reading, life-changing. Beautiful, earth-shattering and unforgettable’
SAMANTHA MORTON
‘A
phenomenal memoir. I am in awe’ AMY LIPTROT
‘It
will burn a home in your heart’ LEMN SISSAY
‘Mesmerising,
heart-breaking.
I’ll never forget it’ ANNIE MAC
‘Should be required reading’ CLAIRE FULLER
Ootlin
‘A harrowing story of staggering resilience and fortitude, Fagan’s memoir should be required reading.’
Claire Fuller
‘A phenomenal memoir. I am in awe. It takes exceptional strength . . . skill and magic to write a life story, especially when this type of story is often marginalised.’
Amy Liptrot
‘A clear-eyed, unsentimental account of the author’s childhood being shuffled between foster homes. Her resilience is remarkable.’
Douglas Stuart
‘Beautiful, deep, dangerous, transfixing . . . it will burn a home in your heart, it has in mine . . . From start to finish I could not put it down.’
Lemn Sissay
‘An astonishing piece of work. I tore through it, and it through me. I will never, ever forget it.’
Niall Griffiths
‘Jenni is composed in her candour, though this is a memoir that goes beyond honesty, and to attempt to describe the soul of this book is to diminish its power.’
Derek Owusu
‘This is essential reading, life changing, I couldn’t stop reading once I started . . . Unbelievably brave. Beautiful, earth shattering and unforgettable. A truly rare talent.’
Samantha Morton
‘A 21st-century classic from one of our most exceptional writers.’
Adelle Stripe
‘Heartbreaking, magnificent, and incredibly important . . . [Jenni Fagan] is one of the best.’
Ever Dundas
‘A terrifying descent into a childhood of an un-looked-after child, growing up and expected to make sense of a senseless system.’
Denise Mina
‘Brilliant. Devastating. Redemptive. I read it in one sitting.’
Heidi James
‘Jenni has offered a difficult and vital gift to the world with Ootlin.’
Josie Giles
‘A phenomenal work . . . it clean broke my heart and the skilled deft pen of Fagan pieced it back together again.’
Salena Godden
‘The most important book you’ll read this year.’
Kirstin Innes
‘An astounding memoir . . . It blew me away.’
Chitra Ramaswamy
‘Mesmerising, heart-breaking and so, so beautiful. I’ll never forget it.’
Annie Mac
‘Fagan writes powerfully about her childhood as a ward of the state, a rootless existence that fostered a fascination with storytelling.’
Guardian
‘[An] extraordinary, harrowing, and uplifting memoir . [Fagan] has a bravado that never fails her.’
Observer
‘Ootlin is a triumphant tale of survival by somebody who managed to preserve “the bit of me that shines”.’
Financial Times
‘Ootlin is proof that there is part of [Fagan] that is always whole, tapped into the cosmos, looking towards the light.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘[A] poetic work, impressionistically evoking harrowing and joyous experiences alike.’
i Newspaper
‘Stunning and powerful.’
Scots Magazine
Also by Jenni Fagan
The Panopticon
The Sunlight Pilgrims
Luckenbooth
Hex
Poetry Collections
Urchin Belle
The Dead Queen of Bohemia
There’s a Witch in the Word Machine
Truth
The Bone Library
A Swan’s Neck on the Butcher’s Block
A Memoir
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For all those who traverse the underworld on nothing more than a feather
Tell your own story and you will be interesting.
Louise Bourgeois
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
James Baldwin
There is always a story before the story and this fi rst one, too, starts long after it all begins.
Prologue
This is a story about stories. The stories we are told about who we are by others.
Twenty years ago I began writing this memoir as a suicide note and as I was trying for hours to sum up my life in one small letter all I could think was – is that it?
This note said so little about me and in no way captured the life that had brought me to that exact moment. It was incredibly sad to think a small assemblage of words might be all I had to leave behind, so I decided before I went I should look at my entire life just once – a story so much bigger than me.
