Three extraordinary memoirs

Neige Sinno's Sad Tiger, Mina Holland's Lifeblood and Sigrid Rausing's Mayhem

Writing about books every week, you might think that I am used to being moved by what I read—but that is not the case. It is rare to be as affected as I was by the three in this letter. When a book continues to occupy my brain for weeks after reading, when it refuses to leave, when it has changed me in a way that feels physical—it is shocking! It is also why I read.

These memoirs are set in different places and tell of disparate things, but the connective tissue that binds them together is a sense of early abandonment. In Sad Tiger, Neige Sinno’s childhood is obliterated by her step-father's sexual violence; in Mayhem, Sigrid Rausing takes charge of her four nieces and nephews after their parents are lost to addiction; and in Lifeblood, Mina Holland is forced to abandon her idea(l) of motherhood, as her tiny child wrestles with a life-threatening sickness.

I was already familiar with the shocking story behind Sigrid Rausing’s Mayhem, because it was splashed across every British tabloid in the summer of 2012. Eva Rausing—wife to Tetra Pak heir, Hans Kristian, and mother to their four children—was found dead in her Chelsea townhouse, from a heroin overdose. Her distraught husband, also a heroin addict, had rolled her up in a rug and told no-one. Eva was found only after Hans Kristian was arrested for driving erratically around London.

Eva and Hans Kristian met in rehab in 1989. Of the three Rausing heirs (with a fortune estimated in 2022 at £9.6bn), Lisbet is a historian, Sigrid is the publisher/owner of literary magazine, Granta, and Hans Kristian is a spender. He and Eva were party page regulars, for their purchasing of vast houses and enormous boats and glamorous galas—“a Potemkin facade of affluence and stability”, notes Rausing. By 2004, the family suspected that Eva and Hans Kristian were using drugs again, and in 2007, after a brutal court case, their four children went to live with Rausing and her husband, Eric. In 2012, Eva died.

Mayhem, which was published in 2017, tells the story of what happened between the years of 2004 and 2016. It is not just a memoir about raising your brother’s four children (which would be fertile enough ground), it is a lyrical and philosophical interrogation of addiction, family, shame, and how unfathomable wealth coddles, colludes and curdles. Reading it, I was reminded often of an essay in Intimations on the hierarchy of suffering, where Zadie Smith writes that wealth cannot insulate against suffering: “If it could, the CEO's daughter would never starve herself, nor the movie idol ever put a bullet in his own brain.”

One of the most powerful parts of the book is when Rausing implores Eva to see how her addiction is facilitated by their tremendous wealth: someone else can raise the children, and clean the house; she does not need a job, will never struggle to pay the bills; she will never need to steal to fund her addiction, or be forced onto the streets, or to sell her body, or to sell drugs herself, and will therefore likely never face prison. I was also fascinated by Rausing’s thoughts on philanthropy—as someone who is firmly ensconced in that world, who has herself donated over £170m to philanthropic causes—on how it can become its own kind of drug:

“Before they relapsed, Hans and Eva had stopped going to 12-step meetings. They let go of solidarity with other addicts, they became funders of addiction causes instead, flattered and praised, like all philanthropists, exchanged one dopamine hit for another. Perhaps in fact that was the beginning of the relapse, the lapse of solidarity, that seduction of philanthropy.”

From 2004 up until her death, Rausing received ‘relentless’ and abusive communication from Eva, who believed that Rausing had taken away her children out of cruelty. (Shockingly, it was a claim that Eva’s father, Tom Kemeny, endorsed, stating publicly that Eva would not have overdosed, had she had her beloved children around her.) During the court case to determine who the children should live with, Rausing and her sister Lisbet were cast as “the dark Norns” of Norse mythology. “We turn our dark heads like vultures; we take Eva’s children.” The claims were ‘outlandish’, admits Rausing, but still ‘devastating’.

In spite of this, the author holds extraordinary compassion for Eva and Hans Kristian; for what could have been.

“There seemed to be empty spaces in Eva’s body and mind itching for drugs and for freedom, cavities that might have been filled with contentment, or work, or family love, that subtle connection between parents and children, and their children in turn, that animal thing which is about feeling better, and safer, when the loved ones in the room.”

That thing Tom Kemeny speaks of—that need for Eva to have her children around her—that cavity that may have been filled—is exactly what the drugs took away from her.

