Why Write a Memoir?

 Who on earth wants to know about your life? Unless you’re a celebrity, or you’ve done something weird or ground-breaking. Maybe I’m just an attention-seeking, narcissistic idiot! I’ve had to think a lot about the ‘why’ – and it has a lot to do with my much-loved younger brother, Jon. 

He died as a homeless alcoholic before he reached old age. He lay in hospital suffering from organ failure for almost two weeks before he died, alone, and his family weren’t told that he was there. It’s a wound that keeps on being re-opened.  

Sitting in Birmingham railway station, on my way to the Historical Novel conference in Dartington, I was approached by a homeless man, aged about 50, very polite and non-threatening, who asked for money for a coffee. I asked him about himself and he told me that he was a drug addict on a programme, living in a homeless hostel and struggling to stay clean. He’d once had a good job, a wife, a house with a mortgage, until drugs had got hold of him. He was a lovely man – a former DJ (my brother was a rock guitarist and sound guy), fully aware of his situation and the probable consequences. He has a son he’s trying to keep in touch with. 

And it made me think of my brother and the reasons why he came to such a terrible end. Jon had a fantastic wife, serial girlfriends, (all interesting, feisty women) and four lovely daughters – strong characters with creative, independent personalities. Jon had everything to live for. 

Jon, standing. Barn Theatre rehearsal - his first band!

I started writing the memoir when Jon died, and I realise now that it was, in part, an attempt to unravel the past and find out what had gone wrong in my brother’s life that had made it so painful he had to drown it at the bottom of a bottle. We were much-loved as children. We had a happy childhood, didn’t we?  But I came to realise that siblings experience things differently; what is happy for one isn’t necessarily happy for the other. 

My father’s family was Irish and I discovered that there was a thread of alcoholism running through our genetic line: one great-grandmother, one of my aunts, a cousin and my brother. How much do genes contribute to a tendency to addiction? 

There was always something different in my brother – an aloofness, a hidden anger. He cracked open one of our younger cousin’s skulls with a slate when he was 11 or 12 for no reason at all. When he was 17 he left home and disappeared, changing his name to avoid being traced. We didn’t know whether he was alive or dead for 10 years. 

Jon in full song

Even after he’d got back in touch, contact with his family was sporadic and usually through his wife and girlfriends. After my mother’s funeral, we never spoke; fury on my part at the way he had treated my parents as their health failed; guilt on his about his own behaviour, plus resentment that I was more successful than he was (his perception, not mine).  

I started looking for him again about a year before he died and found a post on Facebook, dating from a couple of years earlier, saying that I was a ‘terrible woman’, fake and insincere, and he wouldn’t want me at his funeral. That caused a great deal of soul-searching and made me even more determined to be there when it happened. But that was all I could find of him and it was so hostile I stopped looking. Other family members were in a similar position. The fact that he died in hospital without any of us knowing, was very bitter. No chance for us to have that last conversation, to say the things we would have liked to say. Forgiveness, reconciliation, love. No chance to ask questions either. Mainly ‘Why?’ 

Jon had an abundance of talent – he could sing before he could talk and had every opportunity to ‘make it’ as a musician. Instead he drank a bottle of Rioja for breakfast and we read about his life in the tabloid press. (My mother kept the cuttings). 

Unhappy Jon, L front next to me. Scattering our father's ashes at Rough Close.

I’ve written about our childhood in Reading My Mother, the rest of it I’m still working my way through, figuring it out. Wendy Pratt, in the Ghost Lake, writes that being working class isn’t a great start – there’s a lack of aspiration built into our education and the community itself has a lack of role models to inspire us. In our family there was no lack of ambition, but perhaps without the confidence to believe we could get where we wanted to go. It was a constant struggle with Imposter Syndrome – ‘someone like me shouldn’t be doing this’. But many rock musicians came from working-class backgrounds, so for Jon it probably wasn’t that. 

Perhaps I’ll find the answer before I get to the end of ‘Writing My Way Home’, the second part of the story. The man I met on Birmingham station says there is no answer – it’s a matter of luck in a random universe. Perhaps he’s right.  

Order from Waterstones: https://tinyurl.com/345ac9ky

Barnes and Noble  https://tinyurl.com/3r8sst4c

Bookends Cumbria: https://tinyurl.com/4nfk3hz9

Amazon:  https://tinyurl.com/5ekn75ac