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| Ex-Sun editor writes children's book about his alcohol problems The Truth About Leo, by David Yelland, tells the story of a 10-year-old boy watching his father struggle with alcoholismFormer Sun editor David Yelland has written a children's book about a boy with an alcoholic father, which he revealed yesterday evening was based on his own experiences as an alcoholic.Yelland's debut novel The Truth About Leo tells the story of 10-year-old Leo, who tries to hide the fact that his father is an alcoholic from the world. Due out next April from Penguin, Yelland, who edited the Sun for five years before going into PR as a partner at financial firm Brunswick, said it was "the most important thing" he had ever done.Speaking last night at a book industry event, Yelland – who lives near London with his son Max – revealed that although he is not the father in the novel, "he is the man I nearly was"."Like him, I fell victim to alcohol. There came a time when it controlled me and came close to destroying me," he told an audience from the children's book industry. "Some years ago I realised that I would die if I did not stop drinking entirely, and I saw that I needed help. Fortunately, I found that help and began to recover. Too many go the other route. Too many children are left either in chaotic homes or without parents."Yelland said he had not drunk alcohol since 2005, when he went to the Promis Recovery Centre in Kent, and has no intention of ever doing so again. He began writing The Truth About Leo in 2006."I was compelled to write it because the craft of writing is at the core of who I am, even though at times it was an intensely painful experience," he said yesterday. "This is a book about the truths I have discovered as I have lived my life. Addicts of all kinds can recover and live joyful lives. I hope my novel will encourage adults and children to talk about the issue of alcoholism more openly, but I also want this book to show children what recovery is so they may seek it if they ever need to."Yelland's novel fits into a trend in children's literature over recent years of investigating difficult social issues from a younger perspective. The Carnegie medal-winning Junk by Melvin Burgess tackled teenage heroin addiction, the late Siobhan Dowd took on the troubled life of a runaway foster child in Solace of the Road and The Knife That Killed Me by Anthony McGowan, published last year, is the violent story of school peer pressure and knife crime. This year, the Guardian children's fiction prize longlisted titles which dealt with issues from schizophrenia to concentration camps and guns.Puffin publishing director Sarah Hughes said that although Yelland's novel is aimed at children, it will also appeal to adults. "Simple, direct and affecting, it is a story told completely from the heart and with great honesty and understanding. I found it extremely powerful both as a reader and as a mother," she said. "David draws you in to Leo's world with great skill and sensitivity, revealing what it can be like for a child to live with a parent who drinks too much. And yet, with all that Leo goes through, it's an enormously positive novel, full of hope."Children and teenagersPublishingThe SunNewspapersNational newspapersMarketing & PRAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of the decade: Your best books of 2003 In a year that launched a number of publishing phenomena, it's Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake that's really stayed with me. How about you?In the highly scientific meeting that decided which year we'd each be tackling in our round-up of the decade's reading, I ended up with 2003 – a good one for me, as it was two years after I finished university so I was feeling rich enough to start splashing out on hardbacks. One of these was Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood's brilliant, shivery, post-apocalyptic tale of a world where a genetic pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. (Just don't call it science fiction.) I have read it again and again since, bought it for quite a few Christmas presents that year, and the thought of her laboratory-grown pigoons still makes me feel ill.I also fed my Stephen King addiction with the hardback of Wolves of the Calla, the fifth in his Dark Tower series. In fact, to my shame, I will have to admit that I actually bought it twice in hardback – I ordered it on Amazon, but it took too long to come so in a classic case of needs-to-be-treated reading addiction, I bought another from Borders. Not my most impressive hour, but I did enjoy it a lot: with its theme of treachery in a small town, it has parallels with King's latest magnum opus, Under the Dome (which I'm currently halfway through and loving), so I think a reread might be on the cards. Luckily, I have two copies.Other excellent titles (you might disagree with me on King but you have to give me Atwood) out in 2003 included Monica Ali's Brick Lane ("broad humour grounded in unexpected, detailed and humane observation of the lives of poor immigrants in a precise London location," said Bernard Crick in the Guardian, Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal (bring on the unreliable narrator stories, I just love them), and Peter Ackroyd's Clerkenwell Tales. I thoroughly enjoyed all of these, particularly the Ackroyd, which I actually bought to impress in a job interview (I don't know why I was anticipating the "what are you reading?" question, and it didn't actually come up) but