Emma Freud recounts how receiving a begonia cutting led her to uncover a chain of friendships stretching back to her great-grandfather, Sigmund Freud, who first gifted the plant in the 1930s. Favors, lust, gratitude, and Emma’s own family feud, all told through the history of one begonia’s cuttings—what a way to find your roots.
So as I placed this stumpy green stick on the mantelpiece in my sitting room, I realised it was the only thing I have ever owned with any connection to the man who transformed the way we think about ourselves, and who was also my great-grandfather. He had been sitting in the shadows my entire life until – unexpectedly, in my 60s – someone I barely know shone a tiny light on him. Like a detective who has no idea what they’re looking for, I decided to dig deeper into the chain of events that led finally to my owning a tiny piece of this past.
I looked up the qualities of begonias and found they’re often given as a gift to repay a favour. I knew Tom had given me the cutting in gratitude, but why had his father-in-law given one to him?
More picks on family history
My Grandpa, the Fascist?
“An old family album sent me on a journey through Italy’s dark past in Libya.”
Double Exposure
“On our first memories.”
Documents
“I have no status inside or outside any clear borders unless I consider my mother’s uterus my original country.”
Searching for Sleeper Trains
“Trains are still a part of my blood, my birthright. Through them I embrace my own kind of mobility and ambition, those two valued traits in my family line, if not quite manifested in the direction I’m heading.”
Cresting the Wave
“A surfer comes to grips with a dark family secret born from the swells near Bob Hall Pier.”
Grace: An Unfinished Draft, A Fire
“In Texas—Georgia—in Alabama—all over this vast canvas of fear that we call America, women will die. They won’t have time to run away. They will be great-Aunts only in name, and in death. And their deaths will disappear into a language made and remade by men to cover their shitty sins.”
