This is an intriguing story about the narrator and her relationship with her late mother, but I loved it most for its comments on writing and how we understand and respond to truth and fiction, and being able to decipher the difference.

It's not yet a year since the narrator's mother passed away and she takes a walk across London on a quiet Sunday, recalling their relationship and all the things that made her complicated mother extraordinary.

The narrator is a writer and though she acknowledges her mother's desire for privacy in all things, she feels compelled to write about her life. But is telling her mother's story an act of love or a betrayal? 

There's so much in this book about writing memoirs and novels, and understanding the differences between them. The narrator flags up to the reader moments when she makes decisions in her writing, to tell us what actually happened and what is artistic licence. 

She says on one occasion 'She looked at me. No she didn't. "She looked at me" is one of those phrases that falls into prose, into fiction - this isn't a memoir - around dialogue.'

It is in danger of tying you up in knots on occasion, and feels like a creative writing manual, but I did enjoy this introspection.

She says 'perhaps you fear writing a memoir'. If so, 'invent a single man and call your book a novel. The freedom one fictional man grants you is immeasurable.'

And there's a wry humour throughout, too. 'Writers are dull by themselves, intolerable when they gather'.