Annette Kuhn on Family Secrets in Memoir

“… a family without secrets is rare indeed. People who live in families make every effort to keep certain things concealed from the rest of the world, and at times from each other as well. Things will be lied about, or simply never mentioned. Sometimes family secrets are so deeply buried that they elude the conscious awareness even of those most closely involved. From the involuntary amnesias of repression to the wilful forgetting of matters it might be less than convenient to recall, secrets inhabit the borderlands of memory. Secrets perhaps are a necessary condition of the stories we are prompted by memory to tell about our lives.”

— Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination