John Lanchester's Memoir

I'm in the middle of reading Family Romance: A Memoir by British novelist John Lanchester. The centerpiece is what Lanchester finds out about his mother after her death--that she had lied to his father in order to get him to marry her (no mention of her many years in a nunnery, and she put her age at 31 even though she was actually 41 and pregnant with John. (The man must have been a bit gullible). She never let her son know anything about being immured in one of the most strict and harsh Catholic orders in Ireland. They were The Sisters of the Good Shepherd, and coincidentally a few years ago the movie The Magdalene Sisters exposed the cruel treatment that went on in that sisterhood. For Lanchester, having a mum who had spent decades being a nun before she finally saw the light and escaped and married at the age of 41, it meant having a mother who could express no emotion or love, and lied to cover up her past. It gets a bit bogged down in parts, and I'm skipping some, but in the main it's good.