The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found

Sylvia Brownrigg’s ＂wise, intimate, and deliciously entertaining memoir＂ (Carol Edgarian) reconstructs a poignant story of fathers lost and found

When Sylvia Brownrigg received a package addressed to her father that had been lost for over fifty years, she wanted to deliver it to him before it was too late. She did not expect that her father, Nick, would choose not to open it. A few years later, she and her brother finally did.

Nick, an absent father, was a would-be writer and back-to-the-lander who lived off the grid in Northern California. Nick’s own father, Gawen--also absent--had been a wellborn Englishman who wrote a Bloomsbury-like novel about lesbian lovers, before moving to Kenya and ultimately dying a mysterious death at age twenty-seven. Brownrigg was told Gawen had likely died by suicide.

Reconstructing Gawen’s short, colorful life from revelations in the package takes her through glamorous 1930s London and staid Pasadena, toward the last gasp of the British Empire in Kenya, and from there, deep into the California redwoods, where Nick later carved out a rugged path in the wilderness, keeping his English past at bay. Vividly weaving together the lives of her father and grandfather, through memory and imagination, Brownrigg explores issues of sexuality and silences, and childhoods fractured by divorce. In her uncovering of this lost family, she writes movingly of daughterhood and of parenthood, gradually making her own story whole.

SYLVIA BROWNRIGG is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction: five novels--Morality Tale, The Delivery Room, winner of the Northern California Book Award, Pages for You, winner of the Lambda Award, and The Metaphysical Touch--and a collection of stories, Ten Women Who Shook the World. Sylvia’s works have been included in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times lists of notable fictions and have been translated into several languages. Sylvia’s novel for children, Kepler’s Dream, written under the name Juliet Bell was published in 2012 and turned into a feature film. Sylvia continues to spend time in London where she lived for many years, but now lives with her family in Berkeley, CA.