Remembering Me: N M Browne
And breathe. I am coming back to a novel I wrote in 2002. I'm calling it 'Remembering Me.' Back then two of my kids were still at primary school. I still did the school run every day – only in my case it was rather a brisk walk (I was always a teeny bit late.) My older sons were at secondary school and my house was awash with damp rugby kit and lost exercise books, ballet bags, grubby school sweat shirts, crumpled reminders about head lice and mud. There was always a lot of mud and noise: sauce pans clattering, singing, shouting, TV, radio and argument. There’s no sign of any of that in this book, though in my clumsy rendition of the main character I can see that I still lived with the grunting masculinity of early adolescence. I guess that in this story I was trying to leave the chaos of domesticity behind. It is set on an isolated beach and no one talks much: it’s an oddly silent book. I wrote about solitude and the sea and I wonder why I thought any chil...