Leaving Home
A Memoir in Full Colour
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
An unflinching, brilliantly written, darkly funny, lavishly illustrated memoir by the acclaimed author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: A ringing testament about how one artist sees the world, and how his experiences have shaped his vision
“Tender, addictive, informative and unlike anything else―and brilliantly illustrated. It’s a gem.” ―Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least he had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham.
Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It’s about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It’s about family. It’s about knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier mâché and mental breakdown and great white sharks. It’s about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. It’s richly illustrated throughout with images from the author’s childhood, some of them altered in unforgiveable ways. As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Haddon (The Porpoise) pieces together family photographs, illustrations, and vivid biographical snippets for this panoramic memoir. Moving nonsequentially, Haddon mines his memories of growing up in Northampton with self-involved parents ("You have to remember... that he only wanted one child," his mother told his sister when she complained their father didn't love her), a stint as a young adult caretaking for a rigidly religious disabled man, and his time as a children's book author and illustrator. He also discusses his turn to writing for adults, though he admits it's hard to separate recollections of writing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time from "memories of the answers I've given" in interviews. The focus, though, is squarely on his relationships and his intellectual fascinations, including the fickle nature of memory and the mind, caring for his obstinate parents in their decline, and theories about writing as a kind of mysterious descent into the subconscious. Interspersed throughout are Haddon's drawings, including a painting of his mother sitting at his father's bedside, along with photos and ephemera like his paternal grandfather's cigarette cards. Haddon writes of his "inability to weave the patchily remembered events of own life into a coherent narrative," but the result is utterly transfixing in its meandering approach. It's a strange, beautiful work that exposes the inner workings of a creative mind.
