Original Sins
A Memoir
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize*
“A shattering portrait of addiction—generously open, desperately honest and confronting.” —Catherine Cho, author of Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness
An electrifying debut memoir of a pastor’s son chronicling his loss of faith, his addiction to heroin and our universal quest to find something to believe in
Matt Rowland Hill had two great loves in his life: Jesus and heroin. The son of an evangelical minister, Hill grew up with an unwavering devotion to the tenets of his parents’ Baptist church. But by high school, he began to experience a crisis of faith. To fill the void, he turned to literature, and then to heroin and cocaine. By his twenties, Hill’s substance abuse escalated into a full-on addiction. As he grew increasingly suicidal, he knew he had to come to terms with both religion and drugs to survive.
Hill’s debut is an extraordinary, gorgeously crafted memoir of faith, family, loss, shame and addiction. But ultimately, Original Sins is a raw portrait of survival—of growing up and learning how to live.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exquisite and unflinching debut, the son of a Welsh Baptist minister recounts his harrowing spiral into drug addiction. Throughout his life, Hill dealt with contradictions. Raised in Swansea, Wales, in the 1980s, Hill and his three siblings endured childhood trauma in a home "thick with misery" and dominated by a melancholic, taciturn Baptist minister father and a hypercritical mother who regarded any secular pastime as "the works of the devil." With raging hormones during puberty, Hill ran the gauntlet of "temptation, sin, despair, repentance" and by his teens was having sex and surreptitiously downing bottles of whiskey. After struggling to reconcile his strict religious orthodoxy with the less punitive Anglicanism of his prestigious boarding school, Hill eventually renounced his Baptist beliefs, became an atheist, and turned to drugs in college to blot his pain, shame, and guilt. In visceral detail, Hill recounts his descent into intravenous heroin use and the damage it wrought until he found his way to a shaky recovery after 40 days in a London psychiatric ward. Combined with his stunning prose, his clever use of biblical metaphors—which trace his "Genesis," "Rapture," and "Noble Truths"—makes his story of salvation all the more affecting. In a sea of addiction memoirs, this stands out.
