Who I Am

May 1, 2017
This slim, intimate book by English actress Rampling (Swimming Pool) and French novelist Bataille (Annam) bears little resemblance to a standard celebrity memoir, with scarcely a mention of Rampling’s movie career. Instead she discusses her uneasy youth (“Childhood is its own small battleground”) and a family secret that she has carried for decades. More of a “ballad” than a biography, as Bataille explains in the introduction, the memoir traces Rampling’s upbringing in a secretive, enigmatic family. Her father, an “impenetrable” man who won an Olympic gold medal in track in 1936 and served in the British artillery, moved the family seven times in 13 years. Rampling’s mother enjoyed elegant parties and journaling, and seemed deeply concerned with her fragile older daughter, Sarah, who was Rampling’s close friend as well as her sibling. The two girls attended boarding school together and remained close until Sarah eventually married and moved to Argentina, where she died young. In elegiac prose, Rampling recreates the longing associated with the loss of her sister, and paints a portrait of a family that buries pain only to find that it reemerges later in life. Rampling’s fans and other readers will be captivated by this introspective tale of sisterly devotion.