61 tabs in one book.

I use four colours. Yellow for a sentence worth keeping, blue for something structural, pink for disagreement, green for something to look up later. I finished this with 61 tabs in it, which is the most I've put in anything since I was 24 and working through a maths textbook I had no business owning. The split was 22 yellow, 19 blue, 11 pink, 9 green. I'm giving you the breakdown because the blue number is the unusual one and it accounts for most of the rating.

Nineteen structural tabs in a memoir is not normal. Memoirs are generally one long slope. This is built in three sections with visible joints: the mountain, the leaving, and the years of trying to hold both at once. The middle section is shorter than the first by about a third, and I'm fairly sure that's deliberate, because the leaving happens fast and the book has no interest in making you comfortable while it does. The chapter where she sits a formal examination having never sat one comes directly after a chapter about a car going off a road, and those two chapters are the same event told twice in different vocabularies.

The thing that actually moved me is not what moves most readers, so I'll say it plainly. There are footnotes. Nine of them, and I did count, where she records that a brother or a sister remembers an incident differently, prints both versions, and declines to settle it. I've never seen a memoir do that nine times. Books in this category assert. This one keeps a record of the dispute and hands it over unresolved, and somewhere around the third footnote I stopped trusting her less and started trusting her more.

Eleven pink tabs. Nine sit in the university sections, which are thinner than the mountain sections and I suspect she knows it. A fellowship gets a paragraph. A scrapyard bin gets four pages. The imbalance is honest, because the mountain is where the material is, but it leaves the back half promising a life it never quite shows you. I wanted twenty pages on what it's like to sit in a supervision when you have no small talk and no idea what a supervision even is. I got two.

The injuries are described without adjectives. That's the correct choice and a difficult one, and she holds to it: the burns, the brother's head, the leg, given as sequence and temperature and then left alone to do their own work. She also never names what is wrong with her father. No doctor arrives to supply a word. I marked that blue and then argued about it with my sister for most of a Sunday, because she thinks the refusal is a dodge and I think it's the most disciplined decision in the whole book. Neither of us moved an inch.

A word about the mother, since nobody I've discussed this with wants to talk about her. She's the more interesting parent and she gets less room. She builds a business out of a kitchen, ends up employing half the valley, becomes the household's earner, and nearly all of it happens in the margins of chapters about men. I went back and counted pages: the father takes somewhere in the region of four times the space. I don't think that's a mistake, exactly — it is presumably what it was like from the inside. But it leaves the one question I still have, which is what the mother believed by the end, and whether anyone has ever put that to her directly.

I had the ending wrong for about a year. I told at least four people that the family reconciles, because that's the shape I expected and my memory obligingly supplied it. It doesn't happen. When I went back to check I found a yellow tab already sitting on the last page with the word "no" written under it in pencil, so past me knew and present me had quietly overwritten her.

Read it in fewer sittings than I did. I took nine of them, spread over three weeks, and every gap let me build a version of the story out of nothing, which the book then had to spend its next chapter correcting.