The author’s artfully constructed debut is a painfully comic and thrillingly immediate memoir about the torments of drug dependency
invented, you’d raise an eyebrow at the plot. How he actually first came to use heroin beggars belief; ditto, that the savvy girlfriend he shares a flat with in London could possibly leave him alone with her suitcase full of cash savings.Rowland Hill isn’t playing a blame game, even if he suggests he was fundamentally unmoored by his parents, themselves poisonously unhappy with each other.
The title oozes irony: whether stealing someone’s credit card, or snatching a moment as a hormonal teen with the underwear models in the Marks & Spencer catalogue, the transgressions laid bare hardly represent uncharted waters, however murky. But what makes the book tick is Rowland Hill’s willingness to send up his own sense of exceptionalism.
But the richest, most painful comedy comes when he isn’t openly guying himself: see the passage describing the unique agony of waiting for his dealer, just as his mother’s texting to say she hasn’t heard from him but is still free to meet if he wants; he deletes the message, thinking only of his fix, calming his jitters by “trying to practise the act ofWho They Was
: here is another dramatic coming-of-age tale doubling as a stealth portrait of family breakdown, and parenting from the point of view of the parented, as well as an account of the peculiar dislocations of class-crossing in which the protagonist is an outsider wherever he is, whether that’s a halfway house or a college quad.
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