In the rhododendrons

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When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to re-write and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with. On a recent visit to Kew Gardens, Heather Christle's mother revealed a shocking secret from her past - she had been sexually assaulted as a young girl growing up in London, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather's own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager. Her British mother's revelation - a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship - propels Christle down a deep and destabilising rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother's past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England's sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Show more