In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf

When Heather Christle realizes that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite 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 London's 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 private, British mother's revelation--a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship--propels Christle down a deep and destabilizing 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. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family's "birthday hill" in Kew Gardens, the tourist-ified homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf--both famously depressed in life and exuberant on the page--and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother's story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.

Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. It is also a book unlike any other, and one that will send readers down rabbit holes of their own.