Rausing is a keen researcher, a sifter of theories and ideas, and she is particularly interested in the idea that rather than some people being genetically pre-disposed to addiction that it might be “likely that some [genetic] mutations give protection against addiction” [my emphasis]. She isn’t afraid to gets into the knottily philosophical, at one point questioning the difference between love (which can be tough, which can interrogate) and empathy (a limitless understanding.) She fears she has loved her brother and his wife, when she should have heard them. “Isn’t it better for addicts to be heard and understood than to be “loved”?

The author also explores the limitations of rehab, in particularly the ruinously expensive centres in California that might baffle a European sensibility. She recalls watching a promotional video, featuring a man named ‘Ben’, explaining to his father that his addiction is due to low self-esteem. His father hugs him, Ben gets sober, comes home to his happy family, and in the final scene, can be seen commanding a large table in a meeting room, where a board of directors look on approvingly. This story is vanishingly rare and particularly alienating for a reticent Swede. “[My father] could not have done that hug, that smile. He wouldn’t have understood or believed in that simple narrative”. His son, however, “Longed, I think, to live in a world where those simple narratives could be true, where praise came easily and expectations were moderate. Where he would be valued not judged.”

As a reader, you can’t help but feel that Rausing is giving herself an unduly hard time. She exercises extraordinary resilience and care, raising her brother’s four children, alongside her son, while continuing to plead with Eva and Hans Kristian from afar. (Hans Kristian—now sober, re-married—is a vague, monosyllabic presence in the book, “a hiberating bear; deep in his addiction.” ) Rausing admits to a tendency towards martyrdom. “I have become stricter and stricter… I tidy rooms, I set everything straight”. Her husband believes she suffers, “from excessive guilt—guilt about money, guilt about privilege, guilt about Hans, guilt about the children.” Partly that comes from the feeling that she has transgressed: has broken the codes of “wealth, privacy, silence, discretion” (to which, in Tom Kemeny’s case, we could add denial.)

Mayhem is a wrestle, a heart break, a grief memoir, an excavation of trauma and a philosophical enquiry. Rausing, ever cautious, fears she has “redacted too much” for the memoir to be ‘real’. At best, she says, it is an attempt to arrange ‘fragments’. Despite her stake, she is wary of claiming a story as her own. It is merely “a representation” of a moment in time. In that sense, it is the story of every family: unfinished, unbound, unknown to all who are not part of it.

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Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from French by Natasha Lehrer, is an astonishing book that will never, ever leave me. Which is ironic, because I suspect few of you will read it. (I understand, entirely, why you would not want to read it, as does its author.) I bought it on the strength of a rare Annie Ernaux endorsement—unsurprising, as the book has a distinctly Ernaux feel—and while it is undeniably a memoir that obliterates, the obliteration is intentional: Sinno wants to shatter everything you thought you knew about sexual violence.

Sinno meets her stepfather, a mountaineering guide and construction worker, when she is 6 and he is 24. Sinno is one of two daughters, to a mother of 28, who has divorced their father (a vague, intermittent presence) and recently lost her boyfriend in a devastating mountain slide where they live in the remote French Alps. Sinno tells you the terrible thing at the very beginning—that she was sexually abused by her stepfather between the ages of 6 and 14—because she doesn’t want the reader to be waiting for something terrible to happen. She tells it from the imagined mind of her stepfather:

“He comes into my life with the best intentions in the world. Humble but honest, he wants to replace my father, to love me like his own daughter, to give me a home, a stable family life, an education worthy of his the name. I resist him from the start. I don’t want to call him papa… All he wants is for me to love him. He tries to get close to me. I push him away. So he comes at night and touches me, when I am not on the defensive… I seem to understand that this is the only way for us to have an affectionate relationship.”

Like Mayhem, Sad Tiger is not a linear story: it is a patchwork of memories, literary criticism and moral enquiry. Fragments of the story emerge over the course of the book, interspersed with the thoughts of Kahlil Gibran, Mary Gaitskill and Toni Morrison; Blake (whose tyger her title takes from), Sartre, Deleuze and Woolf, who was abused by her two older half-brothers (which I did not know.) Weaved through the entire book is a discussion of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1945 novel, Lolita.

Sinno is troubled by the idea that Lolita is a “slightly perverse little girl”. Rather, as Nabokov clarified in 1975 (perhaps troubled himself by the perception of his book) Lolita is “a poor child who has been corrupted”. Her worldliness, her “seductive nymphet” is our narrator’s self-preserving, delusional idea of her. Does that mean she is without sensuality? No, says Sinno. She is coming into her teenage years, “there is a sensuality in the young girl’s character as she is beginning to discover the world.” But an awareness—a thrill, even—of a naturally occurring adolescent sensuality does not make you a consensual party.

