I'm detecting a theme.....

I roared through Julian Barnes' book Talking it Over, then switched back to Peter Robinson's Sleeping in the Ground.  Both continue the themes of remembrance and regret, and how the remembrances of our past can distort our present, and our future.  (Both good books, by the way.  I will be reading more Julian Barnes for sure when I get back.) 

I don't have many memories.  My family was the poster child for dysfunctional families.  No, that's not fair to say.  There was not much violence (and certainly none directed against me), and certainly no hunger or any other serious physical deprivation (unless you count no furniture but a Steinway baby grand in the living room as physical deprivation).  But my step-mother hated my father, and I think the feeling was mutual.  There was constant yelling, and constant mutual degradation.  My early decision not to have children was one of the fall-outs.  Another is, I am beginning to realize, the repression of all of the memories of my childhood.  I do remember my father bemoaning his bad memory, so maybe some of it is genetic, but I can't help but think.......

It does add to my feeling of rootlessness though, no ties to the past or to the future....