In her debut memoir, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf, poet Heather Christle reckons with her youth, her troubled relationship with her English mother and the ups and downs of early midlife, through the lens of the life and works of Virginia Woolf.
Christle grew up in New Hampshire with an English mother and American father. In 2018, now married with a child, Christle visited London with her mother and sister, and as they strolled through a suburban London neighborhood, Christle’s mother pointed down an alley, saying this was the place she’d been molested as a girl. This unexpected revelation marked the beginning of Christle’s attempt to come to terms with an incident from her own youth that reverberated into adulthood: At 14, Christle was sexually assaulted outside a London bar. At the time, she felt abandoned by her mother, who seemed not to care, and unprotected by the older cousins who’d taken her out drinking that night.
Over time, Christle writes in the book’s introduction, “I have learned to gather subjects through which I can perceive my mother indirectly, the way people will watch an eclipse through a pinhole camera so the sun cannot burn their eyes. The life of Virginia Woolf has proved to be an especially reliable space within which I can make my explorations.” Like Virginia Woolf, Christle’s mother spent years living near Kew Gardens in London, and the two women’s “biographies overlap at certain points of shared suffering.” And so, beginning in 2018, Christle undertakes a series of pilgrimages, tracing the settings of Virginia Woolf’s life and writing, as well as her mother’s paths, hoping to better understand her own life and her mother’s. During the years Christle wrote this memoir, her life went on, bumpily: She took a teaching job in a new city, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, a friend died by suicide—and the memoir recounts these events too.
Among the Rhododendrons (the title comes from a similar line in Woolf’s diary) is a mostly linear memoir, though the narrative circles back to Christle’s assault and her difficult teenage years. Christle writes with a poet’s close attention to language and to the natural world, precisely recording her thoughts and emotions throughout, which can sometimes feel a little claustrophobic. Still, Among the Rhododendrons is a meditative and often beautiful narrative, a reminder that the experiences and words of the writers we love can illuminate our own lives.
