andemic conditions meant I couldn’t visit Marina Warner, but I’ve been to her house, in London, once before, and I’ll try to remember it for you because it hums with enchantment. First you must open the wicket gate off the street, brushing past clambering plants to reach the front door. Inside, you climb a slim staircase. The walls are crammed with art, and you’ll want to pause and look: there’s a little Paula Rego that shows the householder reading a story to an entranced wolf from Little Red Riding Hood, a reference to Warner’s lifelong study of fairytales and myths and her role too as a storyteller, author of novels and stories and children’s books. Over a door is a wooden sculpture by her son, the artist Conrad Shawcross, called The Winnowing Oar – a pun on the prophecy given to Homer’s Odysseus that he must wander until he meets a community who mistake an oar for a winnowing fan. Then you duck into the sitting room, where there’s more art and teetering towers of books – at one moment when I was there Graeme Segal, Warner’s third husband (an Oxford mathematician so distinguished that his name is attached to both a theorem and a conjecture), put out a steadying hand to prevent a collapse. The room vibrates to a steady babble of chat – friends, grandchildren, teenagers – and in the centre of it all, benignly smiling, serene and immensely elegant, Warner herself. That day she told me about two of her Italian aunts, who began with the poetic names Annunziata and Purissima, and became, when they emigrated to America, prosy Nancy and Pat. She told me too about her late cousin Andy Cicoria, who looked rather like her, but was a homicide detective in the LAPD, leading me to the loopy but enjoyable fantasy that maybe she and he were the same person, that Warner might be scintillating mythographer by day and hardboiled Californian crime fighter by night. These memories, shading into imaginings, are certainly faulty in all kinds of ways. But perhaps appropriately so, since it is memory, at its most capricious and partial, that is the material of Warner’s forthcoming book: “It’s the most exposed I have ever been in my writing – but not entirely exposed; I still take refuge in stories,” she says. Her Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir covers that penumbra of existence before recollection properly crystallises into family myth – the first six years of her life. The book works its way slantwise towards her first really vivid memory: the sight of her father’s Cairo bookshop burned to the ground. Only the ceramic lavatory bowl was still intact atop a mound of ashes, bearing the legend “Shanks of Glasgow”. The shop – the Egyptian outpost of WH Smith, which Esmond Warner had set up after the war – had been targeted during a night of attacks on foreign businesses in January 1952. “It seemed such a complicated, ambiguous symbol,” she tells me on our video call, “because obviously a bookshop is a terrible thing to burn down, but at the same time if you looked at it at all closely, as I began to do, the shop was part of a strategy of trying to ‘domesticate’ Egypt – it was part of Britain’s soft power.” Her father – Etonian, well connected if not exactly rich – reflected his class’s insouciant confidence that (as a colleague of his put it in a letter) the Egyptians “cannot do without us & our professors, our technicians or our books”. It was an insouciance that, like many so British endeavours founded on the illusion of effortless superiority, hit the buffers of reality. Soon after that devastating fire the Warner family – her father, mother Emilia and younger sister Laura (now Gascoigne, an art critic) – left Egypt for ever. Warner did not return until 2009. In one way, then, Warner’s book is a kind of reckoning with this episode, a look at an early childhood marinated in the attitudes of the times, a recrudescence of which she dispiritedly notes: “Brexit is not just nostalgic, it is a revanchism, a real resurrection. The self-assurance about how we will dominate the global networks again with trade is very pre-Suez.” But the story is complicated. Her father – the son of the famous cricketer Pelham Warner (known as Plum) – may have been a deeply establishment figure, but her mother was the penniless and beautiful Ilia Terzulli, a war bride from Bari in Puglia, who had to train herself, step by painful step, to impersonate an upper-class English wife. Some of Warner’s most brilliantly evocative writing summons up her mother’s immigrant experience, arriving aged 21, entirely alone, to live with her parents-in-law in Kensington, in that “general stewed comforting frowsiness that ... she came to know and recognise so clearly as the smell of England … mouse droppings and rats’ nests, suet and soot, cabbage and cabbage water, Worcestershire Sauce, lard, mustard, Marmite, chicory coffee …” Ilia had to learn absolutely everything, from the fact that it was incorrect to put out marmalade at tea time to how to hold a cricket bat properly. And it had to be learned well: Ilia “knew she was the youngest daughter of a widow of no means from a stricken region of a defeated nation and a vainglorious regime and needed to prove her usefulness”. And because Warner is the kind of writer she is, all of this is brought to life partly through bright novelistic imagining, and partly through a scholarly consideration of objects, the “inventory” of the title, something that offered itself as a possibility because of the sheer abundance of material. Ilia, who died in 2008 (Esmond predeceased her in 1982), “was almost a hoarder; or rather I think she felt a tremendous respect for this world she’d