My mother never hugged me. And her cruel response when my sister got meningitis still haunts us, reveals MARK HADDON, author of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, in a chilling account of parental neglect

Leaving Home by Mark Haddon (Vintage £25, 224 per person)

Nearly 40 pages into this extraordinary book comes an image—at once heartbreaking and heartwarming, funny and moving—that hits the reader with the shocking force of a violent blow to the solar plexus. It shows a forearm with a deep wound closed with five large stitches. The accompanying icy prose reveals: ‘The year is 2024 and I’m sitting in John Radcliffe’s A&E. I cut myself earlier in the evening and accidentally chose a new scalpel to do so instead of the scissors I normally use. I feel good now because that’s what cutting does.

‘That’s not why I’m doing this. ‘

It is written by Mark Haddon, multi-award-winning artist and much-loved author of the international bestseller The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time (which was later adapted into a hugely successful stage production). Haddon has always been open about her struggles with depression and anxiety, but it’s clear this won’t be a traditional memoir. And in typically self-effacing fashion, the image of Haddon’s arm is accompanied by one of his very funny little caricatures. It shows a dog wearing a T-shirt and shorts, holding a knife and his arm bleeding. The headline reads: ‘So what exactly will this solve?’

To say the book is fully illustrated doesn’t really do it justice. It consists of 87 short stories in small chapters loosely connected by the author’s fragmented memories. Each one is lovingly accompanied by pictures. There are drawings, parodies, some from childhood, some more recent, even the Weetabix Solar System Wall Painting; Each of these is a rich accompaniment to Haddon’s meticulous prose and a vital tool in the gradual excavation of his past.

Haddon grew up in a comfortable middle-class home in Northampton in the 1960s and 1970s (age 63) with her sister Fiona, to whom she was clearly very close and to whom the book is dedicated. The name of the book is ‘Exorcism’ but what exactly is exorcism? Maybe childhood memories, ghosts of an unhappy, loveless upbringing, of course. Her parents, Peter and Maureen, both recently deceased, seem perfect for anything other than being parents.

Photo of Mark Haddon’s mother, Maureen. Haddon says he has no memory of being hugged by her

Mark Haddon says he has no memory of being hugged by his mother

His father was a successful architect and outstanding athlete who played rugby for Northampton Saints. Young Haddon enjoyed playing rugby and admits ‘even now I miss the mud, the bruises and the legalized brutality, but this was not an environment where you could easily talk about poetry’.

But it is Mother Maureen who hits her neck the hardest. I swear, would Haddon accept this? So how fair is this? She says she has no memory of being held by her mother, but on the right is a photo of Maureen holding young Mark and baby Fiona. ‘Were they performing for the camera?’ wonders.

Maybe sometimes it’s best not to think about these things too much. But it honestly wasn’t much fun for these two talented, sensitive kids. ‘I think my parents bought into the idea that I was an extraordinarily intelligent child because it diminished their need to understand me,’ Haddon writes.

‘I was in my own world of encyclopedias and star maps; A world whose language is foreign to them and where I know best how to take care of myself. On the contrary, they treated Fiona like a burden, and because she was not as academic as I was, she did not get the approval at school and at home in those early years.’

A few years later, Fiona is hospitalized with meningitis, she says, and is waiting to find out whether it is viral or bacterial (the latter can quickly become fatal). ‘He called home, but my mother said they couldn’t visit because ‘Your father plays golf in the morning’. ‘They kept finding reasons not to visit him the whole week he was in hospital.’

He was later sent to Haddon public school.

He writes with characteristic, wry bitterness: ‘Bullying was not only widespread; It was the default relationship between young boys forced to share a very small space like factory-farmed chickens, with pastoral care and discipline largely unhandled by older boys. ‘You were bullied or bullied.’ He talks about his own inability to piece together the sporadically remembered events of his own life into a coherent narrative, and that’s what we see in this wonderful book. Slices of life are brilliantly illustrated and elegantly told.

It’s the kind of book you can return to again and again for insights into life, love, and the way we live; Insights that reach us in a non-linear way in the book, just like in real life.

Haddon has started his own family, and there is a wonderful chapter (we might as well call it a love letter) about meeting his wife Sos, another writer and critic. Haddon’s fears and anxieties after being hit by a car on her bike while she was six months pregnant are brilliantly depicted. Both his wife and child were fine, and soon after the accident Haddon won the Whitbread Book of the Year award for Curious Incident. In his speech he says, ‘You never realize exactly how much you love someone until you kneel on a road thinking they are going to die in front of you.’ Their son Zack is now ‘a huge bearded creature who studies maths and can leg-press over 560kg’. So no harm was done…

Haddon now volunteers for the Samaritans and realizes how useful it is.

‘Of course the organization has been a lifeline for me, especially when my own mental health is fragile. ‘Three to three-quarter hour shifts each week focused entirely on other people and their concerns often feel like a holiday away from myself.’

He is calmly honest about his own health problems. He underwent a triple heart bypass in 2019, about which he writes with his characteristic wry calm. ‘Anyone who has sex within six weeks of heart bypass deserves a medal, as does their partner who had to get aroused despite a huge scar on his chest where his sternum had been cut with a rotary saw, dismembered and then resealed with titanium rings (I asked for all the details).’ And that’s what’s happening in the attached photo.

It is impossible to overstate the riches of this sensitive, transformative little book. There is magic on every page, and in the end you can be grateful that someone as thoughtful and insightful as Haddon is among us and illuminates everything around us.