roared through with huge pleasure. There was also Martin Amis's Yellow Dog (Tibor Fischer called it "not-knowing-where-to-look bad" in the Telegraph, but I rather liked it), Mitch Albom's cloying The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Marcus du Sautoy's The Music of Primes, an engrossing exploration of the mysteries of prime numbers, Greg Bear's novel Darwin's Children (my introduction to Bear, and I adored it) and the debut novel from this year's Guardian children's fiction prize winner Mal Peet, Keeper, but what I think really marks the year out is the number of genre-launching titles that were published.We have 2003 to thank for The Da Vinci Code, spawner of myriad code-cracking thrillers, for Lynne Truss's punctuation diatribe Eats, Shoots and Leaves, the quirky Christmas hit which has led to many a pale imitation, and for both Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner and Azar Nafisi's memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, which togetherhelped spark a flurry of interest in literature from and about the Middle East. It also gave us Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (hello flood of adult/children crossover titles).DBC (Dirty But Clean) Pierre should be noted for a novel which wasn't really like anything I'd read before, Vernon God Little. It won him the Booker, while Valerie Martin's Property took the Orange.You can take a look at other books published during the year here, hereand here.However – and I'm judging this on the fact I've returned to it the most over the intervening years – I am going to have to stick with Oryx and Crake for my book of the year. "He scans the horizon, using his one sunglassed eye: nothing. The sea is hot metal, the sky a bleached blue, except for the hole burnt in it by the sun. Everything is so empty. Water, sand, sky, trees, fragments of past time. Nobody to hear him." Still sends shivers.How about you?Best booksFictionAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books for Christmas: Celebrity memoirs roundup | Book reviews The success three years ago of Peter Kay's The Sound of Laughter has given today's celebrities an agreeable choice. Ending with the chubby comic only just starting out as a stand-up, it showed they could split their lives up and write two or more memoirs while still mid-career, like sports stars – and hence enjoy more than one sizeable advance. Far from regarding this as a swizz, the public clearly preferred hearing about growing up in Bolton in the 1970s and 80s to the usual name-dropping: the book is said to be the biggest-selling British autobiography of all time. As it read as if rushed straight from Kay's notepad to the printers, its sales also suggested they wanted naturalness, not fine writing.His approach was copied last year by Paul O'Grady, and 2009's Christmas offerings from Jo Brand, Alan Davies and Jack Dee similarly stop with their first gigs, leaving plenty of scope for later volumes about the years of fame. Brand's Look Back in Hunger (Headline Review, £20) – this year's only female memoir with hit potential – is a relatively straightforward effort, chronicling how a biddable, slim, swotty Kent schoolgirl turned into a workshy, sulky teenager due to a change of school and a bolshy boyfriend; and then found her way, via psychiatric nursing and dabbling in drama, to comedy that mixed blunt confessions with verbally clobbering men. Badly behaved blokes and unfulfilled women both feature, but there's surprisingly little sense of a feminist perspective.Jack Dee's Thanks for Nothing (Doubleday, £20) also records an education disrupted by a disinclination to study, derailing his parents' plans – he never made it to public school after prep school – but positioning him, like Brand, as a sullen outsider suitably equipped for stand-up comedy. His main ploy is to intersperse tales of dealing with idiots and enemies, first at school and later as waiter and barman, with rants about current everyday irritations. Will buyers of the Grumpy Old Men titles snap it up, or complain about being already sated?Alan Davies's gimmick, in the more genial My Favourite People and Me 1978-1988 (Michael Joseph, £18.99), is regularly to interrupt his account of his childhood and student years with chapters saluting idols in sport, TV and theatre. These sketches are engaging, but give the memoir the odd feel of a chatty textbook on the social history of the Thatcher era, full of pasted-in wodges of information (the sources are listed) – although the likely purchaser, presumably of roughly the same age, will know most of it already.Kay's much weaker follow-up, Saturday Night Peter (Century, £20), is the story of his first years on tour and still only takes him up to 30; the enthusiasm that was so winning when he was a comic wannabe in dead-end jobs becomes wearing here, and the best moments offer glimpses of a tougher, sarkier side.Equally bland is Ooh! What A Lovely Pair (Michael Joseph, £20), a ghosted duet – they write alternately, in bold and italics – in which Ant and Dec recount their rise from teen pop and TV stars to their current status as ITV's top presenters. The perky perpetual adolescents are affable about almost everyone, only evincing hints of nastiness when discussing press critics, Kelly Brook and executives who axed them or got them into trouble. Revelations are rare, but we learn that Jordan once pursued Dec, which seems somehow scandalous, though technically licit.Chris Evans's superior It's Not What You Think (HarperCollins, £20) is midway between the