Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Dogs and Monsters) was always leaving home. That is the impression he gives readers in Leaving Home, his beautifully written, collage-like memoir of moments that shaped him as a person and as a writer.
Leaving Home consists of 87 nonlinear sections varying in length with family photos and drawings by the author--even footnotes. He speculates about what others call nostalgia, the nature of "longing, this echo of some remembered comfort." The delight of the memoir comes from his grappling with answers: "Is it that, as children, we live inside a bubble of focused attention which gives everything inside the bubble a memorable fierceness?"
Luckily, Haddon appears never to have lost his bubble of focused attention. He supplies uncanny details that place readers beside him at Brighton's Palace Pier, with its sounds, smells, and sights. He writes of the adults and children he worked with, who had a variety of disabilities both mental and physical, and their impact on him: "Our humanity is not an individual quality that can be measured and traded and celebrated and ignored, but an activity, a thing human beings do together."
Haddon's bracing, raw honesty reveals his struggle with mental illness, love for his wife and two children, views on spirituality, and the life-giving force of his writing. He notes for one of his writing groups, "As writers we... can simply lay one thing beside another and let readers do the rest." Haddon's recollections create a moving cumulative effect; he gives readers the space to savor his epiphanies and arrive at their own. --Jennifer M. Brown