This beautifully written and utterly heartbreaking memoir begins with a horrific event: the sudden death of Gavanndra Hodge’s younger sister Candy, aged nine, during a family holiday to Tunisia in 1989. In the middle of the night Candy collapses, victim of a rare virus, and as Gavanndra watches she dies in their father’s arms: “For a long moment it looked like a sculpture, but Dad was howling, a noise tearing from his stomach, and I wanted to put my hands over my ears and close my eyes but I couldn’t.” The family returns to London, Candy is cremated, and life goes on.
Fast forward to 2014, and it turns out that putting her hands over her ears and closing her eyes is exactly what Hodge has managed to do for 25 years. Now in her 40s, she is outwardly the picture of success: a Cambridge graduate, deputy editor of Tatler, happily married with two children. Yet beyond Candy’s death and funeral she has no memories of her. When Hodge sets about writing an account of her childhood she finds herself binge drinking and sliding into depression. Far from moving on from the shock of her sister’s death, she realises, she “adapted to it, like a sapling growing around a metal spike, making it part of who I was”, and at last begins counselling for a lifetime of repressed grief and trauma.
The Consequences of Love is a courageous attempt at coming to an accommodation with loss. It’s also an inspired, at times bleakly comic narrative about living in a family so spectacularly dysfunctional that it could have formed the basis of a book in its own right. “I have spent over two decades pretending to be a different person, someone who fits into the world that I find myself a part of,” Hodge admits. The high achiever is a hard-won facade; her true backstory isn’t one of glamorous accomplishment but of the “savage self-confidence which comes from desperation”, of “skin-of-the-teeth survival”.
Hodge grew up in 1980s and 90s London as the daughter of celebrity hairdresser and “philandering junkie” Gavin Hodge (her exotic first name, which sounds like an invincible warrior queen’s in the Dungeons & Dragons games she plays as a teen, is really derived from his). For decades Gavin was dealer by unofficial appointment to a cohort of blue-blooded addicts from Jamie, Marquess of Blandford to Lady Alethea Savile. His wife, Jan, was an alcoholic former model. Hodge recalls making her own breakfast by the time she was three following her parents’ all-night benders, “the room dark, wine bottles and ashtrays all around, my parents still asleep – who knew when they would wake up”.
Candy is born when Hodge is four; Jan once told her “she and Dad were surprised to find themselves pregnant a second time because they had been so wasted on booze and drugs that they couldn’t remember having had sex”. As a seven-year-old she takes on the job of stubbing out the burning cigarettes of her dad’s clients after they pass out in the small hours on the living room floor; when the police rip open her teddy bears during a raid she doesn’t reveal that Gavin’s heroin is stashed in the battery compartment of his torch since he’s warned her. “It’s our little secret.”
Hodge relates all this with an extreme candour that highlights both the agony and the absurdity of being raised by a junkie. Part of the challenge involved in her examining of the past lies in having to accept that “fun and funny” Dad himself had no qualms about hurting her. She calls him a sex addict, but his behaviour is far more predatory than the term implies. He grooms her friends by plying them with drugs: “Girls who went to my school. Girls whom I brought down to his hairdressing salon.” Jan finally throws him out after discovering that he has been having sex with one of Gavanndra’s schoolmates from the year below. Is he repentant? Not a bit of it. When weighing Gavin’s casual destructiveness, Hodge veers between revulsion and regret: “My father never said sorry. The drug addiction was a disease; the sex drive was a dragon.”
It is Jan, whose born-again Christianity Hodge finds difficult to tolerate, who emerges as the quiet heroine in this story, providing the day-to-day stability after the divorce without which her daughter wouldn’t have managed to get her life back on track. One of the most compelling things in the book is an interview Hodge conducts with Jan about the past: her mother’s honesty, and her memories of Candy, are “a revelation”. Her father, on the other hand, “never required me to be honest, only complicit, which is much more fun”. You wish that she could have brought herself to condemn his manipulations in less equivocal terms. But mostly you want to salute her for escaping the dragon’s den, and for writing about it with such verve.
• The Consequences of Love by Gavanndra Hodge is published by Michael Joseph (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