Like Nabokov, she has a curiosity about how an abuser comes to be. (They must have a narcissistic victim complex and be incapable of self-reflection, firstly. If they were capable of self-reflection, she says, they would not be able to live.) Sinno knows that in her stepfather’s case it was not about sensuality (“[I was] a little scrap of a thing with scabby knees”) but:

“Innocence. That’s what there is to see, the purest innocence. And perhaps what attracts him is simply the possibility of destroying it.”

Sinno’s writing on how Lolita was and is perceived is symbolic of the memoir itself, which is all about how the same things can be perceived differently by different people: herself, her mother, her stepfather, her siblings, her neighbours, the jury, the reader. She is shockingly specific about the abuse, because she knows that harrowing details can shape and change our perception of things. It is excruciating to read this detail. You will need to put the book down and take several deep breaths. But this is not mere titillation. It is not a tell-all memoir, like the misery lit canon of the nineties, designed to shock. It serves a greater literary purpose.

What is so unusual about Sinno’s case is that her stepfather admitted to (most of) the crimes. He served 5 years of his 9 year sentence, and then re-married and had four more children, to add to the two he had with Sinno’s mother. (Sinno finds the fact of their existence unbearable. For her sanity, she chooses to believe that they are safe, that he does not hurt them.) Sinno is "politically opposed to incarceration”, believing that it alienates prisoners, fails to rehabilitate them and destroys their ‘affective bonds’, but she could think of no other way to protect her younger siblings—she had already asked her mother to leave him, to take her siblings away, but he would not let her go.

We tend to equate a jail term with justice. But Sinno does not believe that justice exists for such a crime.

“What does seven years in an institution funded by the taxpayer achieve—sure, it involves solitude, privation and shame, but still, what possible correlation could there be with the seven years spent torturing a child? What criterion is used to establish equivalence?”

A jail term cannot return a shattered childhood, or slay the albatross of trauma, stirred by even the sweetest scene: a young girl sleeping on a bus, with her head on an older man’s lap. (Is he her father? And if he is, is she safe?) She is most passionate on “the moral superiority of the survivor”: the idea that by existing, by building a life for herself as a mother, partner and literary translator in Mexico, that she has somehow triumphed.

“I loathe the idea that some people cope with others don’t, and that getting over trauma is a morally laudable goal. I’m appalled by a hierarchy that makes the person who recovers, in contrast with the person who cannot, a superhuman being.”

Sinno is also sceptical of the idea of catharsis—“unburdening yourself through writing, or art, as if you can rid yourself of the toxin by vomiting all your ills onto others”. Speaking out tarred her with shame in her home town—“contagious, swift to propagate”—while her younger siblings struggled with the loss of their father. I grew up without a father, one sister tells her. I had to protect you, Sinno replies. But he’d have never done that to me, says the younger sibling. He’d have never do that to one of his own. Sinno is bewildered, distraught. Her friends (of which she has plenty, it is a moment of respite for the reader to know that she is surrounded by friends) say gently that her sister is just trying to survive. Like Sinno, like all of us to some degree, she must tell herself stories to survive.

In her absolute commitment to foreshadowing how her story will be perceived—and challenging the response that she knows that you will have—Sinno interrogates the entrenched socio-historical belief that the mother is always to blame. Here is that blistering passage:

“I am hard on my mother. I imagine the reader will be hard on her too. It’s a cultural reflex when it comes to stories about incest. We often blame the mother who failed to protect her child more than the rapist himself. It’s true, she didn’t protect me. Nor did my father. Nor did my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, friends of the family. Nor did my teachers, or the people who worked at the youth centre, or the personnel at the hospitals where I spent time being treated for my back, or the psychologists, therapists, and practitioners of alternative medicine I was sent to see [for a chronic back condition as a child.] No one protected me. Yes, the mother is guilty. I agree. I have not spared her during the many cycles of anger and recrimination that have taken place over the years. But she wasn’t the one who raped me.”

Sad Tiger is a slim but rigorous book: there is nothing that its author will not confront, tease apart and reassemble with new thinking. Nevertheless, it will not be for many of you. I understand that; I do not wish to sell it to you. This is not a book you sell, or push upon someone. It is more that I want you to know, that if you have the capacity for a profound and shattering work of literature, that it exists, and that it will change you.