I borrowed a typewriter from a neighbour. For the next few weeks I typed for fourteen hours a day on a tiny tabletop on the floor, that I had found in the street. I smoked and drank coffee endlessly in my tiny housing association flat, until one night I placed down a full stop to fi nd I had a full manuscript. After I had written ‘The End’ I locked the entire typed-up document away in a fl ight case and vowed never to look at it again, or discuss its contents with anyone.
In one decisive act I had taken what was a suicide note and turned it into a book that kept me alive for many more decades.
Returning to stories, we hear them in every aspect of life, on the bus, in school, at home, the pub, in our relationships, via every single aspect of human culture this one shared constant underpins so much of our lives.
Jenni Fagan
The government told a story about me before I was born. Strangers who took me in were given a story and they too had their own stories.
I never turned up at a stranger’s door just to be me; the story always arrived before me.
Throughout a childhood in care, I was morphed into believing I was some kind of monster – just by those stories, let alone others’ actions. I believe the discrimination that underpins many of the awful things I was taught to believe about myself as a child has some of the most destructive long-term consequences. For those of us who did not have a positive experience in the care system, deconstructing that damage could easily take a lifetime.
I did not want to deal with my history, publicly or even with friends, so I did therapy and made art, or music, or wrote and carried a burden that impacted my life irrevocably both in my ability to function at all at times, or be part of the world, but I always kept trying, in small ways, to connect myself more strongly to this life.
Twenty years after I put away that manuscript, I once again thought I might die.
As we do at such moments, I turned to God. My God is the primordial matriarch who created all things 13.9 billion years ago out of a huge explosion of energy, all of rage, all of fury, all of creation, all of destruction, all of the atoms and particles and carbon of stars that make up every one of us. I asked her –what could I trade for my life? If I could be allowed to have more time, to see my child grow up and maybe meet their children, what value or purpose could I give back for such a thing? The answer was Ootlin.
I had a story that was more politically important than anything else I might write. I did not want to even look at it again but it was calling me.
This is a story I have never told.
It is a story about how some stories saved me and others destroyed me. I am writing this to reclaim myself from all the stories put upon me, that were often little to do with me.
On the day the Freedom of Information Act came in I picked up the phone at 9 a.m. It took me twenty-four years to get my social work fi les. I collected a vast heavy load of fi les. Hundreds, thousands of pages, many redacted in black lest they validate something that would allow me to sue the social work department, or those who had raised me, or to protect others’ identities, but often to safeguard the system. I had lived in so many placements. I had several name changes. I lived in foster families, had two adoptions, many short- and long-term placements in children’s homes and hostels. I had been through more as a child raised by the state than I could ever get my head around. I had never got to have my say about my time in the system, legally or otherwise.
I suffered from severe anxiety and a devastating loss of self that came from lifelong brainwashing telling me that I was the problem. I’ve never met an abuser who owned what they did, or a system that wanted to be accountable.
Society raises us to avoid any subject that can make us vulnerable or cause shame.
It is no longer my shame to carry.
There are a lot of kids out there being told they are less than everyone else. They are made unsafe by that story alone.
Ootlin is a message of solidarity to any other person who has ever had to overcome, in any small or greater way, the power of someone else’s story or legislation or law, which was devised solely to dehumanise them.
Jenni Fagan
We are all of us bound by stories, yet some of us are more negatively impacted than others.
This is a story about a little girl who learned to examine narrative very, very, very carefully and always in secret. This is a story about a girl who found her way to books, and discovered in a world of words the only place she ever actually belonged.
I sought out cultural mothers by the time I was in my teens. Their words, voices, art raised me or at the very least offered solace or company. I spent a lot of time alone both in the system and after it. Some of my favourites included Nina Simone, Alice Oswald, Maya Angelou, Dorothy Allison, Billie Holiday, Frida Kahlo, Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois, Patti Smith, Lydia Lunch, Poly Styrene, Odetta, Hole, Sylvia Plath, Anaïs Nin, Nan Goldin, Yayoi Kusama, Nina Cassian, bell hooks, Nawal El Saadawi, Elizabeth Bishop, Blondie, Leonora Carrington and Cookie Mueller. I went to the Buddhist teachings in words and sometimes in person, also to Wiccan practices and origins which had pulled me towards them all my life. I studied all the religions I could fi nd and considered the myths that predated some of them; I sought out science and medical texts and music; I read about philosophies, art movements, and social or psychiatric developments; I did it all while looking to the sky every single day and asking with every atom of my being – why are humans here at all?
