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 (some just three paragraphs, others several pages) along with family photos and drawings by the author--even footnotes. It opens with Haddon's sister, Fiona, and her recurring nightmare of their father wielding a knife, which continued for 45 years until Alzheimer's necessitated his move to a care home. Haddon, too, had nightmares in childhood, describing himself as "an anxious and depressed child." 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 to his own questions: "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. These details launched the title story from his collection The Pier Falls. 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." Such observations give readers insight into Haddon's compassion for his parents, despite their lack of affection for him and Fiona throughout their lives, and also for his hero Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. "Why am I me and not someone else?" Haddon wonders, and the answer, he believes, is "intimately connected to our ability to tell stories."
Haddon's bracing, raw honesty reveals his struggle with mental illness, his love for his wife and two children, his views on spirituality, and the life-giving force of his writing: "I've learnt that an artistic success, however big, gives you nothing new to work on this morning, and it's doing new work this morning that makes me feel at home in the world." 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
Shelf Talker: In Mark Haddon's moving collage-like memoir, significant moments in the author's life add up to a wondrous whole and provocative worldview.