Jenni Fagan’s extraordinary memoir began as a suicide note 20 years ago. Upon writing the note, it seemed insufficient. And so she borrowed a typewriter from a neighbour and wrote 14 hours a day until she had committed the story of her childhood to the page, a story she had never told.
Fagan locked it away in a flight case and didn’t return to it until in 2020, by which time she was an award-winning novelist, poet, and one of Granta’s anointed Best of British Novelists. When she fell ill with Covid-19 she realised it would be a waste to have survived her childhood without telling the story. The resulting memoir is one of the most affecting and remarkable I have read.
Ootlin, meaning “outsider” in Scottish vernacular, is the name she imagined for herself because she never knew her name. The story begins at the first moment it went wrong, when she was five months in utero and her mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital having tried to kill herself. Fagan speaks in the voice of her pre-born self, and the unlikeliness of this doesn’t jar, such is her skill and persuasiveness as a writer. It was decided at that point that Fagan would be taken into care. By the time she was seven, she had lived in 14 different homes.
The book is about Fagan’s childhood “in care” in Edinburgh, and the utter failure of that childcare system. She never had a stable, kind or loving home as a child, never knew her family, and never had a sense of her identity. There was no “care” involved in Fagan’s childhood. She was moved so often from home to home that the only time she felt at ease was when she was sleeping rough or in a residential home with other foster children.
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Before she was five, she had already had an out-of-body experience caused by a physical trauma she cannot remember, but it is an experience she recognises again when she is raped at the age of 12.
There were few kindnesses shown to her throughout her childhood. She had two adoptive families, each as cruel as the other. In one difficult scene, her first adoptive mother offers her a choice of food between a tin of dog food and a bowl of Fagan’s vomit. The mother in her second home kept an ever-expanding collection of dolls and teddies in her bedroom, while Fagan was dressed in ragged, ill-fitting clothes.
When she was 12 she attempted suicide, after which she was placed in a residential home. When she ran away she endured the most horrific ordeal at the hands of four men, and when she returned was charged by the police for absconding and wasting police time. On her 13th birthday she was admitted to a women’s refuge. Nobody knew it was her birthday until a care worker noticed the date. “This isn’t much, sweetheart, but ... here’s a new packet of 20 cigarettes, from me to you,” she says. “Tomorrow they are going to blow up the high-rises on the hill so maybe you can watch from the garden?” This is one of the greatest kindnesses Fagan experienced in her childhood.
In writing her story, Fagan used her diaries, which she kept from a very young age, and her official files, which she finally gained access to under freedom of information. The judicious placement of candid childhood photographs are heartbreaking, but Fagan uses them to create a visual connection between the reader and the vulnerable child she was and to firmly lead us through her story, never allowing us to forget that she was a helpless child, never allowing us to look away. Nor should we.
This book, like Lemn Sissay’s My Name Is Why, will stay with me for the rest of my life. It’s almost unbearable to read how Fagan was mistreated by almost every adult whose duty it was to help her. The casual cruelty and shirking of responsibility by care workers, police and doctors is astonishing. How Fagan survived the care system that was supposed to protect her is nothing short of a miracle.
Ootlin ends when Fagan is about to turn 16 and her record of misdemeanours will be wiped. She is determined to get clean and make an honest living for herself. It would be facile to interpret Fagan’s literary success and achievements as happy endings but it lightens the load to know that the child who found such solace in writing grew up to have her talent recognised.
Reading about Fagan’s childhood is harrowing but I have no hesitation in recommending Ootlin to everyone, not only because Fagan’s ability to tell her story in her singular poetic prose is an incredible literary achievement, but also because the child who was never asked if she was okay by social workers or foster parents or teachers or police or doctors or other adults deserves to be heard now.