No answers that I could fi nd ever really convinced me.
I sought out cultural fathers or brothers in Viktor Frankl, Ice-T, Nick Cave, Kurt Cobain, George Orwell, Knut Hamsun, Reinaldo Arenas, Max Ernst, David Lynch, all the great grunge bands, and post punk and new wave and no wave, Burroughs, Ballard, Basquiat, Hendrix, Public Enemy, Kafka … I didn’t agree with all of them the whole time but I didn’t have any
family I’d ever met that I could remember and so I turned to culture and asked it to raise me, to teach me, to – in my most isolated moments of which there were many – let me have somewhere to rest, and return, and belong.
Now I must offer back my own lighthouse on a distant shore, for anyone who may need such a thing.
This is my story. It is only my perspective, imperfect as that will of course be. I never claimed myself properly, nor my own history. These are only my memories and they are not told for revenge or ‘from rage’ or out of bitterness. They are told to honour the great light of being! It is given to us all by the primordial matriarch. I have always felt like the carbon of her stars is strong in me and I am grateful.
Twenty years after I fi rst wrote this memoir I opened that fl ight case, took out an old yet pristine typed-up manuscript and I revisited it. It is the hardest thing I have ever done in my entire life. I never shared the story, of my childhood, or a decades-old note that turned into a memoir of my own life, with anyone.
Until now.
This is the book you are holding.
Part One Age –
I wanted to be pure so badly but before I was born I almost killed my mother. It was not a small overdose. She shook a bottle of tablets, popped it open, forced pills down her throat until it burned and the world began to fade.
At five months pregnant a growing foetus doubles in size. It was no longer possible to ignore me.
She lit a cigarette.
Waited for one of us to die.
I could hear her heartbeat as it began to slow – down.
The room got darker.
Much later a bright light is shone in her eyes.
Paramedics have to carefully navigate her pregnant body down a small concrete stairwell in a low-rise block of council flats. She is wheeled out past her neighbours, in one of the roughest estates in the country. Doors close. Ambulance indicates right. Turns onto a motorway. There is a hum of the engine and a medic asks, how many? The motorway is all catseyes. It goes on and on. A gap appears in the trees and the ambulance turns onto a hidden road that leads to one place only. It drives slowly past the groundskeeper’s accommodation; he looks out the window, raises his hand and picks up a stubby pencil to record the arrival in a book. Signs say ‘Watch Your Speed’. A small roundabout sits by a car park with industrial buildings in it. A tall row of fi r trees shield the view. Patients walk in the grounds. Nurses or sometimes family visitors chaperone them. A long winding drive delivers the
Jenni Fagan ambulance into the middle of a vast psychiatric village. Endless black skies roil across two hundred and twenty-two acres of grounds.
The vehicle slows to a halt in front of a gargantuan archetypal Victorian asylum building which stares out across the entire site. It presides over thirty villas, each fi lled with patients with different ailments, mostly alcoholics in Villa 7, abuse survivors in Villa 19; there is a locked ward for women considered too dangerous to be allowed out in a prefab building up on the hill. The lit-up buildings are surrounded by darkness. In the distance, cars race down the motorway like electric eels in the night. A tiny wooden prefab building creaks in the cold wind. It has SHOP painted haphazardly on a sign above it. There is a rehabilitation centre, a workshop, a village hall. There is a laundry, and the nurses’ training centre. A huge incinerator on a hill where black smoke trills out day and night. A tall church designed by H. O. Tarbolton and a minister who will not bless me. There has been someone on reception admitting patients here since 1902. It was run by the Edinburgh District Lunacy Board back then. It had a train that ran one way only until a patient decapitated themselves on the line. It stopped after that. Of those patients who committed suicide it often occurred within weeks of arrival. Nearby, nearly eight hundred naked bodies lay stacked on top of each other in unmarked graves. Some kind of resting place for those who appeared to have nobody to claim them. As the administrator took my mother’s name (again) (it was not her fi rst time there) I turned in the blood-glow of the womb. They wrote down a number.
