Absences are at the heart of this memoir. Catherine’s precious nanny Sylvia, her body ‘the ship’ to which she is ‘tethered’, leaves without warning. Uncomprehending, Catherine is desperate for her return. On the journey with her father to her detested school Catherine vomits with anxiety. At the door, Alexandre disappears and she is abandoned to the icy headmistress, Madamoiselle Videlange.

Even the time with Daddy John, Sylvia’s father, a loving figure who wheels the small Catherine around in his wheelbarrow as he works – ‘Love was in the shed, near the cosy tools worn smooth’– is tinged with the acute loneliness they share.

Poum and Alexandre sails in poetic language and rich imagery, in layers of history and philosophy. Nevertheless, it does not quite illuminate the parental figures it works so hard to describe. Like Henry James’s depiction of warring, self-obsessed parents in What Maisie Knew, de Saint Phalle’s memoir is most successful in revealing a child unseen.