Erica Wagner - A History of My Family in One Object

Available for over a year

Continuing our series in which five writers were invited to reveal something which they'd never told anyone before. From difficult and awkward truths to personal and challenging experiences, this series of essays offers an intriguing and provocative glimpse into the inner lives of others. At a time of the year when it's traditional for families to gather together, the journalist and author Erica Wagner looks back on the stories her mother told about her father through the medium of the wedding present she gave him in 1965: a Norden bombsight taken from a Second World War B29 bomber. The narratives we build around ourselves and those we love are just that - constructed stories - and sometimes the boundary between fact and fiction is a fine one. Erica Wagner's father died in 2007; her mother a couple of years later. During the period when she was packing up their belongings and also spending time with her parents' surviving friends, she began to discover that her mother's proud story about her father's years as a pilot didn't entirely make sense. Her father had never spoken about his wartime experiences, and records from the USAF were either missing or destroyed. With no one left to ask, what does it mean when the stories you cherish may not even be true?