Kay-style partial memoir and the traditional, fuller autobiography: it ends as he buys Virgin Radio, with Billie Piper and Radio 2 to follow, but takes in his local radio apprenticeship, The Big Breakfast and the Radio 1 breakfast show. No longer the insufferable bloated ego of the 90s, Evans is unsparing about his failings in relationships and in pursuing his ambitions (he was "consumed with hubris" at Radio 1, he writes); and unusual care has been devoted to his book's look and bonus features, as you'd expect from someone obsessed with perfecting TV and radio formats.Best known for being gobsmackingly rude on BBC2's Mock the Week, Frankie Boyle brings the same verbal energy and relish for making enemies to My Shit Life So Far (HarperCollins, £18.99), in which the Glaswegian comic portrays himself as excelling only in boozing and masturbation in his earlier lives as student, civil servant and teacher. Reading like a collaboration between Irvine Welsh (for the incessant swearing) and Joan Rivers (for the incessant personal abuse, whacking everyone from Boris Johnson to Susan Boyle), this original mix of confession and stand-up monologue must be the only showbiz memoir by an author whose favourite writers are James Ellroy and Thomas Pynchon; and it's rather gratifying that it's outselling most of the books above by more famous figures.CelebrityJohn Dugdaleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Waking Up in Toytown by John Burnside Aida Edemariam is impressed by the honesty and beauty of a memoir of life on the edge"Not so long ago, when I was still mad" – which, as an opener, certainly does its job – John Burnside woke up naked in a bed. Around it a dozen or so bottles filled with blood, honey, alcohol, olive oil and urine stood guard; on the rim of each was balanced a single feather. If the feather fell, the spell would break. And it had sort of worked: he no longer saw "demons and beasts flaring out of the dark around his bed; he no longer feels worms boring holes in his flesh or embroidering his skin with a filigree of decay". Eventually, surprisingly, someone came looking for him, and he let himself "be gathered together and driven away".When he was a child he had dreamed of flying; had, over and over again, launched his small body off the roof of a disused pit building into the smoggy air of Cowdenbeath, in Fife. And he had dreamed of the solo navigators, Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson and Antoine de Saint Exupéry: "The way I saw it, it was only by flying solo that an aviator could reach the borderline between this world and the invisible, and it was only by being lost that she could cross that line, falling out of the sky and into forever, alone, blessed, untouchable."But he never quite took off, and by his teens was flying solo by other means, in alcohol and barbiturate-fuelled binges that lasted for days. The sacraments of his Catholic childhood were replaced by LSD. "Most of the time," he wrote in A Lie About My Father, his first volume of memoir, "I was elsewhere, and trying to come back – only I didn't want to come back empty-handed." Sometimes the elsewhere swallowed him up altogether, and he had to be rescued.On psychiatric wards he was diagnosed with apophenia, a word coined by a schizophrenia specialist to describe a desperate search for meaning in unrelated things, a search for an overarching order: Forster's "only connect", taken to psychotic degrees. ("The mad," he says, in an insight that would bear a lot more scrutiny, except Waking Up in Toytown isn't quite that kind of book, "are symptomatic of a societal failure, not random episodes of perversity or bad luck and, most often, what they want is order.") Apophenia met drugs and alcohol and insomnia, and the cocktail overwhelmed him.After the episode on the bed he knew something had to be done, and his answer was to escape to the suburbs. He wanted, as he puts it, in an uncharacteristically heavy-handed echo of Trainspotting and Pink Floyd, "a normal life. Sober. Drug-free. Dreamless. In gainful employment. A householder. A taxpayer. A name on the electoral roll . . . I wanted, in short, to be comfortably numb." And so he walked off the psych ward and headed for Surbiton. "A perfect plan. Ridiculous, yes; but perfect."In fact, he fetched up near Guildford, to begin a "long and solitary ceremony of self-erasure" in garden centres and train timetables and dead-end jobs and cups of tea, a fantasy of latter-day monasticism whose sole point was to deny his awareness of liminal worlds, to shut out the voices with reruns of old movies, to replace the call of drink with fetishised routine. To discover in practice what he already knew theoretically, and most people glimpse sooner or later: that they are building ramparts against the dark and trying to believe in them, however flimsy they may be.And though it works, for a little while, it's never going to be that easy. Darkness creeps in around the edges: sleep is elusive, and no amount of willed shut-down can rid his empty flat of the presences that animate it. Death stalks him, to an absurd degree. A pub-made friend (there are many of those) drinks himself to death. Another tries to persuade him to reenact Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (hence, presumably, the wry caveat at the start of the book: "some of the characters, especially the homicidally inclined, have been camouflaged for their own protection"). A lover, holding a carving knife, waits for him to wake. Love – generally inappropriate – offers brief respite, though