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Ending on something with a little more lift, in that there are no terrible parents, only very, very good ones. Lifeblood is journalist Mina Holland’s account of her infant daughter Vida’s life-threatening illness, an expansion of a piece she wrote for The Guardian, in 2020. It is the story of how chronic sickness affects a whole family, a life shrunk to a hospital room, a life centred around one desperately unwell child, an isolated, stricken, anxious life which few people can understand and where the outside world—a world of travel and wine and pasta and laughter—feels a thousand miles away. But it is also a memoir of discovery and revelation, of being broken and re-built, and of light at the end of the tunnel.

At just a few months old, Vida was diagnosed with Diamond BlackFan Anaemia, a very rare, genetic blood disorder where the bone marrow doesn't produce enough red blood cells. Treatment involves regular blood transfusions (plus daily ‘chelation’ to stop iron building up), steroids (which may stunt growth) and in some cases, a bone marrow transplant. On learning of Vida’s diagnosis—a painful and protracted process with its own kind of guilt and trauma—Holland puts her journalistic skills to good use: scouting out parents of children with Diamond BlackFan, interviewing specialised doctors, seeking out science papers.

But while her professional skills allow her access to information, she learns that her profession can only do so much. You sense something of the good schoolgirl, the determined perfectionist in Holland, when she writes:

“[T]his is not a question of getting a refund or securing a restaurant reservation. Nobody cares about my sensitively crafted, grammatical emails or the Guardian logo in my email signature. The system is the system. I am just another patient’s parent. I learn as much about my privilege as I do about medicine in these weeks.”

Lifeblood is as much about breaking up with an idea of motherhood—which Holland writes about with grace, starting with her difficulty to get pregnant with Vida—of grasping for hope when you feel hopeless, of cultivating resilience when it feels like the world is against you, as much as it is about sickness. As her mother (to return to that entrenched socio-historical idea that the mother is always responsible) Holland feels desperate to protect Vida, to give her the carefree childhood she envisaged. But she is powerless. Even being ‘in the best place for her’—the Evelina ward at St Thomas’s Hospital—cannot guarantee these things.

Holland’s agony is cloaked in a shame that she has not received Vida’s diagnosis ‘well’.

“Where is my selfless maternal stoicism, a quality that my own mother has in spades? I have taken this diagnosis badly, I know, a fact that is laced with guilt for me.”

She restricts herself from anything enjoyable, as if punishing herself for this lack.

“All of this seems so decadent. Work! I hadn’t known true work before now. And leisure! Films or books or any kind of extra-curricular activities strike me not only as frippery, but dangerous… Other people’s health is everywhere to wallop me. There is no escape from it.”

Holland writes without ego—as the best memoirists do—sharing her private wranglings that many of us would shrink away from revealing, that so many people have opinions on, in particular around their decision to have another child, a child they always wanted and wanted very much, but who will also go on to be a bone marrow donor for Vida. Will their little boy, Gabriel, one day resent Vida? Holland’s worries are raw, they roar; like blood pulsing through her veins.

In time, as the shock of this new life becomes familiar, “the stirrings of creativity” push up through Holland’s consciousness, awakening her exhausted mind to new possibilities. She seeks out literature that can speak to her: Lorrie Moore’s short story ‘People Like That are the Only People Here’ in the collection, Birds of America, about a mother on a paediatric oncology ward, coming to terms with her daughter’s shock diagnosis; writers like Raynor Winn and Amy Liptrot who remind her how ‘transportive’ writing can be.

This memoir will be a balm to parents who have gone through similar situations, back and forth to a hospital with a tiny charge, grieving what they would be and yearning for a different life, where their child is not sick. But it is also a glorious testimony to life, to recovery, to possibility. It is a salient reminder that so much of life is out of control; that “it is what it is and so much more”.

Happy Easter to you all! I hope you found something of interest in today’s letter. This was meant to go out on Tuesday, but as you may have clocked, it’s gone out today, instead of my weekly dose of cultural Bits. That’s due to a) Easter holidays and b) this took me much longer than usual to write. I think it’s because these stories felt so precious, I wanted to write about them carefully.

I’m planning another piece on memoirs soon—for someone who doesn’t read all that many, I am on something of a jag rn. I recently read Ione Skye’s (different to what I imagined) and on Lauren’s recommendation, I just bought second-hand copies of Vivian Gornick’s and Dominick Dunne’s. I’m currently reading Graydon Carter’s, and I’m finding it a little ploddish… What memoirs have you read that you think I should read? As ever, holler in the Comments.