THE CONSEQUENCES OF LOVE

GAVANNDRA HODGE

Michael Joseph, 320pp, £14.99, ebook £9.49

Gavanndra Hodge was named for her father, Gavin, a working-class hairdresser turned heroin dealer from Bromley who paid his daughter’s school fees by selling drugs to his aristocratic clients around the King’s Road. Gavanndra was 14 when her younger sister Candy died suddenly of a rare airborne virus on holiday in Tunisia in 1989. The family fell apart and Gavanndra began a double life – working hard at her Latin while bringing her schoolfriends to her father’s salon to be corrupted. The double life continued when she went to Cambridge and then embarked on a successful career in journalism; but an encounter, through work, with the grief counsellor Julia Samuel made her realise that she never mourned Candy’s death. Instead she ‘adapted to it, like a sapling growing around a metal spike, making it part of who I was’. This memoir describes how she uncovers and confronts her repressed grief, while at the same time painting a vivid portrait of her family and the druggy, chaotic Chelsea milieu in which they lived.

Elizabeth Lowry in the Guardian admired the ‘extreme candour’ and ‘verve’ of Hodge’s writing while wishing that she ‘could have brought herself’ to condemn her father ‘in less equivocal terms’. Marcus Field in the Standard described the junkie hairdresser as ‘the roguish but lovable anti-hero of the piece’. Johanna Thomas-corr in the

Guardian wondered if we would see more ‘memoirs by the offspring of narcissistic boomers, a generation that seems to like being immortalised as ravenous rogues and hedonists’.