as an inheritance, perhaps, of the masculinity he so reviled in A Lie About My Father, he is often remarkably careless with it. When it holds him, however, it holds him completely; when it goes, he falls – a word he uses deliberately, intending all its moral vertigo and biblical freight.If there was a fault in the first memoir it was that most of the adult empathy Burnside might have had for his violent, alcoholic father was constrained by a child's hurt and hating point of view; Waking Up in Toytown is a larger, more generous book, in part because concentrating on the vicissitudes of his own mind frees him from having to imagine how someone else ticks. Following the loops and whorls of memory also frees him from too slavish an attendance to place and chronology, and although he uses enough novelistic tricks for the book to have real forward momentum, the important narrative is interior and episodic, a curation of carefully examined moments.Quite often these moments are garnished with self-deprecation, and there is, perhaps inevitably, a self-consciousness about the constructedness of his endeavour: a strong sense of the way writing things down can bring clarity to episodes that have nothing of the sort, or of how in the act of using words we can make a lie of them. But none of this overshadows what is a poet's book in the best possible way – Burnside isn't chasing music for the sake of music, but the music is there. Waking Up in Toytown is full of surprising rightnesses, in the detail – "the rumour of a mouse in the wainscot", for example, or a woman who "huggled up to me" – and also in the constant quality of insight, the supple product of a sustained and quiet looking.The occasional outbreaks of glibness, then, are all the more glaring – "unlike madness, normal was a lie", for example, is both banal and misleading, especially since what he has actually discovered, through hitting bottom again and again, is much less schematic. To ignore the voices is to be chased by them (into the pub, more often than not); to try to forget that he believes in what he calls the afterlife, in which "the dead we once knew . . . will go on forever, or some element of them will, folding endlessly into rain and leaves and new animals hunting in the first grey of dawn", is to deny a state that for him gives the world meaning. And so the answer turns out to be not a cycle of denial and fall, but a daily negotiation; what he calls, in A Lie About My Father, "the long discipline of happiness".And it involves a turn to solitude and nature rather than drugs and alcohol; a sober, thrilled meditation on "the roads, and the places just off the roads, all that God-in-the-details of the land: the sway of cottonwood in the wind, the black of a secluded lake, the monumental quiet of a Monterey cypress near a roadside motel on the way from nothing to nowhere", or the "gloaming just beyond the hedge, where the night begins".One day, late in the book, he finds himself travelling in Norway, far inside the Arctic circle. Arriving early at the small local airport, he sits and gazes out at the whiteness of the airfield. "I sat a long time, that day, waiting for my flight – and some of me is sitting there still, enjoying the stillness, becoming the silence, learning how to vanish. Every day, in every way, I am disappearing, just a little – and it feels like flying, it feels like the kind of flight I was trying for, that first time, when I was nine years old – but it has nothing to do with the will, and it has nothing to do with trying. If it happens at all it happens as a gift: and this is the one definition of grace I can trust."That his years of madness were followed by a period in which he produced book after book of award-winning poetry striking for its awareness of the numinous in nature (but also, as Jonathan Bate pointed out in a review of The Light Trap, of our alienation from nature) is, then, no surprise. And the seeming disjuncture, in this memoir, between the squalor and desperation he describes and the precision and beauty of his language is like a proof of his achievement – a kind of higher sanity.Aida Edemariamguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Love Story author Erich Segal dies aged 72 Erich Segal, author of the hugely successful story of love and bereavement, has diedErich Segal, best known as the author of Love Story, died on Sunday of a heart attack, his friend Ned Temko said today. He was 72.Segal wrote the bestselling book about love and bereavement, which became a chart-topping film, in 1969 when he was 32 and a classics professor at Harvard. As its most famous line, "love means never having to say you're sorry", entered popular culture, Segal became a celebrity and regular on TV shows, as well as a commentator on the Olympic games for the ABC network.However, he continued to write right up to his death, producing more than half a dozen novels, essays, literary criticism and, with his dear friend and comrade-in-comedy, Jack Rosenthal, a new English translation of the opening Friday-night Hebrew prayer for the West London Reform Synagogue. His last major work, in 2001, was a scholarly look at the history of comedy, and of dirty jokes, from the ancient Greeks through to Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove.Segal is survived by his wife and editorial collaborator, Karen, his elder daughter, the writer Francesca Segal, and his younger daughter Miranda, a student at Bristol University.FictionMichelle Pauliguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |