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Summary
Summary
*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize*?
"A shattering portrait of addiction--generously open, desperately honest and confronting." --Catherine Cho, author of Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness
An electrifying debut memoir of a pastor's son chronicling his loss of faith, his addiction to heroin and our universal quest to find something to believe in
Matt Rowland Hill had two great loves in his life: Jesus and heroin. The son of an evangelical minister, Hill grew up with an unwavering devotion to the tenets of his parents' Baptist church. But by high school, he began to experience a crisis of faith. To fill the void, he turned to literature, and then to heroin and cocaine. By his twenties, Hill's substance abuse escalated into a full-on addiction. As he grew increasingly suicidal, he knew he had to come to terms with both religion and drugs to survive.
Hill's debut is an extraordinary, gorgeously crafted memoir of faith, family, loss, shame and addiction. But ultimately, Original Sins is a raw portrait of survival--of growing up and learning how to live.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this exquisite and unflinching debut, the son of a Welsh Baptist minister recounts his harrowing spiral into drug addiction. Throughout his life, Hill dealt with contradictions. Raised in Swansea, Wales, in the 1980s, Hill and his three siblings endured childhood trauma in a home "thick with misery" and dominated by a melancholic, taciturn Baptist minister father and a hypercritical mother who regarded any secular pastime as "the works of the devil." With raging hormones during puberty, Hill ran the gauntlet of "temptation, sin, despair, repentance" and by his teens was having sex and surreptitiously downing bottles of whiskey. After struggling to reconcile his strict religious orthodoxy with the less punitive Anglicanism of his prestigious boarding school, Hill eventually renounced his Baptist beliefs, became an atheist, and turned to drugs in college to blot his pain, shame, and guilt. In visceral detail, Hill recounts his descent into intravenous heroin use and the damage it wrought until he found his way to a shaky recovery after 40 days in a London psychiatric ward. Combined with his stunning prose, his clever use of biblical metaphors--which trace his "Genesis," "Rapture," and "Noble Truths"--makes his story of salvation all the more affecting. In a sea of addiction memoirs, this stands out. (July)
Guardian Review
Matt Rowland Hill's turbulent debut plunges the reader irresistibly into the hell that followed his adolescent rejection of a taboo-laden upbringing as an evangelical Christian in south Wales. The descent is steep: when his parents move to the home counties, sending him on a scholarship to boarding school, he seems set fair for the upward mobility his fretful mother has scrimped to secure. But his next stop, Oxford, is where he first injects heroin, heralding a decade of dependency, criminality and near-death as he sinks ever deeper. Part of what makes Original Sins so electric from the off (witness the prologue in which, aged 30, he's frantically shooting up at a funeral) is how often Hill lets us see him lying: twice in the first three pages. No better way to earn a reader's trust on the page, and it's engaging, too, that he bucks the trend of literary nonfiction by avoiding any noodling digressions on, say, famous writer addicts or "studies have shown" commentary: instead Hill, now almost 40, puts us in his headspace as he lived it, 100% real-time torment. The artfully structured chapters, built from engrossing scenes sustained in large part by dialogue, usually open on an alarming predicament (a bout of withdrawal-fuelled diarrhoea at the aforementioned funeral, for instance, or trying to blag his way through customs in Israel while carrying methadone) before Hill rewinds the action in order to spool forward again with novelistic verve. Indeed, had Original Sins not been subtitled A Memoir, you might take it for fiction, although if it was 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. Hill isn't playing a blame game, even if he suggests he was fundamentally unmoored by his parents, themselves poisonously unhappy with each other. His father is a baptist minister whose fluency in the pulpit is a source of childhood pride, then teenage scorn, as - craving nothing other than a crafty fag in peace - Hill Sr bats away his son's increasingly insistent theological quizzing, fuelled by a sleepless night devouring Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker. Still more painful is the boy's early sense of disappointing his mother, frazzled in her turn by four kids as she obsessively monitors her Tesco Clubcard points as well as the ever-present threat of satanism. 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 Hill's willingness to send up his own sense of exceptionalism. At times he's akin to the pratfalling protagonist in Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station, not least on that Israel trip, when he joins his parents at a religious conference while secretly hoping to cop off with a pastor's daughter and maybe "write something meaningful" about the occupation while he's at it; instead, he ends up trying to score in Bethlehem. 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 of quiet noticing". Allowing us to notice how little Hill notices is key to Original Sins' effects. It reminded me of Gabriel Krauze's autobiographical novel of gang violence, Who 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. And like Krauze, Hill is a blazing talent whose next move isn't obvious; his memoir's poised ending, cleverly capturing the nature of recovery as partial and continuing, makes clear the question isn't only literary.
Booklist Review
Hill's arresting, confessional memoir limns a life of near-fatal drug addiction. The book opens with the author ironically shooting up heroin at the funeral of a friend who has died of a drug overdose, before flashing back to Hill's childhood in Wales and England. The son of an evangelical minister, he becomes increasingly consumed by doubt and, at 18, loses his faith--as, in due course, do his younger brother Jonathan and two sisters. As a university student, he discovers smack (heroin), and, well, "Smack, it was just heartbreakingly lovely." So lovely that he soon becomes addicted, and using heroin and crack five or six times a day becomes a medical necessity. The story of his life as addict is so harrowing that it is often painfully hard to read. Hard to live, too, since at 27 he attempts suicide. Miraculously he survives but is remanded to an inpatient psychiatric ward, and his life becomes an exercise in repeatedly trying to become clean and failing. The book is anything but a failure, though. It's remarkable--beautifully written and wonderfully insightful. Doubt and faith are twin themes that inform the captivating story and, without doubt, will also captivate readers of this extraordinary memoir.
Library Journal Review
Hill's heart-wrenching, emotional tale begins with a sordid account of his drug use at the funeral of a close friend before he takes readers back in time to his childhood as the son of an evangelical Baptist preacher and his devout wife. The piety of the Hill household hid the dysfunction and unhappiness of both parents from outsiders, but Hill and his three siblings were immersed in the deeply unhappy life of their parents. As they grew up, each in turn rejected their parents' faith, and Hill's rejection took the form of atheism and drugs. His experimentation with alcohol quickly turned to other drugs, including cocaine and his preferred drug, heroin. Hill's struggles with heroin in particular led to many overdoses and at least one attempt at self-harm, leading to six weeks of treatment. Hill chronicles his attempts to get and stay clean along with his efforts to rebuild relationships with estranged family members. This compulsively readable book shines a light on the devastating results of the opioid pandemic that exists not just in Hill's native Wales, but also in the U.S. VERDICT This is an exceptionally well-written and heartfelt memoir.--Rebecca Mugridge