Halfway through the book Fagan writes: “Nobody has ever asked – what happened to you? What are we not getting right? What don’t we know? What can we do for you? Who are you? What do you miss? Who hurt you? What can we do to get them?” Her answers to those questions will keep you awake at night, but she deserves to be heard, and her story may offer some direction as to how we can better protect vulnerable children
Further south, Catherine Taylor’s memoir The Stirrings is set in the 1970s and 1980s in Sheffield, where Taylor grew up after a move from New Zealand. Her story is set against a similar backdrop of miners’ strikes, Thatcherism, brilliant music and grim recession, all under the long shadow cast on the northern female psych by the threat of the Yorkshire Ripper.
While Fagan’s book is the extraordinary story of brutal neglect and abuse, Taylor’s memoir is about what might be called (without any intention to trivialise) the more ordinary traumas of childhood: her parents’ painful divorce, her own chronic illness, abortion and the tragic early loss of a friend. But she is equally concerned with questions common to both books: how do we become who we are? How do our childhood experiences shape our lives? And how do we survive our experiences?
Taylor’s childhood as she knew it ended at the age of nine, when her father left the family. Her parents had been married for 25 years and the split left her mother struggling and stressed about money. Taylor was left to her own devices. There was no lack of love in her life; in her acknowledgments she writes that she remembers her “amazing mother” every day with gratitude and love. But the difficult nature of the break-up meant the young Taylor didn’t see her father for prolonged periods, and so their relationship never properly developed.
As well as a personal story, The Stirrings is also an atmospheric social document. There are morbidly fascinating details, such as how, in late June of 1979, a recording of the voice of Wearside Jack, a hoaxer pretending to be the Yorkshire Ripper, which he had sent to the police to goad them, was “broadcast over and over again, on buses, in shopping centres, in university halls. It played over the airwaves of our local radio station in Sheffield like a twisted nightly entertainment.”
Taylor writes about another bogeymen of the era, nuclear war, and includes more fascinating historical details, including the CND movement, and the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, which was set up to protest the RAF allowing US cruise missiles to be stored there. She also mentions the abduction and murder of Hilda Murrell, a 78-year-old retired horticulturist, whose death became the subject of conspiracy theories that she was keeping documents in her house on behalf of her nephew, a senior naval intelligence officer during the Falklands War.
But it is in the intensely personal details that Taylor offers us her thoughts on the fragility and malleability of the burgeoning adult. Her description of her abortion, and the cruel insensitivity of placing women desperate to keep babies on the same ward as women desperate to terminate pregnancies, is delicately written and deeply affecting.
Taylor is mostly concerned with how the difficult experiences of her childhood and adolescence reverberate in the adult she became – the incomprehension of her father leaving, the sadness of her accidental pregnancy and abortion, how it affected her relationship with her then partner, the terror of her medical experiences as she was diagnosed with and treated for Graves’ disease, and the tragic loss of a young friend.
The ordinariness of many of Taylor’s experiences is affecting in its own way and she makes even the smallest experiences interesting. I was reminded of the epigraph from Fagan’s Ootlin, the Louise Bourgeois quote: “Tell your own story and you will be interesting.”
These are two different memoirs of two different childhoods but the undeniable truth at the heart of both is that while our experiences thankfully don’t have to define us, every experience is absorbed, everything is processed, everything leaves its mark.
Further reading
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Random House, 1969), the first in Maya Angelou’s series of ground-breaking memoirs, recounts her traumatic childhood in the racist and misogynistic setting of Depression-era America. A devastating story of childhood neglect and abuse and its effects.
Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger: A Memoir of My Body (Harper, 2017) delves into how her childhood sexual trauma (she was gang-raped at the age of 12) affected her relationship with her body, but it is also a radical examination of how society views women’s bodies.
Tara Westover’s best-selling memoir Educated (Hutchinson, 2018) tells the story of her upbringing in a rural Idaho family with a controlling fundamentalist Mormon father. Westover was homeschooled and her parents’ religious beliefs meant she was never given medicine other than her mother’s herbal remedies. Educated is the story of how she liberated herself through books and education.
My Name Is Why (Canongate, 2019), Lemn Sissay’s memoir of his childhood in care, follows his search for identity and his search for an artistic life against a backdrop of cruelty and rejection. This is an inspiring story of one boy’s determination to become a poet and his salvation in the process.
