Tag: Memoir

THE GRASS ARENA by John Healy

Sometimes it feels as if every addict has written a memoir, like it’s one of the twelve steps or something.

I was recently noting how very many there were, and how similar. Here’s the book that shows I was wrong (first time for everything). It also shows something we often forget: how incredibly stitched up the book world is by people who were able to graduate high school.

THE GRASS ARENA is by a man who had an exceedingly tough childhood, became an alcoholic, and spent fifteen years homeless. It makes all sorts of more famous books on alcoholism look like a holiday camp, because they are all written by people who, at the end of the day, had parents in the suburbs to go back to. I have never read an account of what it is to be an addict without a safety net.

The grass arena is public parks, mostly round Camden. This is very much a book of north London. He tells about his daily life. He wakes up blacked out most days, and begins again from scratch to find enough money to drink. Let me give you a sample:

George and Ernie came back with a bag full of chicken bones. They’ve been down the dustbins again, back of the restaurants. Everybody welcome to lunch. Yeah, we’re all going to catch some horrible unspeakable disease. Not today perhaps. But time is on the dustbins’ side

He also tells us about his fellow drunks (not his friends, as he emphasizes: there are no friends in that community):

Alfie used to drink with a guy called Fingers Knox but Fingers got himself killed when he fell from the top to the bottom of the escalator in the tube. Poor old Fingers, that was some drop – he was a good beggar – lost most of the tops of the fingers of his right hand to the frost, a few winters back. He was a middle-aged Jock, used to travel out on the last tube to Edgeware every night to a skipper. He’d beg all the way on the tube going out, get a bottle next morning and beg his way back to the park. He was never without a drink. He used to take fits and get mugged often. He got nicked one time and the computer or something showed he was a deserter from the army in 1939! . . He used to say it was sad to have to creep and crouch and slink next morning after drink and that was why he always done a bit of late night begging. . . He had style. He would not keep jumping up at everyone that went past. He would wait. Then when he sensed the best beg, he’d put on his begging smile, beam in. Nine times out of ten it would be a fiver touch.

I find this very touching somehow, that this is what is left to posterity of Fingers Knox. The author eventually goes to jail for a long period, gets clean, and is eventually rescued from alcoholism by chess. Yes, you read that right. Someone teaches him chess and it transforms his life. He becomes a professional chess player. And then a yogi. What a man! What a life!

ORIGINAL SINS by Matt Rowland Hill

The field of memoirs on drug addiction is a crowded one. Well done to this guy for getting his book written and published, but I’ve got to be honest and say it’s a story that’s been told before. Not that that makes his suffering any the less real: the stealing, the betraying, the bulging veins, but it’s hard going when it’s been done before. Like I am always impressed by people who sit down and decide they are going to write about the first world war. Check it out: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT already exists. Best to retreat from that field in good order.

I’M GLAD MY MOM DIED by Jeanette McCurdy

Here is a memoir that makes you think that being a child star is really as bad as it looks. McCurdy’s mother is a super aggressive stage mother who pushes her daughter into acting and is phenomenally, creepily controlling. Example: she gives her breast AND VAGINAL exams in the shower until she is sixteen.

She gains some independence from her mother but has a drinking problem and both anorexia and bulimia. The anorexia she regards as the more sophisticated and desirable disease, but the bulimia eventually wins out. The most horrifying part is when she starts vomiting in a airplane toilet and a couple of teeth come out.

Every page of this book reads as being earned. McCurdy has clearly gone the incredibly hard miles in therapy. The voice is stark, direct, and simple, in a way you only achieve when you have cut out everything that’s not true. It’s also hilarious. I have nothing but admiration.

THE HOUSE BY THE DVINA by Eugenie Fraser

I found this book yellowing in the bookcase of my childhood home. I would say I have read every book we own, so I was surprised to find this one, and in a spirit of completeness decided to read it.

It is a memoir written by a woman with a Russian father and a Scottish mother. She was born and grew up in Russia, and was only eventually forced to leave as a teenager by the economic collapse of the Russian revolution.