Assigned a bed.
I listened for the lilt of her voice. Silence!
Ootlin
Instead there were other noises. Tablets rattling on a metal trolley, someone scrunching up a plastic cup; footsteps, echoey corridors; television, canned laughter; a scrape of forks; a flurry of thuds, a door closed hard, the spark of a lighter, two people inhaling, someone said the same word over and over again like a prayer, or a mantra.
Not a sound from her though!
My arms were too short to reach out in the womb.
I was floating in space.
I could stretch.
I could yawn.
I was translucent.
Blood vessels were visible through my skin. There was a cage around my heart made of bone. I was kneeling on the altar of fate!
My heartbeat had its own drum separate to hers, a tiny fast metronome. I had been sent here straight from the other side –some kind of earthly assassin, a fanged one, a fallen angel, a nothing. I was thoughtless and wordless with see-through hands – splayed in front of me.
I had ill intentions.
And, I was so very far from wanted. Still, I wasn’t leaving.
I needed calcium – so I took it.
I weakened her teeth.
I had a fi ne coating of hair all over my body called lanugo. I had been the size of an apple pip, then an avocado, then as long as a carrot!
My eyes already had colour in them. There was shouting out there, something was always going on. The outside world was a frenetic place, I needed more than a wall of placenta between me and it. I wanted to dwell in the
Jenni Fagan
quiet bliss of amniotic suspension forever. I was surrounded by two membranes – amnion and chorion. My mother came from a family of Catholics named after saints and she could not terminate easily at all. Stuck with a growing tumour inside her, she had no choice; I weighed about 1.3 pounds on our attempted death day.
I was not meant to be here.
My imprint was more than faint.
I was a sin, an exit, a locked door; I opened a portal to the other side that could not be shut; I came from the underworld but would say nothing of what 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. I was a hangover. I was bad sex while too drunk; I was a broken heart; I was a disappointment. I was a permanent sense of unease – crescendoing towards colours so bright and vicious my mother could not bear them.
I brought the voices.
I was unstoppable.
While she settled into ward life the hospital psychiatric team arranged a meeting to decide what would be done with us. Lots of patients slept heavily sedated, a thick chemical blanket to tuck them in. Some just lay staring. Late at night when the wards were dimly lit, monsters swam around them.
They were my fi rst playthings.
In a corridor, tall metal fi les stood shiny and steel with uniforms hanging neatly pressed in each one.
Polished black shoes were placed side by side.
Leather restraints sat in drawers.
Shock treatment required a small cushion dipped in water. There were rows for bottles, all colours of tablets, needles –sharp and sterile. Stores held shelves of antiseptic, plasters,
bandages, bleach, nit cream, cheap shampoo, carbolic soap. There were a lot of thin folded towels. Corridors turned to fi nd more corridors, they locked onto each other. Such high ceilings in the big village hall! Ornate cornices! The site also had newer prefab buildings built in the war. They rotted a little more each year in the relentless north wind, not in any way fit to keep out Scottish winters. There was one lift in a building up on the hill that none of the nurses would go in. The monsters had taken over that one a long time ago. I could have gone in it. I’d have sat there as a toddler and played all day –quite happily. Those monsters were the fi rst creatures to love me and I had no reason to discriminate between the dead and the living and only one of those wanted me – so it was those I favoured.
Trees rustled outside.