decided to make her own, so she kept everything”. Considering a pair of her mother’s shoes, for example, handmade by Peal & Co seven decades ago, Warner presents the reader with both a dazzling history of the brogue (as footwear, as accent) and a vivid sense of how, for the Italian girl used to slapping along the Bari lungomare in a pair of strappy cork-soled sandals, the brogues were part of her English disguise, her uniform, her Cinderella’s slipper. In fact, Warner tells me, the book started as a novel. “I needed to use fictional techniques like dialogue, like interior thinking, and simply filling in what wasn’t there in the record.” But Segal persuaded her it had to be real, with real people – telling her: “If you make them into imaginary characters it won’t have the same purchase.” He was surely right: of course one wants to know that the socialite Violet Trefusis was Warner’s godmother; and that as a tiny child she was given a donkey ride among the pyramids by the Soviet spy Donald Maclean, then working at the British embassy in Cairo; and that much later, at home in England, the family’s odd-job man was the notorious “Cambridge rapist” Peter Cook, who, chillingly, when arrested, had a photo of the teenage Laura Warner in his wallet. The well known names who surface in the pages sometimes create the impression that the Warners lived in the kind of world where all the grand people are constantly either dining together or bumping into each other – a real version of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. (Esmond “fagged” for the Labour minister Frank Pakenham at Eton, and they were lifelong friends; Pakenham was Powell’s brother-in-law... ) One can sense Warner reckoning with all this. “With nonfiction you really need to make up your mind about your line of argument,” she says. “You need to go in a clear direction and I tried to do that, say, in my book on the Virgin Mary, or in my book Monuments and Maidens. But the great freedom of fiction is that you can admit the complexity and the ambiguity and search out the emotional textures and the feeling of it happening rather than the line you should take. It’s not a comfortable place to be writing from, but it’s reflective and it’s emotionally sincere, it echoes the turbulence inside one.” This sense of reckoning-through-narrative relates, she thinks, to her Catholic upbringing (although she is not religious). “There are modes of consciousness in Catholicism that are quite close to writing. One was told to tell the story of one’s day, which was an oblique way of writing a personal diary, as a kind of training in self-examination. Another is the idea of making redress through semi-symbolic acts; that certainly underlies the motivation I have for writing.” Nevertheless, Inventory of a Life Mislaid is not a novel: or rather, had she framed it as a work of invention, she says, she would have pursued some lines of inquiry with more license – for example, her parents’ relationship. A sense of daughterly decorum, too, prevents her from straying too far into whether her mother had affairs, though the clues are there. Warner had thought the book was almost finished when her mother died. But, clearing out the house, she started going through her letters and diaries. “I had lots of shocks. I knew my mother was unhappy – I’ve known since I was a child. But I never knew the extent of it. It was very upsetting. I found traces of relationships, though I have no idea how far they went. I don’t feel angry about it at all, though I know some people feel angry with their mothers for their infidelities.” The mother-daughter relationship was clearly far from straightforward, but writing the book brought her to a kind of understanding of Ilia, who was so alone and dissatisfied in her marriage, who asked a Cambridge tradesman to bill her for more than she paid so she could skim off a little spending money of her own. After finishing the book, “I felt as if I had been psychoanalysed into a state of acceptance and grief,” Warner says. The book is full of stories that feel like digressions: the nature and meaning of “balm”; the significance of Eno’s Fruit Salts, taken often by her father to ease his “claret-curdled and Stilton-and-port-enriched guts”. There’s also a lengthy and enjoyable burrowing into the life of Hildegarde, the German nightclub singer with whom Esmond had had a fling before the war, family legend claimed. (Family legend was wildly off-track: Hildegarde was actually American, a lifelong lesbian, and, ultimately, a nun.) These digressions bring pleasure in themselves, deepening the texture of the narrative – and at times, perhaps, acting as defences or feints against a more personal excavation. Will she ever write more memoir? She says not: she is reluctant to write about the living, and is incredibly relieved that her sister likes Inventory of a Life Mislaid. She couldn’t, she says, write nonfiction about her son, or his father, her first husband, William Shawcross (who was recently, if controversially, appointed as the independent reviewer of Prevent, the government’s anti-radicalisation programme). The demands of her job as professor of English and creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London, mean that she has been forced to neglect her fiction, and she says she would like to work on a novel next – perhaps stringing a series of stories from a kind of calendar, in the manner of Ovid’s Fasti. Then she concedes, with a dazzling smile, “If I live for a very, very long time and I am the only survivor, which I don’t want to be, then I might do a catalogue of loves.” That, I would certainly read.