One Life: My Mother's Story by Kate Grenville - book review: A work of filial devotion that unfolds like a novel
"When a writer is born into a family," said the Baltic-born poet Czeslaw Milosz, "the family is finished." Kate Grenville, the Australian-born author, hesitated to write a biography of her mother Nance Russell, who died in 2002, for fear of disturbing a private inner world and secrets. Nevertheless, she persisted in the task: the discovery of Nance's past was in some measure also the discovery of her own.