Kate Legge

You know, Dad would be writing these wonderful...

I had been at an international conference and his paper had gone down well and mum was, you know, her letter was about taking us all down to the beach during a Melbourne heatwave and my younger brother punching children and not being able to take her eyes off him and wondering why nobody ever wanted to come to our house.

And I felt for her, I really felt I understood more of the demons that were tearing her apart and leading to this really quite fraught and emotional childhood.

So, you know, when we moved to Singapore, which we often went on sabbatical leave with my father...

You know, you'd think this would be a joyous occasion for her, but again, she was stuck in a sort of colonial house which was sort of like Somerset Maugham with plantation shutters on the window.

We had staff, which we never had on an academic salary at home, obviously.

And my younger brother would often unravel in these places and once she took us in the car and was threatening to kill us all, just my brother and me and her.

How old were you at that time?

I would have been 10, 11, and she was just weaving from one side of the road, crying, screaming, I'm just going to end it all for all of us.

And I can't remember why.

I remember we got home safely, but it's just one of those things you never forget.

And I think one of the things that's important to remember about our lives is

because we're hypervigilant now as to how our childhood impacted upon us, that what we remember, we remember the splintered gateposts, we remember the shattered bars, we remember the argument, we remember the drunken tirade, we remember the lipstick-smeared face, but we don't remember the benign lulls in between.

And so that was what I went searching for in trying to understand how she'd made our childhood so miserable, because it wasn't all miserable, of course.

And once I started to unravel her, I remembered all the beautiful and lovely things about her.

I'd learnt to take the panoramic view of my childhood rather than hold on to these less pleasant memories.

Why did you feel like you wanted to write about your – there's a long story in your book about the streak of mental illness that runs in your family, intergenerational.

Intergenerational.

How do you think this fed into the story of infidelity here?

Well, during lockdown, when I was starting to write what was then thought to be a fictional book, Treatment of Infidelity, I used the opportunity, so many people did, and Melbourne, of course, had the longest lockdown of any city in the world, to go through my father's filing cabinet of personal papers, which he'd kept and I had ignored for years because of