Back when misery lit was all the rage and writers vied to share their dreadful or abusive upbringings, I never quite understood the appeal. Perhaps readers just found it a way to make themselves grateful for their lot in life.
Worlds Apart – a work of autofiction – definitely fits the misery category. Julia’s childhood is suitably bleak. She was born into a once-bourgeois German family of Jewish lineage and the ravages of the Holocaust and the Cold War have not been kind. Her family’s wider networks are artistic and colourful – it’s a life of financial poverty, perhaps, but with no scarcity of ideas or intellect. But by the time Julia and her twin appear in 1970s Soviet east Berlin, their bohemian actress mother Anna has lost a brother to suicide, seen her once-promising career collapse and fled numerous relationships promising a stability that continues to elude her.
Anna’s mother Inge, a sculptor, is both present but absent and distinctly uninterested in grandchildren, while Julia’s older sister resents her new twin siblings for usurping her. They are left alone, foisted on boyfriends, rarely cared for. For a time, they live in a children’s home, the burden of their existence too much for everyone involved. And that’s before Anna and her daughters – four now, from three different men – cross the border to live as refugees. In West Germany they are funded by the state and the twins, now eight, are eventually enroled in a Steiner school.
But life does not become easier, because Anna has no interest in adjusting to society’s expectations. Their home is dirty, their feet bare, their mother wanders around unclothed, the neighbours gawp and gossip, and the local children are cruel. Julia and her siblings are bright and intelligent, but with so little adult support it can leaving you gasping.
Worlds Apart is clearly Franck’s story, although as she notes in the foreword, “no real person will recognise themselves in any of the characters”. Indeed, when the Julia in the book is barely a teenager and finds a way to extricate herself from her situation, the character becomes “the girl”. Perhaps this distance is partly what enables Franck to dig into these memories. Her late teens, while more ordered, see her moving between host families and then eventually to dubious accommodation in the city’s red-light district. But she meets a middle-class boy, Stephan, and falls utterly, wonderfully in love. Yet we know from the outset that this too will end in the worst possible way. Some things are clearly too painful for Franck to dredge up. Is Anna mentally unwell, or simply unsuited to mothering? It is never interrogated. But what this book brings to life is just how formative a terrible childhood can be.
So, misery. But beautifully written and translated, by an author desperate to make sense of her roots. “How is the wilderness of a person’s origins to be mapped?” writes Franck. After all she has endured, I hope writing this has helped her find an answer.
Worlds Apart by Julia Franck is published by Moth Books
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