The novelist sat for her father three times – first in a naked portrait when she was 18. Now 65, she has written a memoir based on the diaries she kept at the time. She talks about her chaotic childhood, writing truthfully about her dad, and the books she read to him on his deathbed. In the first, she sprawls, unclothed, legs spread wide on her father’s chaise, aged 18. In the second, at 31, she is buttoned up in a dark shirt, hair cropped, refusing the artist’s gaze.
One of the compulsive aspects of Boyt’s book is that, as a reader, you get to listen in on her trying to make honest sense of events that go well beyond what any daughter might be expected to fathom.
So we talk first about how when she was seven, Boyt, her mother and her three young siblings sailed around the world on a leaky cargo ship her mother had sold their home to buy. It began, like much of Boyt’s life, by accident. Suzy Boyt was Freud’s student at the Slade, 17 years his junior; in what became a familiar pattern with his women, she had his children in quick succession, and all but gave up her own artistic ambitions.
The experience left her with a kind of outlaw sense. She recalls taking a big knife into her primary school, and being outraged that the headteacher confiscated it. “I was probably pretty strange,” she says. “It’s why I’ve spent much of my later life trying to be as bougie and normal as possible.”, heavy gambling, high- and lowlife friends, all organised around the intense 24-hour compulsion of his painting.
One of the prompts for her leaving home was the trauma of being raped, at 14, by one of her older brother Ali’s friends. The general response from the family seemed to be “shit happens”. There were other sexual traumas; she had lived in fear of being alone with Uwe, who, among other things, was in the habit of having the children line up naked on deck and dousing them with cold water.
As with all Freud’s work, the painting went on, dusk till dawn, several nights a week over months. He wanted to call the finished work, a title “that would make anyone think of incest,” Boyt says. “Not that I wanted to have sex with him, nor him with me, just in case you were wondering…” she writes. He called itShe had liked to think of their relationship at the time as being “like that between two teenagers”.
She was embarrassed by a lot of it when she did. She laughs. “There’s way too much about wanting a husband. It’s very Bridget Jones.” She couldn’t look at it for a while after the death of her father, but then the plan was to go back and extract “all Dad’s stories, which I remembered as being hilarious, stories about gangsters and film stars, lords and ladies”. But then when she got into it, “it all turned into something else”.
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