It’s an interesting account of the earliest days of globalization, and what it is to be a child of hybrid culture. It’s also a romantic picture of traditional Russian life. Most interesting though of course, is the collapse. They descend very quickly into hunger and tragedy. I was particularly struck by when the narrator, as a child of the bourgeoisie, goes to beg a peasant woman for milk. The woman tells her about how she used to have to rush home during her short breaks at their mill to breastfeed her baby, and never managed to feed him for long enough. She asks why she should give her any milk. A tough question indeed.

MY FIRST THIRTY YEARS by Gertrude Beasley

Get ready for how this memoir begins:

Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen.

If first paragraph not enough, let’s go to the second one:

Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb, a pink soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously cruel, Christ-like, and handsome man with an animal’s appetite for begetting children.

BOOM. This lady born very poor in Texas in 1892, and only wrote this one book, a memoir of her life up to age 30. It is a story of titanic will power, courage and rage. It’s also possibly the only book in English I can think of, other than LARKRISE TO CANDLEFORD, written by a poor woman born in the nineteenth century.

It;s is an account of what Gertrude calls her family’s “horryifying and disgusting domestic relations,” where her mother sleeps with a shovel to fight her father off, so she can stop having children. Gertrude is raped by all three of her elder brothers, who also have sex with the cows. Her mother comments: “I was just scared nearly to death before that old cow’s calf come . . ” .

She is the only one of her 12 siblings to make it through high school, and she goes on to University in Chicago. As she put it: “I was getting jollier and jollier and going to the devil as fast as I could go.” The books ends with her contracted as a journalist to go to Japan. It’s an uplifting story about triumph against unimaginable odds. However, on reading the Introduction, I found out she didn’t in fact triumph. The book is banned – apparently you can’t just say exactly how things actually are – and a few years later she is put in an insane asylum, at a time when that was a common thing to do to troublesome women. It does not seem at all likely she was insane. Just belligerent, and with good reason. She dies there thirty years later.

That’s it ladies: these are giants on whose shoulders we stand. I’m so glad she got out this one short book on her life, and on her astonishing achievements, before the patriarchy closed her down.

OCTOBER’S CHILD by Linda Bostrom Knausgard

Linda Bostrom Knausgard’s husband, Karl Ove Knausgard, wrote six horrifyingly honest volumes about his life. Of course, you cannot write about your life without writing about the people around you. So despite my never having read a book by this woman before, I know a lot about her. More about her than most people I know in real life. For example: Karl Ove had such an enormous crush on her that when they kissed for the first time he embarrassed himself by FAINTING WITH JOY.

This book is about her time institutionalized for depression, and especially about her electroconvulsive therapy, which is as bad as it sounds. I didn’t know people still did this at all, but apparently Sweden is an outlier globally in using it heavily. It was a gripping little book, about the institution, and about the fragments of memory left to her by the treatment. It was interesting to hear the other side of Karl Ove’s version of their marriage.

Let me end with this fun aspect of their apparently very artsy marriage. They are on vacation:

When we finally got to the hotel all we saw were palm trees and greenery, endless shadows and hills. You looked over the landscape and said, What the fuck is this?

It turned out we were in Mauritius and not in the Maldives, your dream destination, and I spent the entire vacation in the shade with the children saying, Oh, how lovely it is here in Mauritius. Mauritius. Mauritius. It served him right.

How do you not find out you are going to Mauritius not the Maldives until you actually get there?!?

CARNIVAL OF SNACKERY by David Sedaris

These are David Sedaris’ dairies from 2003 to 2020. This is not very personal stuff; clearly he is doing this more or less professionally, as prep for his essays. In his first diaries, he is poor and struggling; in these he is wealthy and successful, moving between his different homes around the world. Astonishingly, they are just as likable. It’s interesting to see what someone’s daily life is made up of, but it’s also interesting to see how much less enjoyable these are than the essays. It’s weird to see the magic that moves daily experience into dairies and then essays.

SINS OF MY FATHER by Lily Dunn

Here is a memoir by someone whose father joined a cult. It is a lot less interesting than it sounds. I am often surprised by how little the circumstances of someone’s life seem to affect how involving their memoir is. This one I found quite dull. I feel bad to say so, because it was clearly deeply felt. Most troubling for the author was her father’s late descent into alcoholism. The degree of surprise and helplessness she feels was – I hate to say it – especially dull. Many people have done the hard miles on writing about being an addict, and loving an addict, and it’s not very easy to add anything to this, no matter how strongly you feel it.

