'Jonathan Raban notes that when he returns from a trip, ‘I spend most of my time forgetting rather than remembering until I feel I can write about it … in other words, [I seek] a memory that is not over polluted by irrelevant details’ (Raban 2004, 59). In her haunting and haunted memoir The Other Side of Absence: Discovering My Father’s Secrets, Betty O’Neill, however, makes it her business never to forget a single detail of her quest to the truth about her father’s secret life; and when she returns from several trips to Poland to discover the complex identity of the man she barely knew, her obsessive search demands she record every particular and instance of her investigation. Fact, however murky, not imagination, is her quarry.' (Introduction)
