Here's the epigraph to John Lanchester's memoir, Family Romance:

"If I am ever kidnapped or taken hostage," my mother told me, "and they allow me to communicate with you, but I can't say what's happened or where I am, what I'll do is, I'll deliberately make a grammatical mistake. For instance, I'll say 'between you and I' instead of 'between you and me.' So if you ever speak to me over the phone and I sound a bit strained and I say 'between you and I,' you'll know I'm being held hostage. Will you remember that?"

"Okay, Mum," I said.

Lanchester's memoir focuses on his remarkable family life -- which includes a childhood spent not knowing that his mother had falsified a great deal of her history when she met his father, and which also details his attempts, as an adult, to reconstruct who his parents really were, and what their marriage, built as it was on secrets, actually meant.

I've only just begun, but I'm hooked. More to come.