From a Best-Selling Novelist, a Memoir Drawn in Blood and Whimsy
In “Leaving Home,” the writer and illustrator Mark Haddon recasts a painful childhood in kaleidoscopic color.
Mark Haddon as a child with his sister, Fiona.via Mark Haddon
By Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson’s works include “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” and “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” Her latest book, “One Aladdin Two Lamps,” was published earlier this year.
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LEAVING HOME: A Memoir in Full Colour, by Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon is a visual writer. His debut novel for adults, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” used language for what it can show as much as for what it can tell: the dog “leaking blood from the fork-holes”; the boy “hunched up with my forehead pressed into the grass.”
His new book is “Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour.” Inside are family snapshots, sketches, cartoons, graphics, thought-bubble musings — all the alternate ways of seeing that characterize this writer’s work. Haddon isn’t someone who illustrates his writing. Words and pictures belong together.
One of Haddon’s illustrations for “Leaving Home,” in which he portrays his complicated relationship with his father.Mark Haddon
Reading this memoir is like sitting on the floor in a room with a friend who spreads over the carpet their dog-eared, yellowing, predigital photo albums and spills out a box-file marked “The Past.” It’s an immersive experience.
The story starts in 1962 in Middle England, Northamptonshire. (For American readers, this is certainly not the Hamptons, but north.)
Mark’s mother, Maureen, was a full-time homemaker who believed that working women cause unemployment but idle women lead men on. She cleaned obsessively, creeping up on the family cat to spray its rear end with Marks and Spencer’s vaginal deodorant. When Mark got his ear pierced and Christmas came around, her wish list stayed the same for the next two decades: “The only thing I want,” she tells his sister, “is for your brother to take that thing out of his ear.”
Much later, when she lamented her trials to a friend, the friend had this to say: “You should have smacked him when he was a child, Maureen.”
Mark’s father was a self-taught architect and natural athlete whose taciturn mixture of pride and unhappiness reflected the postwar social change in England, where advancement became possible for working-class men (not so much for women until the mid-1970s).
This material affluence failed to address what Haddon later dubs the Hard Problem. Humans are self-aware; how this happens in creatures made of meat, we don’t yet know. But it forces us to seek meaning, usually outside of ourselves — in a god, or good works, or politics, or study. A happy marriage can do it.
The Haddons’ marriage was not happy. Mr. Haddon had an affair with a much younger woman. His children, Mark and Fiona, were part of the set piece necessary to make a display to the outside world. Mrs. Haddon was drinking a lot, sleeping a lot, taking headache pills. At 12, Mark was sent to boarding school.
There is no self-pity in this memoir. It’s as if younger Mark is showing older Mark a Magic Lantern slide show, and older Mark is helping younger Mark understand the images.
When Mark is an adult, the same unflinching kindness is at work in the narrative. Telling the truth is the best balm. There’s Mark’s fear of flying, his fear of dying, his fear of his wife, Sos, dying, after she is hit by a car while six months pregnant.
There’s his triple bypass operation, and a graphic account of the rotary saw that crunched through his sternum. There’s his lifelong struggle with depression and what he takes to help himself. There is, out of nowhere, an image that shows him cutting himself so deeply with a scalpel that he needs five stitches.
Haddon’s illustrations include this interpretation of his triple bypass surgery.Mark Haddon
This is a good moment to explain that “Leaving Home” is not linear. The narrative flow is more like blood pumping around the branching arteries of the body than water channeled in a rill. I like this method because it is closer to reality. Our minds are not linear. Each of us moves in a past/present/future simultaneously. Memories don’t sit side by side in chronological order, like diary entries. Time’s arrow is not how we remember. Haddon’s writing more faithfully tracks the truth of our minds, which see time in the round.
Mark’s parents die. His children grow up. His books are a success. He fields phone calls as a volunteer at a Samaritans help line in Oxford, where he lives. (“A shift of three and three-quarter hours each week focusing entirely on other people and their concerns often feels like a holiday from myself.”) He struggles with the Hard Problem. He can’t bring himself to believe that humans are spiritual jam in a material doughnut, but he does continually discover, as if always new, that “writing lives on that boundary between consciousness of two worlds.”
This is an uplifting book, funny and sad and hopeful. It’s a collaborative book, too. Haddon’s gentle, curious voice asks us questions about his life, and ours, shares his difficulties, speaks aloud those doubts he believes he will never settle.
And before the Hard Problem comes something else, equally important for these troubled times. “The question is not ‘Is anyone in there?’ but ‘What exists between us?’” he writes. “Our humanity is not an individual quality that can be measured and traded and celebrated and ignored, but an activity, a thing human beings do together.”
LEAVING HOME: A Memoir in Full Colour | By Mark Haddon | Doubleday | 320 pp. | $35
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