Also annoying was some gentle name-dropping. This is always bad, but it’s particularly bad when you don’t even know who they are dropping. I find this to be a particular affliction of upper and upper-middle class British writing, and speaks to the narrow provincialism of that demographic. Antonia Fraser’s MUST YOU GO remains the high water mark of this kind of thing, and I highly recommend it if you want to LOL.

MICHEL THE GIANT: AN AFRICAN IN GREENLAND by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

Here is a book about how you can live the life of your wildest and most eccentric dreams.  In this memoir, a Togolese teenager in the 1950s discovers a book about Greenland in the only book store in his village.  He is inspired, and spends the next seven years travelling slowly up Africa and through Europe, raising money as he goes, till he gets to live in Greenland. 

Someone asks him how he will benefit financially from spending his early adulthood on this project, and like iconoclasts everywhere he is appalled anyone could ask a question so crass.  There is also a whole thing about how he nearly dies after getting bitten by a snake, but is saved by a priestess of a snake cult, so his family wants him to join this snake cult.  This I think also came into the whole run away to the Eskimos idea, but so wildly weird is this book that this is the least strange part of the story.

One reads many travelogues where Europeans travel to Africa and are titillated by its foreignness or disappointed it is not more foreign.  It is really fun to read it the other way round, and Kpomassie has plenty of both experiences.  These Greenlanders are just leading incredibly rough lives.  Take this:.

“Hans and Cecilia took me to dinner with Augustina and her husband Jorgensen, their neighbours and friends.  When we reached the house no meal was ready, but a whole seal, caught by netting, was waiting for us.   . . . As soon as we sat down at the table, Cecilia (went to the seal and started cutting it up pretty efficiently.  And then using her hands). .  . tore out bits of the lungs and then the liver.  These were the hors d’oeuvres.

BLEARGH!  They often eat raw food, still frozen.  Apparently you come to like the ‘crunch’ of ice crystals.  It is also very cold, so they keep the bucket to poop in in the living room, and don’t even pause their conversations while they use it.  BLEARGH!  He also finds out that the huskies, far from being the noble animals he imagined, are kept half-starving through the summer, when they are not needed, and only barely fed in winter.  Drunk people often get eaten by dogs, which is fair enough, as people often eat the dogs too.  BLEARGH!

On the upside, there is a lot of free love.  Married women offer themselves to him, or are offered by their husbands.  Apparently this is partly considered insurance, in case your own man does not make it back from the hunt.

I can hardly do justice to this strange book. I love this guy.  He is wildly original and did all of Africa incredibly proud. I think I am fondest of this part. When he first crosses into the Arctic circle, everyone gets a certificate.  You’d think he’d be excited, after working seven years to get there. But here he is:

This distribution of printed forms struck me as so grotesque that I didn’t bother to collect mine, preferring to savour the strange thill of that striking landscape.

What a man!

DID YOU HEAR MAMMY DIED by Seamas O’Reilly

Here is a memoir by a man with TEN SIBLINGS.  For added drama, he grew up in Ireland during the Troubles and he lost his mother when he was five.  You can see where the pitch for this book wrote itself.

It had some funny parts.  For example, the title  DID YOU HEAR MAMMY DIED?, refers to the question he kept asking people at his mother’s wake. He was too small to understand what it meant, and was rather enjoying being the bearer of important news.  He was bouncing on his bed when he told his aunt:

“‘If you want to see her, she’s in the dining room,’ I added helpfully, punctuating this sombre death notice with a commemorative belly flop”.

He also described one Irish village as so picturesque it was as if it had been ‘bitten by a radioactive postcard’ which I found hilarious.   This book has been something of a bestseller, and I can see why.  And yet somehow it did not quite work for me.  I am not sure how to explain.  I think it was because it lacked heart.  In some ways, this does not make much sense, as there is much here that is sincere.  He talks a lot about his grief for the mother he hardly remembers. He is still ashamed, strangely, of his behavior at the wake.  And yet still, I could not really enjoy it.  Perhaps it is just that bit too polished?   It’s was a bit like reading a few hundred pages of a dinner anecdote that has been told once too often.