The ‘mother!’ of all head-trips
— have won numerous awards. She edits Granta magazine, which she also owns. An anthropologist by training, Rausing wrote a memoir three years ago about the period she spent researching her PhD on a post-Soviet collective farm in Estonia.
Rausing says all her family write “memoirs that are not published. I think my mother has written about three, my father has one, my sister has about three”.
Did she consider writing Mayhem and not publishing it? “Of course,” she replies. “And, in fact, this is a very redacted part of a longer text. I really grappled with the question of whether to publish the book or not.”
But, she points out, “in our case, the story was terribly public already. I had a very strong feeling the media owned our story and made of it what they wanted.
“If you’ve been objectified, described, somewhat degraded by the newspapers, you can be gripped by a wish to... not set the record straight, but... there is the thought that what’s happening here is more serious.”
Writing and publishing the book, Rausing suggests, “was almost like pushing a fish hook through your finger rather than trying to pull it out, or ignore it. Yes, it’s painful and, yes, you may cause pain, but in the end, I still think it’s the best thing to do”.
Already, people who have read the book and have addicts in their family have written to her. “There are so many people out there who are wounded and hurt and invisible, who have struggled with the addiction of a family member,” she says. “And when people say to you, ‘That’s exactly how I felt’, that’s a wonderful feeling, because you feel like you’ve released something in people.”
Hans Rausing has told Sigrid that he has not read the book and has no desire to. The five children — four of his and one of Sigrid’s — have all read it. Rausing says she has “had conversations with them. And very interesting conversations with them. And they are broadly very positive about the book”. In some ways, given the hereditary aspects of addiction, she hopes it might, as she puts it, “act as an inoculation”.
What if one of the children had read it and not wanted it to be published? I ask. Rausing pauses. “I don’t know what I would have done had they read it and not wanted it to be published,” she says.
All memoirs contain the stories they have not told — unseen perspectives, speechless protagonists. In the Rausing case, there may be a question beyond the mere existence of another angle: to whom does this story belong?
Is it the story of Eva, who no longer has a voice in which to tell it? Does it belong to Hans, who is now in recovery and who remarried two years after his wife’s death? Or is it the terrain of their children?
“I think the story belongs to all of us — all of us who are part of it,” Rausing says.
Would it have helped, I ask, if they’d had less money? “It’s relevant but it’s not the most important thing,” Rausing replies. “A lack of wealth and an excess of wealth... I don’t think my brother would have not been an addict had he not had money.” She does know, though, that the mask of civilisation can be kept up for longer if there is money — and she said as much to Eva Rausing in a letter. “If you don’t have that, you end up either on the street or in prison,” Rausing says now.
She writes a good deal about guilt and regret. In the words of her book: “My guilt gnawed at me, like a hum of nausea.” In conversation, she says she feels guilty “about everything”.
I try to pin her down. “What are your main areas of guilt these days?” I ask.
Rausing laughs. “I don’t think that question should be in the interview!” she says.