World Book Night
On the occasion of World Book Night, I have been thinking of those writers whose work has illuminated for me the various lived experiences of mental health problems, substance misuse, homelessness and imprisonment. As a practitioner, I was an avid reader of the genre, believing that the insights they offered would give me a greater understanding of those whom I was seeking to support and help. So, in the spirit of the occasion, I thought I would share some personal favourites.
Kay Redfield Jamison is an American clinical psychologist and leading expert on bipolar disorder. Her 1995 autobiography An Unquiet Mind is a compelling account of her own journey growing up and learning to live with the illness. Through her writing, I developed a greater understanding of the fathomless depths of depressive despair but also the great lure of mania.
Lee Stringer was desperately searching for a crack pipe when he found a pen. Grand Central, his stories from the streets of New York, read like a cross between The Wire and Raymond Chandler and positively fizz with incident, deft characterisation, compassion and hope.
Closer to home, John Healy’s Grass Arena is a spare viseral evocation of a brutal North London Irish childhood followed by decades lived in the grip of alcohol addiction in the streets and parks of North London. Like the pugilist he was, Healy knows how to wind the reader. Perservence is rewarded with a story of redemption through chess.
I came to know Erwin James through his column in the Guardian, written whilst when he was still in prison serving a life sentence. So when A Life Inside was published, I already regarded him as an avuncular correspondent. His perspicacity,humour and humanity illuminate the world of prison and one man’s journey to rehabiliation. When James describes weeping on hearing the news of his move to an open prison, I cried tears of joy too.
Brendan Behan, the self-styled “drinker with a writing problem” was just sixteen when he was sentenced to three years detention at Hollesley Bay Borstal, Suffolk, in 1938. Borstal Boy, his autobiography, describes this experience with great wit, irreverence and bags of what we now call attitude. By turn an acerbic and tender coming of age prison story, Behan writes with passion of coming to consciousness and growing up to eshew violence.
The books listed here all demonstrate the power of the human spirit to overcome great adversity and the generosity to share that experience with others. Just one of the million reasons , as the slogan goes, to read one for World Book Night.
