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|title= Without Warning and Only Sometimes

|sort= Without Warning and Only Sometimes

|isbn=978-1472296634

|website=https://www.kitdewaal.com/

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As Philip Larkin so eloquently put it, “They f*** you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do” Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal focuses on this idea of parenthood and the bonds that bind family. This book is a memoir focussing on the author’s formative years as a teenager living in a lower class area of Birmingham. Her father is from St. Kitts in the Caribbean and her mother is an Irish woman ostracized by her family for becoming pregnant by and marrying a black man. This intersectionality plays a large role in the autobiography. Kit De Waal faces multiple hurdles due to her race, her class and her gender. Her parents loom large and are written with care, love, and the kind of anger only a child can express to their parents.

“Without Warning & Only Sometimes” by Kit De Waal is a brilliant book concerning the bonds and multiple small heartbreaks of family life. By using her parents, she highlights the struggles faced by multiple groups and multi-ethnic families in the UK. This hardship is something we should read as old-fashioned, as something that is in our past. Today, it would still appear that, with the rise of food banks, and racial and sexual violence, the UK still cannot remove itself from its colonial past that is obsessed with class.

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