I read this book at one
sitting (rare) and had no real quibbles (also rare). True, it’s not quite as
big a read as its 208 pages might suggest - that’s because there is a lot of
white space. I’m a fan of white space and don’t mind buying blank pages.
Daley-Ward chronicles a
troubled (sometimes traumatic, sometimes chaotic) Northern England black girl childhood and adolescence in deft,
word-sparing sketches which sufficiently evoke character, milieu and feeling to
make any more plodding framing (“I was born in … my mother …. my father ….)
unnecessary. At no point did I feel lost in what are often quite complex
relationships - her mother has three children by three men, for example. This suggests
to me that Daley-Ward has deployed a lot of craft skill in shaping her material
and a lot of thought in keeping a firm hold on a main narrative thread. She
knows what she is doing and it isn’t splurging. (The question whether some of
it is poetry rather than prose or vice versa does not interest me, though I see
that other reviewers discuss the question).
Daley-Ward sustains that
thread from birth to eighteen, often using her precise age as an anchor point.
This takes her to page 107 at which point I suspect many writers would have
stopped and said, That’s it; done my
childhood. At no point did I feel she was using her prose to illustrate some general truth, nor did it feel
as if she was writing with the baleful gaze of hindsight and the disapproval of adult judgement. No one
really gets hit over the head with an imported adjective; Daley-Ward simply
tries to express how she felt about her life and people in her life, sometimes
in everyday terms, sometimes more poetically. Both ways, she carries the reader
(this reader) along with her.
The bold decision was
to continue beyond the age of eighteen and into the fairly recent past (she was
born in 1989 so still not thirty when this book was published in 2018). This continuation
is written very frankly (to her credit) and my quibble would be to say that
when your life is in a messy period it’s hard to give it much narrative
shape; there is just a succession of things which happen. You hook up with this
person and then move on to the next; you drink and then you take drugs and back round again; you do
sex work and then modelling or vice versa. And you live to tell the tale (
those who don’t live simply don’t tell their tale).
The book was awarded
the PEN Ackerley prize in 2019, a prize which is given to a British literary autobiography
published in the previous year - and with quite a bit of emphasis on the literary; ghost written celebrity
memoirs don’t qualify for consideration. Though I haven’t read the other two shortlisted
autobiographies, I think this one clearly meets the standard expected for that
prize. It sits comfortably alongside Amy Liptrot's The Outrun which won in 2016 and which also has religious fundamentalism and alcohol as prominent themes. The two books could be read together in a book group; Liptrot is white, grew up in Orkney and was in her early thirties when she wrote her book.
My own memoir I Have Done This In Secret was called in
by the judges for the same longlist of twenty six from which Daley-Ward emerged
the winner and I would of course be very happy if you read that memoir too. But
do read this one first.