A crescent moon hung cleanly above the huge old asylum. The monsters sang me lullabies. They told how some people never left here, or how others sat at windows for decades, and how some fell in love and yet more managed to walk out a little more well than they were before they came in. How some people were so glad of this place as a refuge. How nurses and doctors fulfi lled their training here. How there was one doctor who used to bring his little girl into work sometimes and she’d play in the grounds and say hello to all the patients who passed her by. The big hall was always decorated for Christmas festivities. They told me about soldiers who arrived here after both World Wars to roam the grounds in a haze of tobacco and chlorpromazine. In the really old days, patients would carefully write letters to family and give them to staff but they were never sent. Those patients would sit day after day watching for a relative to arrive but none was ever going to come. Those letters were kept in secret, so the doctors could study lunacy.
Jenni Fagan
Each morning my mother sat on our ward. She wanted to go.
The following week the psychiatrists’ scheduled meeting was fi nally held.
My arrival was discussed with trepidation.
Severe psychosis was likely.
They noted her prior admissions to the hospital, once for three months after the birth of her fi rst child, several other occasions, and one of particular note during extreme and disturbing visions on LSD. Another note of intrigue was raised at the meeting. It was point 3. As the secretary poured hot tea and they selected biscuits from a plate, they agreed that it was curious to fi nd out that my mother’s biological mother (who she had not grown up with) had been hospitalised on another psych ward at a different hospital not so long before we had. My paternal grandmother had been having ever more extreme delusions about my mother’s pregnancy until she had to be sedated as well. I took out two generations before me with madness and I hadn’t even met them to smile. I was an awful thing. All love though! It is all newborns have to give. I wasn’t sure either of us would make it. They discussed my mother’s prior shock treatment and debated the success and limitations of various recent advancements in medication. They went over the details of her long hospitalisation after the birth of her fi rst child, just five years before. Carrying and delivering a baby had also precipitated that breakdown. They discussed with some frustration that my mother still refused to sign a soul and conscience certificate, and they agreed she was too ill to represent her own truths. She knew a child might grow up and read such a certificate one day and so she wasn’t going to do it. The staff wrote things down anyway. They said that her husband (not my father) had told her he was living in a hippy
commune but it turned out he was actually serving a sentence in Wandsworth prison for drug offences. He was a registered heroin addict, so they checked fi les to see if she was too. My biological father was an old boyfriend who they said was rumoured to drink a lot, and who was rarely present, and they concluded he was of no use to anyone, although his influence was important to my mother. It was agreed by all those present that her modes of life rendered her unfit. There was discussion of me being raised by nuns. Or, being handed over to a Catholic adoption agency on the day I was born. One of the newer doctors said he’d heard that one of my greatgrandmothers had been the most famous drunk in Glasgow and how much did you have to drink exactly to claim that? How they chortled! Over cups stained with tea and plates covered in crumbs, it was agreed that one way or another I was going to be born. My mother would be hospitalised. I would be taken. It was decided. They put it on fi le. From that day on the state had set it in motion, it was only a matter of time before they owned me.
It was close to midnight when I was born. Leaves fell from trees in reds, golds and ochre. Some of them were see-through with fi ne skeleton veins that would crumble under even the lightest touch. Or crunchy brown leaves that lay underfoot. Or big tough red leathery ones around tree trunks. Mice began to burrow. It was dark. Stars mapped out roads across the grounds. Bonfi res lit by groundsmen smouldered. Everything smelled of damp mulched earth and woodsmoke. An icy wind whistled up through wooden floors until each asylum building was cold as a tomb. It furrowed paths through long grass. The incinerator groaned. Up on the maternity ward I was lifted into the air. Taken to another room to be inspected while my mother was rushed away to begin her treatment.
I was wiped, weighed, tagged, swaddled – taken to the car park and handed over to a person who drove me away. I was out into the world without her on the very fi rst day I was born. I strained to hear her voice, or heartbeat, or laugh, or even the way she cleared her throat. My mother was gone. Sore and swollen and hormonal, she would have been taken back down to the psych ward to begin her treatment.
I was in a car and it was going somewhere.
On my fi les it does not say where I lived for the fi rst few months of my life.
There is no address.
There is no name.
There is no keeper.
