It Might Not Be True

A memoir of life and love

Francesca Rhydderch

• Publisher: Parthian Books
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781913830557
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A memoir of life and love and everything in between. Francesca Rhydderch is certain that she's chronically ill, but her doctors disagree. Twelve months later she can't even walk down the street, and her latest consultant is still suggesting that her neurological problems will just go away on their own. Then she comes across a specialist who changes the course of her illness. She may well be in danger of fighting a losing battle – with time, memory, herself – but she learns there are ways to live in the present by making peace with the past. "A delicate masterpiece. In precise yet lambent prose, Francesca Rhydderch's memoir is a painfully beautiful portrait of not just her life, but also the fundamentals of all our lives. A quiet, clear-eyed mediation on family, childhood, illness, grief, literature and love. Moving and illuminating in equal measure, there are scenes, lines and phrases from It Might Not be True that will remain with me for a very long time." – Owen Sheers "Beautifully subtle and moving, vivid in its painful present and reaching deep into the past…" – Tessa Hadley "They say time stops still in moments of crisis, yet in this intimate and poignant portrait Rhydderch uses her craft to demonstrate a more complex distortion in which time stretches and gapes, shrinks and magnifies, passes and returns in sequences that cohere a past, the present and a future. This evocative little gem truly provides a life lesson." – Charlotte Williams

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• The Art of Time Travel
• A Private Language
• The Cod Wars
• Waiting rooms
• Surgery hours
• Symptoms
• Toots’ birthday
• Another Fall
• A&E
• Toots’ handwriting
• Long Exposure
• Who was Toots before she was my mother?
• Toots’ Bazaar
• Covid keeps time
• The second lockdown
• One foot in front of the other
• A mysterious illness
• Victoriana in Stone
• Home
• No Star
• Half a Childhood
• Mother Tongue
• Countries of the World
• Insomnia
• Haven’t got a TV
• The gym
• Consequences
• The Robber and the Beehive
• Reminiscences
• How a marriage comes to an end
• Despatches from the Past
• Dad and Christmas
• You’re not Welsh, you’re English
• Thirty Years Later
• A lesson learned at the launderette
• Saturdays
• Moving on
• Folk tales and shopping lists
• Leaving the library behind
• The best days
• Growing pains
• Silver Jubilee
• Babes in the Wood
• Green fingers
• You’ll be free again
• Diagnosis
• Twilight
• The wave of life
• Acknowledgements