Leeson, Miles Richard John, ed. (2018). Incest in contemporary literature. Manchester: Manchester university press. ISBN 978-1-5261-2216-2. The Sinhalese mythographers however were not interested in solving the “riddle of man” so much as in creating a “new people” or a “chosen people” with little or no continuity to earlier ones. Faced once again with the riddle of creating a new people without reproductive origins in two people who have ancestors as well, these writers use an animal and an incestuous union: the lion begets a son and a daughter, albeit on a royal princess. In this way all human ancestors on the paternal line are severed and discounted and a new beginning made, and insofar as we are dealing with a patriarchal and patrilineal society, this solves one problem. Having the lion around, however, would not be feasible and further one would be forced to deal with his kin. He is, therefore, slaughtered by the son himself, symbolically severing another ancestral connection and establishing a new line through the son himself. The problem that it seeks to solve is not the origin of “people” but the origin of a people. It does not have to create a creator so much as to create a context in which a break with certain other people could be promulgated. This is achieved by invoking the lion as the father. The other people were mere humans begot by other mundane humans, but the Sinhala people begin their new destiny with this radical rupture. To begin with, a lion is of an ambiguous moral value within Indian cultural contexts: the lion is reputed to be courageous, arrogant and powerful, of noble bearing and carnivorous and skilled in the hunt, the very embodiment of ksatriyadharma; it is, however, also a wild beast without decorum and discipline. The Sinhala myth of origin, therefore, provides for a noble but wild progenitor in the lion and a royal princess as the genetrix. He brings the valor and she the grace.

She began walking again. Her gait seemed to be improving as we neared the house. “I was thinking about something. I kind of like this anonymity thing. I can tell from your costume you are well put together and I’m about as horny as I can ever remember being. How about you come inside and help me with that?” Just fear of losing my family completely, fear of family falling apart and not them being the way we’ve always been.”It did not have a name until my mum’s psychiatrist, who was then actually looking after her for dementia in her seventies, referred to her historical diagnosis of schizophrenia. At which point it was out and my father very nearly fell off his chair. I then asked, ‘does anybody else know?’ and she said, ‘no, I will go to the grave with this and you are to tell nobody.’ The way she fixed her gaze on me, when she said that, I knew she was serious. Thomas, Edward, J. 1956 [1927] The Life of the Buddha as legend and history. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.

My husband and I had let our marriage die a slow, insidious death. Only when it was finally cold and lifeless on the floor, did we decide we needed to have an exit plan. Except we had no real plan at all. My husband moved into his father's house and I stayed with the children during the week, but nearly every weekend he would come and stay with the kids at our house, so that they would have the stability of being in their own home, around the things that made them feel the calmest.It’s basically taken over my life. I sit in the same seat every day with my laptop on my lap, and I’m thinking and thinking and thinking and looking at family trees, looking up old newspaper cuttings, and it makes me feel better to be working on it. That’s my fix.