I like to think it was goblins. Cave-dwelling, heavy-drinking, knife-wielding, poetry-spouting, foul-mouthed, chain-smoking –outlawed from the human world and not at all maternal but oddly taken by this strange foundling, goblins!
In lieu of other names they called me ootlin.
One of the queer folk who never belonged, an outsider who did not want to be in.
In reality it was actually the ancestors who were the ones to accompany me out of the hospital. As I was put in a car they argued (as the dead do ceaselessly in eternity) about who had fucked up the family line most and therefore inadvertently caused this predicament. Such brutal fights! Later on that night they sat around my very fi rst crib giving each other dirty looks. They debated whether I would survive what was coming. It was unlikely. The ancestors with their strange faces and eternal habits inspected me. I slept with fi sts curled tight. I didn’t want to open my eyes. I was trying to make my way back to the underworld. I had not left it in the way infants are meant to because there was no mother to pull me into this one and I had already learned on the fi rst day I was born that all things end. I already knew in all my tiny bones there would never be a real home for me on this planet.
I was not meant to be here.
I had been sent by some awful, hideous, mistake. I drifted.
Files began to pile up in social work offices. They were typed up with multiple variations of spellings of my name(s) (nineteen within the shortest time), a spattering of dates of birth they rotated depending who was on shift. The humans paid to document me had no idea who I was, or my actual age, or what I had actually been named. Still. They had things
Jenni Fagan
to write so they did. Back on the ward my monsters swam around at night looking for me. They were sad as I was to be separated. It must have been a relatively rare thing at least, for them to have a little plaything who had delighted so – in all the stories they told.
On the ward my mother just had to be a patient for a little while.
A rare respite.
It was a place to breathe.
Somewhere she could be ill in all its totality. Not have to try and pretend to feel well enough to cope with everything.
A small time away from the council scheme she lived on that was designed as some kind of a social experiment. Her family had gone from the high-rise tenements in Glasgow (which is where she’d met my father – a neighbour – both of them just kids then and living on the same fi fth-floor landing) to a newer estate with lots of low-rise council flats in an area where there was mostly just a motorway, and a shopping centre, and a school.
On the ward they measured out her meds. They wrote notes on her but did they ever ask her what happened?
How her heart got broke?
Meanwhile they made notes about the mental illness that ran in our genetics. The female line mostly. Psychotics, schizophrenia, suicide, severe depressions. They didn’t mention the visions of hard smart tough men, like my grandfather, who my father would one day claim had been an old-school gangster but what do I know, I had never met them as a kid that I can remember, just gleaned what I could from social work fi les which say my father never returned their calls and drank
Jenni Fagan
constantly, the few meetings I had with him as an adult were usually in train station bars where he’d be drinking. It’s not like I knew any of them anyway so what did it matter really? I was told my grandfather had visions as I do. It’s a thing. We were born like this. The fi les said my mother’s family were notorious in their area supposedly and, as was (and often still is) the way of things, they commented on her modes and habits and her sickness rather than her soul. Did they examine the impact of poverty? Or her history? Or the great disease of a society that casts its own people out all the time?
People were released from asylums more in the late seventies. It used to be you went in and never came out.
A general idea of rehabilitation was becoming fashionable. Recovering in the community was the plan once you became less of a threat to yourself, or others. The shame and fear of being mentally ill would always be on you though. Like a red stain under your fi ngernails. Madness was thought to be catching. It was considered to show weakness of personality, or even immorality, or possession, or evil? Some thought it was a made-up thing but all agreed it was something to fear. Anyone could end up like that …
They too could run out of their homes in the dead of night to scream uncontrollably while neighbours bolted their doors and authorities were sent to take them away and lock them up so they would not infect the good people who had not yet succumbed.
At the next meeting a fresh shiny packet of rich tea biscuits was unwrapped and tea was replaced with coffee and little brown creamer pods with sugar for a touch of luxury. Months after my mother’s latest admittance to the psychiatric hospital and with loose skin on her belly a little softer than before, the doctors brought a stamp down on my mother’s fi le – she was about to be released.
