The Whole Staggering Mystery

Critically acclaimed author Sylvia Brownrigg’s memoir reconstructs a poignant story of fathers lost and found, and of children rebuilding bridges burned by their own parents

When Sylvia Brownrigg received a package addressed to her father that had been lost for over fifty years, she wanted to deliver it to him before it was too late. She did not expect that her father, Nick, would choose not to open it, until she and her brother finally did.

Nick, an absent father, was a hippie and would-be Beat writer who lived off the grid in Northern California; Gawen, an earlier absent father, was a well-born Englishman who wrote a Bloomsbury-like novel about lesbian lovers, before moving to Kenya where he died a mysterious death at age twenty-seven. The reputation of suicide shaded his memory.

Reconstructing Gawen’s short colorful life takes Brownrigg through the first and second world wars, toward the last gasp of the British empire in Kenya; and deep into the California redwoods,  where Gawen’s son Nick, who had also wanted to write, chose instead to carve out a rugged path in the wilderness, keeping his English past at bay. In the course of her discoveries, Sylvia Brownrigg begins to question omissions of her own fractured childhood after divorce. Combining her own memories with imagined ones of this lost family, she finally makes her own story whole.