1975

Discovering Robert Altman

My father left the family home somewhere between 1966 and 1968. The exact date is murky, at least to me; he was one of those men who, for a while, attempted to run two families, the second unbeknownst to the first, which happened to be mine. So there were a lot of comings and goings and disappearances before the eventual, inevitable separation. And between the ages of 14 and 18, I lived a life of ill-matched pieces. My mum was a secretary and a single parent, and we lived on a Barrett Home-style new estate; my father was working for an American company in the South of France, and living with his new wife and two young children. He had a swimming pool, and there was always Coke in the fridge. In Maidenhead we had neither. I spent my summers a few miles from Antibes, until he moved to the US in 1973 or 1974. My father got promotion after promotion, and jumped from company to company, so my half-brother and half-sister lived lives very different from those of my sister and I.