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There are around 40,000 children who are being cared for by The State in Britain. Meaning that their parents are either dead or in jail or in some way incapacitated and unable to be fathers and mothers. Jenni Fagan was one of those kids from birth. Her father was long gone and her mother was severely mentally ill.

First she went to foster homes (a lot of those) and finally she was adopted by a couple at age 5 and her adoptive mother seems to have hated her from the get go. It seems like a strange thing to do, to adopt a child and then hate it. Jenni writes :

not one single second of sympathy for seven years

On occasion, as a punishment, she was given dog food to eat. It's Dickensian. Eventually even the gruesome adoptive mother realised it wasn’t working out and at age 12 Jenni went into a care home until she was 16.

Children in care are not like other children because the only people who care for them do so because they are paid to. The kids in care homes, it seems, from very early ages, get hold of all manner of drugs and booze and the staff turn a blind eye, shrug, give up. So from age 12 to 16 Jenni was a major ingester of lsd, ecstasy, coke and the omnipresent weed, and this led her into the company of several very unsavoury men.

This is a very literary misery memoir. That term sounds dismissive, it isn’t intended to be, but if ever there was a misery memoir this is it. I have read a handful of these and that’s it, no more.

Jenni Fagan is a poet and novelist, so the prose often erupts into passages like this

I came from the underworld but would say nothing of went on there; I had notions of immortality; I was a parasite; a bastard and a leech. I was a dark room and a dress being tugged down.

Or this

I am stoned immaculate. I am high like a wild thing. Savage like sin. Wasted to the hilt. I am stoned like moon bait. I’m a cavewoman. I am scratching out drawings of human history on stone. I got stoned like I mean it.

There are so many terrible places in society that we only ever see, and that fleetingly, from the victim’s point of view. The perpetrators won’t talk and if they did we wouldn’t listen, we would turn away. Some of the lives lived (and the deaths died) are beyond our imagination, maybe we catch a glimpse in a news report, a court case where ghastly people get long sentences. Some of the people Jenni encountered as a young teenager were very ghastly and deserved very long sentences.

It’s remarkable Jenni didn’t die � she once came across two kids in school making a bet over whether she would live till her 16th birthday. But she didn’t die.

Do I recommend this one?

At your own risk.

NOTES

Other comparable memoirs:

Educated by Tara Westover
Violated by Sarah Wilson
Damaged by Cathy Glass

An unflinching book about the UK care system :

Generation F by Winston Smith

And a couple of (brilliant) American perspectives :

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood by David Simon

Random Family Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc