Author: Nicola Briggs
Peacock on the Moon is a memoir of Nicola Briggs, an English woman of middle-class origin. It is a coming-of-age memoir mainly set in 1970s Britain. Briggs narrates a story of her childhood, and her story is shaped by discussing privilege, instability, ideological tensions, and class. At the center of her novel is her father, a solicitor and a bigot, showing volatile and self-destructive tendencies in his attempts to win just about any argument or a legal battle. The fact that he frequently loses these battles is also likely connected to the fact that he spent his university years drinking rather than seriously studying, as Briggs honestly recounts, and he barely became a solicitor.
Briggs’ memoir explores childhood marked by silence, contradiction, and emotional neglect, including being sent to a boarding school, which she detested. She also writes about the normalization of bigotry in domestic life and how these roles were negotiated with her mother tolerating her father’s views so long as they were expressed externally and activities happened out of the house. It is quite clear that emotional neglect portrayed in the book is not just about the author but also her mother, who has peacocks and a whole animal kingdom in the house, focusing on cultivating those relationships while she loses children to boarding schools to feed her husband’s ambitions. The memoir also explores growing up under a powerful but controlling parent and spouse, and the gradual emergence of self-awareness and independence, which happened much later in life. The novel is almost entirely about the years before and during boarding school, whereas life after boarding school is squashed at the end of the book.
What the author does well is analyze how the worldview is formed inside a child and how children are influenced by their parents and society. So, the memoir is less about recounting events, which is why a large part of the author’s life is missing, but more about picking an important part of one’s life and analyzing its importance. Indeed, there is likely a point in everyone’s life, particularly childhood, that influences the rest of their lives. We just do not always see it.
A good analytical aspect of the book is the exploration of racism, which the author analyses through absorption and questioning that happened in different parts of her life There is also massive honesty in the book, respective to her family life and values, and the fact the author cites letters her parents and her exchanged during the boarding school years, which provide an account of living history and make her reflections believable because it is indeed possible to reconstruct events so far in the past when you have letters. I really enjoyed how the author embedded letters in her prose and her deep reflection on those letters. The writing also avoids melodrama and is thoughtful and restrained. It must have been difficult to write all of this about one’s family, and also British society and its racial transformation that was happening during the author’s life. I also particularly liked the class dynamic in this book and the writing about aspiration and a quest for recognition and success, the author’s father was seeking with educating his children in a boarding school and insisting that they go to Oxbridge. I was delighted when the author rebelled, took a break, and then decided to go to Manchester.
The memoir, Peacock on the Moon, is a sociologically valuable piece that deeply analyses the psyche of the aspirational middle class in 1970s Britain, and that analyses childhood through psychological reflection rather than a conventional narrative of childhood adversity. The ending was also poignant and suitable for the narrative the memoir adopts.
This is now the second memoir of real people I read recently (the other one is The Bookshop That Floated Away). I have to say that I am really enjoying these memoirs, where one does not know what will happen next, and where a happy ending is not guaranteed.
Thank you for reading!