Attempting a psychological analysis of a literary work is a fool’s errand, for obvious reasons: you’re trying to assess the inside of the writer’s head from the inside of your own, using the inherently treacherous medium of make-believe. And the aim on their part, of course, is always to beguile, and often to deceive.
And yet the temptation is sometimes too great to resist. Mark Haddon, whose blistering memoir details a mainly miserable and loveless childhood and an adulthood studded with significant hurdles, hit the literary jackpot with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2003. In it, a teenage protagonist who struggles to communicate with the world around him uncovers a world of lying adults – most egregiously, he has been told his mother has died, rather than absconded with the nextdoor neighbour – and runs away from home. A more recent novel, The Porpoise, opens with a fatal air crash before morphing into a reworking of Pericles; in Leaving Home, we discover that Haddon is terrified of flying. We also learn that he borrowed heavily from childhood holidays in Brighton to create the atmosphere and texture for his story The Pier Falls, a merciless, documentary-style narration of a cataclysmic seaside disaster.
It’s not a stretch, then, to note that the raw material of his upbringing is vitally important; specifically, a near-total absence of love or affection, his mother’s apparent withdrawal – to bed, or to drink – from family life, a continual thrum of undermining. What’s more fascinating is to consider the variety of modes he uses to achieve a kind of creative elasticity. Haddon’s work moves between strikingly plain reportage, as if to say “this happened”, and flights of fancy and fantasy, often rooted in classical mythology with its possibilities of shape-shifting and other mutations. As this memoir makes clear on almost every single page, he is as much interested in images as words; there are hundreds of illustrations, from the wincingly explicit photographs of his elderly mother’s open foot wound or the scars of his own heart bypass surgery, to his puckish collages and phantasmagorical paintings and sculptures. His work, whether verbal or visual, is a reclamation yard. In one crude cartoon, a rugby-playing father rebukes his weeping son with the words “I have sired a weakling child”. Beneath runs the son’s riposte: “But he will draw pictures of you when you are DEAD HAHAHAHA HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA.”
The question remains: can you recover from – or even avenge – an unhappy childhood by dismantling and remaking it differently in adulthood? In one demonstrable sense, yes: not only has Haddon made a life in literature, he has his own family, and a strong and continuing bond with his sister, Fiona. But alongside the evident joy he finds in acts of creation, in personal relationships and in activities such as running, there is damage that the book suggests he needs to examine and catalogue, to somehow fix in place.
He does not gloss over it. Early on, the reader comes face to face with a photograph of a newly sutured arm; above it, a doodle of a dog, with bleeding forepaw, and the caption “And what, precisely, is this going to solve?” Two matter-of-fact paragraphs opposite describe Haddon’s visit to A&E: he cut himself deliberately, but “accidentally” chose a new scalpel “instead of the scissors I might normally use” and went too deep. He cuts when he is “uncontrollably angry” with himself; calm returns quickly, leaving him “embarrassed” (an emotion that recurs frequently) and “apologetic” to the hospital staff who care for him. Perhaps the most shocking thing for the reader is that this particular event happened in 2024; there is no statute of limitations on feeling desperate.
What, then, to do with the nostalgia – the sense 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, horrifying and exhilarating record of how to live beside what has happened.
• Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour by Mark Haddon is published by Chatto & Windus (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
