Book excerpt: The Bristle Merchants Daughter: about the book John Salinsky wanted to find out more about his mother's life. She was born in 1902, the first child of parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe in search of a better life and freedom from fear. She tried to become a doctor at a time when women doctors were unusual. She did not succeed, but her three sons all became doctors. She suffered from depression as a young married woman and had psychoanalysis with one of Sigmund Freud's early followers in London. She brought up her family in Leeds and died at the age of 96, having lived through nearly the whole of the twentieth century. Apart from a few unusual features it was 'an ordinary life'. But ones relationship with ones mother is never ordinary. In this biography, John Salinsky begins by using his imagination to picture the life of his young grandparents in Tsarist Russia. He traces his mother's girlhood and her life as a young wife and parent up to the point of his own birth in 1941. From here on he blends imagination with memory and inquiry, trying to make sense of the complex emotions that bind a mother and her son in love and conflict. His description of the closeness they achieved in her final years makes moving reading.