The author of Original Sins, an account of addiction and shame, on his book’s impact on his evangelical parents, reading the Patrick Melrose series while waiting for drug dealers, and how looking middle class saved him from arrestMatt Rowland Hill, 38, is the author of Original Sins, about growing up as the son of a baptist minister before falling into a decade-long addiction to heroin while studying at Oxford. Out in paperback, it was longlisted for last year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction while being praised by Geoff Dyer for its “novelistic virtues of vivid scene-making, fully realised characterisation and psychological subtlety”. Hill and I sat in a park near his home in east London.I might have read this as a novel had it not been subtitled “a memoir”.The subtitle wasn’t my choice: I was open to it being published as fiction if my publisher had wanted that. I approached it like a novel, thinking about point of view and how I’d produce moments of irony and humour, which maybe liberated me to write with an emotional distance that paradoxically allowed me to be more honest. Nothing is fabricated. I did go to psychiatric units. I was a heroin addict for all that time. I used my imagination to make vivid the bits of dialogue or details about what we were wearing, although it’s surprising how detailed your recollections are once you dig in; what my father told my mother on that car ride to Guernsey – “If you died tonight, I’d dance on your grave” – was scored into... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2023-04-29 17:00:41 UTC ]
Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Fri, 09/09/2011 - 11:09 Hardie Grant UK has acquired a DIY nail art book by Sharmadean Reid, founder of fashionable nail salon WAH Nails in Dalston, east London. Commissioning editor Kate Pollard bought world rights directly from Reid. The book... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-09-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Mon, 13/06/2011 - 09:00 Foyles bookshop is to open its seventh branch near the site of the 2012 Olympics in the new Westfield Stratford City shopping centre. The family-owned bookseller, which has its flagship store on Charing Cross Road, central... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-06-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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