Heartbreaking, and beautifully written.
This is not a conventional autobiography, more like a story that poet Lemn Sissay is telling himself (and sharing with us, the lucky readers), to make sense of the tormented years of his childhood, and how such criminal treatment of an innocent child could have happened in the second half of the 20th Century.
Sissay structures his recollections of his childhood around the official Social Services files that he finally managed to wrest from Wigan Social Services after a "thirty year campaign to get my records," which was successful only after he had taken "The Authority" to court. ("The Authority" is Sissay's Orwellian, Dickensian name for the bureaucrats, jobsworths and sadists who stole him from his young, unmarried mother, passed him into the care of racist, religious obsessives, earmarked him for failure (and punished him whenever he showed any sign of success or intelligence), and ruled his life until he managed to break free of their control at the age of about 17.
For me this book, read like a thriller: will he escape, will he survive? And, again, that's testimony to Sissay's talent as a writer, because we know that he does: Lemn Sissay MBE is a well-regarded poet and broadcaster, who (we hope) has conquered the demons that The Authority cursed him with.
This is not a conventional autobiography, more like a story that poet Lemn Sissay is telling himself (and sharing with us, the lucky readers), to make sense of the tormented years of his childhood, and how such criminal treatment of an innocent child could have happened in the second half of the 20th Century.
Sissay structures his recollections of his childhood around the official Social Services files that he finally managed to wrest from Wigan Social Services after a "thirty year campaign to get my records," which was successful only after he had taken "The Authority" to court. ("The Authority" is Sissay's Orwellian, Dickensian name for the bureaucrats, jobsworths and sadists who stole him from his young, unmarried mother, passed him into the care of racist, religious obsessives, earmarked him for failure (and punished him whenever he showed any sign of success or intelligence), and ruled his life until he managed to break free of their control at the age of about 17.
For me this book, read like a thriller: will he escape, will he survive? And, again, that's testimony to Sissay's talent as a writer, because we know that he does: Lemn Sissay MBE is a well-regarded poet and broadcaster, who (we hope) has conquered the demons that The Authority cursed him with.
