – and being supported to develop emotional lives that fiction can help foster'

While Geoff Dyer in The Books of [His] Life goes in hard with Beatrix Potter as early memory, Elizabeth Taylor as late-life discovery, and Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets as

One of those perennially bubbling-under modern classics – too good for the Championship, unable to sustain a place in the Premier league – which turns out to be way better than some of the canonical stalwarts permanently installed in the top flight.

Okay, I mark him down a bit for the macho ' I don’t go to books for comfort', but still, not bad for a bloke, eh.

Comments

[brokenallbroken]

Ah, that's a pity MJ-F's interview isn't online. I consider her YouTube channel essential viewing. I really need to order her book.

[rydra_wong]

It is now online:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jun/08/erica-jong-child-molly-jong-fast-growing-up

[oursin]

Thanks - weird that it's only now online.

[rydra_wong]

Yes, I vaguely wondered if there was some sort of deliberate rule that some things appear in the print edition first and then go up online with a time-lag.

[brokenallbroken]

Brilliant! Thank you!

[gwynnega]

I just finished the Jong-Fast memoir. It's compulsively readable, and I feel for her, but it needed editing, and it was a bit weird to me that Jong-Fast keeps dismissing Jong as a writer while also saying she's never read her books. (I understand her reasons for not wanting to read them, however.)

[oursin]

Jong's books got pretty batshit as I recall - not so much autofiction as Mary-Suey? at least the ones that were posing as historical fiction.

There's also one which must have been based on stuff going on in Jong's own life at the time which was dire, which I recall as having in it a nanny who was dangerously neglectful of the Molly J-F infant character, which was downright mean if the actual nanny was her only point of stability.

[gwynnega]

I found Jong's books basically unreadable starting with Serenissima, though I did like her later book on Henry Miller. But her early poetry meant a lot to me (i.e., the stuff she wrote before she was famous), and Fanny is very good (or, at least, I liked it a lot at the time).

[em_h]

I was easily identifiable in the maternity ward because I screamed constantly. No other parent would have wanted me.

[perennialanna]

The nursery system was in operation in 1979 in Guildford, along with a ten day stay postpartum. Though they were tagging both babies and cots by then (my mother kept both tags when she was finally allowed to take me home. I still have them. The cot tag advertised Cow & Gate formula).

[hunningham]

One of Princess Margaret's Ladies-in-Waiting wrote a memoir - it wasn't meant to be a tell-all expose, but in it she said that her husband (Lord someone) used to dismiss the nannies or other staff if any of the children sounded signs of being 'too attached'. The children stayed in the country with the nanny while parents lived in London, so they surely didn't get a chance to get too attached to their parents. Lady whosit thought this all very normal. How to fuck your kids up in a few easy steps.

[antisoppist]

The Gift on radio 4 and BBC sounds is a great series about dealing with the family revelations that turn up from "fun" DNA testing. There was a swapped baby one where the non-biological daughter seemed to get a very raw deal from the family all excited about their new sister and wanting to make up for the more deprived life she had had. It was the brother who had had the test as a present.