Elegy for Echo:  a literary family memoir

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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This is William Gustafson, the grandfather I would love to have known, and whom my mother barely knew - in a photo I recently found on Ebay.  Here he is, in 1926 -- a century ago -- standing outside the Metropolitan Opera, in his polished shoes, bowler hat and slightly crumpled overcoat, while fur-clad opera fans queue for the performance.  He is 6ft 4in, a handsome Swedish-American, with a broader smile than I have seen in any other photo.  But the old overcoat bothers me - has it not been hung up properly at home? I now know that, although he and his talented pianist wife were successful members of the East Coast musical elite, he might well not have been able to afford a new one.  And who was he really?  Why did he kill himself in March 1931, leaving my 8-year old mother and her infant brother fatherless, and his wife a widow?  What was the impact of his death on the family he left behind and the granddaughter he would never meet?

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Listen here to him singing the Swedish hymn “Give me Peace” in 1918 – before he had met his future wife and before he joined the company of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

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Elegy for Echo will be published, initially as an ebook, on Amazon, in UK and US editions, in Fall/Autumn 2026.  For updates on publication, including exclusive extracts, invitations to review and dates of launches, sign up here.

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Elegy for Echo explores the mystery and silence that enshrouded William Gustafson's Depression-era death and the life of my mother Elizabeth, who grew up in the poverty, silence and shame that were the consequence of her father’s suicide.  Was his suicide only about money or was there some darker, hidden reason?

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​Based on several years’ research and writing, the memoir tells the interlinked, unknown and untold stories of my grandfather, grandmother, great grandmother, and my uncle and mother, who was clever, talented and beautiful, but who fell vulnerable to a narcisstic husband. My grandmother, Mary Capewell, was a pianist and singing teacher who took on Bill Gustafson as her protégé before falling in love and marrying him. Her mother, Emma Capewell, lost her husband at a young age to alcoholism and became one of Boston’s earliest women librarians. My uncle, William Gustafson, was killed aged just 20 during the first assault on the German “Winterline” on Mount Pantano in November 1943.  

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And who am I in this story?  I am the researcher, the investigator and the curator of these previously untold stories, and the survivor of the losses, silences and griefs which were the legacy of my family story.

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Elegy for Echo has two parts. Part I, Ricochet, begins with photographs and clues from documents and artefacts I discovered in my grandmother’s suitcase, as well as research I carried out into my grandfather’s suicide while living in New York in the seventies.

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Part II, Fred & Gus:  Portrait of a Marriage, is based on a collection of letters left to me by my father, which I had always avoided.  I was not ready to open or explore them until I had written Part I.  The letters include copies of letters kept by or returned to my father; letters to him from my mother and several mistresses. The letters are dated from the day of their marriage in East Africa in 1950 to shortly before her too-early death in 1978, and tell the story of my mother's disastrous marriage to my selfish and narcissistic father.  Elegy for Echo aims to tell her story and give her back her voice.

 

The epilogue, The Last Word, is based on entries from my journal of 2005-7, written during my father's final illness. The chapter continues with a reflection on my journey of discovery of my family story and how I have changed since embarking on the project.  "Since then, the bonds of silence in my family have been released. Now I am tethered in the present by stories which reach back through the generations. A jumble of jigsaw pieces has been painstakingly assembled into a shape, a pattern, a narrative. The tectonic plates of my identity have shifted into a new and more comfortable pattern."  In writing this book I have given my mother, who is Echo, a story and a voice she never had in life, and have given her and myself "the last word".

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