LEAVING HOME

A writer’s struggles.

Award-winning novelist, poet, and children’s book author and illustrator Haddon offers a montage of 87 brief recollections and vignettes to create an absorbing, melancholy memoir. Recalling his childhood in Northampton, England, Haddon finds memory elusive, “as if I were leafing through a damaged photo album, individual snapshots separated by gaps where many other pictures have fallen out.” What he does remember is a father “with a short fuse” and a racist, sexist, homophobic mother who never wanted to have children, but was afraid of other people’s disapproval if she didn’t. Family life was repressive: “I never heard an adult tell or ask another adult something that really mattered,” he writes. Anxiety and depression that started in childhood dogged him throughout his life, often emerging as hypochondria (he feared getting multiple sclerosis and/or cancer) and a debilitating fear of flying. When he was 12, he was sent to boarding school, where boys were either bullied or became bullies, and where he was beaten by his headmaster. Haddon refers to two mental breakdowns, and to deliberate cutting. “I do it,” he writes, “because I’m uncontrollably angry with myself and there’s just too much pressure inside my head.” Running provided a much-needed emotional outlet, until sudden shortness of breath led, in 2019, to an emergency triple heart bypass. Among the many illustrations (drawings by Haddon, some by his father), family photos, and assorted other images, there’s a photo of the author, chest bare, displaying his surgical scar. Another image shows his arm, stitched after he cut too deeply. Other scars are not physically visible. Although Haddon reflects on positive aspects of his life—his teaching, writing, happy marriage, fatherhood, and deeply satisfying volunteer work with the Samaritans—darkness and sadness pervade his forthright memoir.

Candid, disquieting memories.