Have You Been Good?
Vanessa Nicolson

Have You Been Good?  is a memoir prompted by the sudden death of a 19-year old daughter. Vanessa Nicolson revisits her own troubled upbringing and the acrimonious divorce of her art historian parents in the early 1960s.  Taken to Florence just after her sixth birthday in 1962, then sent to a progressive boarding school in England four years later, she is caught between Britain and Italy, between bohemianism and a longing for security, troubled by her relationship with her mother and her father’s unavailability. Interweaving visceral descriptions of adolescence and young adulthood as a vulnerable young woman in an age of sexual permissiveness, she details her attempts to make sense of her parents’ lack of parenting skills despite their good intentions, and draws on a cast of eccentric characters including her father and his struggle with his latent homosexuality, her paternal grandmother Vita Sackville West, her anti-fascist Italian grandfather Nonno Giacomo, various lovers and characters from the art-world, to tell her daughter the stories she never had time to recount: how she loved and lost and overcame, creating her own family, only for it to be riven by tragedy. Written with raw honesty, alternating between the gentle and the absurd, Have You Been Good?  contrasts three generations and their approach to family, in a bittersweet tale of loss and redemption