Coming Undone

Many of us harbour a fear of exposure. Am I really the person I present to the outside world? Or is that merely, in the words of Terri White, a ‘fragile outline’ obscuring the darkness and doubts contained within?

For White, the dissonance between her interior and exterior worlds grows to an unbearable extreme when she moves from the UK to glitzy, bustling New York to pursue a highpowered journalism career. Yet a constant weight of sadness accompanies her on the plane, ‘a rock lassoed with rope and tied to the bottom of my rib cage’. The presenttense narrative of her adult unravelling is punctuated by a past-tense retelling of a brutal childhood. And so, the origins of this burden of pain and fury are deftly and heartbreakingly revealed. Abuse and violence, at the hands of a series of terrible men who libidinously drift towards her mother, are so ever-present that songs from the era, such as The Jam’s Town Called Malice, can only ever be associated with a sticky, sweaty erasure of hope. The radio and TV, the latter powered by a coinoperated meter filled with hard-won 50p pieces and then greedily emptied by the landlord, spew out apocalyptic warnings of Aids and nuclear war. No wonder, then, that a young Terri seeks temporary protection and escape in the ‘warm, beautiful, bouncing buzz’ of alcohol.

In this raw memoir, almost nobody has a name. ‘The man’, ‘a friend’, ‘an ex’ and the ‘Suicide Preventer’ are viewed through a lens of disconnection. Even temporary allies, such as the live-in landlady, can’t be trusted for long.

It seems absurd to use words like poetic and beautiful to describe a book that depicts two such harrowing parts of a life and makes woozy connections between them. But they feel entirely apt. Although the book ends ambiguously as she returns to London, White’s life since has become more settled. She is now editor-in-chief at a film magazine and in a long-term relationship.