Review of Leaving Home by Mark Haddon – A Painful Memoir of a Loveless Childhood | Biography and memoirs

ATrying to psychoanalyze a literary work is a fool’s errand, for obvious reasons: you’re trying to assess inside the writer’s head from inside your own, using an inherently deceptive device. The aim on their part, of course, is always to deceive, and often to deceive.

However, sometimes the temptation is too great to resist. Mark Haddon, whose acerbic memoir describes a miserable, loveless childhood and an adulthood full of great obstacles, hit the literary major with 2003’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. In it, a teenage protagonist struggling to connect with the world around him exposes a world of lying adults – and, most horribly, he is told that his mother is dead, rather than running off with his next-door neighbour. And he runs away from home. A more recent novel, Porpoises, begins with a fatal plane crash before turning into a reworking of Pericles; In Leaving Home, we discover that Haddon is terrified of flying. We also know that he borrowed heavily from childhood holidays in Brighton to create the atmosphere and texture of his story The Pier Falls, a harsh documentary account of a catastrophic coastal disaster.

It is no exaggeration, then, to note that the raw material for its breeding is of vital importance; Specifically, the almost complete absence of love or affection, and his mother’s apparent withdrawal – into bed or drinking – from family life, a continuing undermining effect. What’s even more fascinating is to consider the variety of methods he uses to achieve a kind of creative flexibility. Haddon’s work moves between strikingly clear journalistic reports, as if to say “this is what happened,” and flights of imagination and fantasy, often rooted in classical mythology with its possibilities for shape-shifting and other mutations. As this memoir makes clear on almost every page, he is as interested in pictures as in words; There are hundreds of illustrations, from sharp, candid images of his elderly mother’s foot wound or the scars of his heart surgery, to his bold posters, imaginative paintings and sculptures. His work, whether verbal or visual, is an arena of reclamation. In one crude cartoon, a rugby-playing father scolds his crying son, saying: “You’ve given birth to a weak child.” Below is the son’s reply: “But he will draw pictures of you when you die Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

The question remains: Can you recover from—or even avenge—your unhappy childhood by taking it apart and remaking it differently in adulthood? On the one hand it can be proven, yes: not only did Haddon live a life in literature, he had his own family, and a strong and continuing bond with his sister, Fiona. But beyond the obvious pleasure he finds in acts of creation, in personal relationships and in activities like running, there is a harm that the book suggests needs to be examined and catalogued, to be repaired in some way.

He doesn’t cover it up. Early on, the reader comes face to face with an image of a freshly sewn up arm; Above it is a doodle of a dog, with a bleeding forelock, and the caption: “And what exactly will this solve?” There are two contrasting factual passages that describe Haddon’s visit to the emergency department: He intentionally cut himself, but “by accident” he chose a new scalpel “instead of the scissors I might normally use” and went too deep. He cuts off when he is “uncontrollably angry” with himself; Calmness quickly returns, leaving him “embarrassed” (an often recurring emotion) and “apologetically” to the hospital staff caring for him. Perhaps what shocks the reader most is that this particular event occurred in the year 2024; There is no statute of limitations on feeling hopeless.

What, then, to do with nostalgia—the feeling of longing for the sights, sounds, smells, and artefacts of the 1970s—that grips and confuses him? One answer is to put those thoughts and feelings into a work like this—an incredibly detailed, painful, funny, terrifying, and exhilarating record of what it’s like to live alongside what happened.