Meeting One’s Biological Mother
Ever wonder what it would be like to meet the woman who gave birth to you long after you had reached an age where you fully understood how such things worked? The narrator nails the awkwardness with an unexpected simile that rings true:
“It’s a bit like a blind date, waiting to meet your birth mother. I didn’t know exactly what she looked like, though I’d been sent out out-of-date photographs.”
Milton Keynes
Much of the action takes place in the planned community of Milton Keynes, a robust small city roughly fifty miles from London. The town has a bit of character and in one particularly well-written passage, the author engages some metaphorical imagery to clarify:
“Milton Keynes is like a toy town, like a made-up place, and the hairdresser is plumped in the middle of the residential area. Somehow, it's unsettling, though I can't think why. Perhaps because the whole area has an air of unreality to it. People are playing at being alive but not really alive.”
The Fantasy Father
Not growing up among the man and woman who produced you can certainly produce an air of mystery about them. While some have little problem dismissing imaginative flights of fancy about someone who might apparently not care enough to find out about you, the more likely course is that charted by the narrator who goes all metaphorical in flights of fancy about what might be when fantasizing about the unknown father:
“He is a rich dark colour, a melting darkness, warm and endless like the dark of sleep. He has broad features, a wide nose, high spread cheeks. Wide as the span of a small bird’s wing, and a laughing smile.”
Conceived as Sin
The truth, when she finally meets her father, is not quite the same as the fantasy. It is, in fact, more that merely awkward or difficult; it is horrifying:
“I am sitting here, evidence of his sinful past, but I am the sinner, the live embodiment of his sin.”
The Man Behind the Curtain
The author’s father eventually becomes situated and defined by one single lasting, resonant and almost universally understood metaphor. Its meaning is as explicable as its appearance is unexpected:
“It doesn’t matter now that my father turned out to be the Wizard of Oz, a smaller man than the one in my head, and a frightened man at that.”
