THE FRAGMENTS OF MY FATHER

A MEMOIR OF MADNESS, LOVE AND BEING A CARER

SAM MILLS 4th Estate, 400pp, £16.99

This is a memoir which mixes the author’s experience of looking after her schizophrenic father with the lives of two other carers – Leonard Woolf and F Scott Fitzgerald. She admires the first and is afraid of becoming the second as she grapples with her parent sliding into a state of catatonia, ‘as though his mind and body had said goodbye to each other’. She revisits a childhood shadowed by her father’s frequent absences in hospital, and describes her reluctance to accept the label carer after the death of her mother who had dealt with her husband’s

illness while earning to feed her family and shielding her children from the extent of his breakdowns. The passages devoted to Woolf and Fitzgerald are interspersed with accounts of how the mentally ill have been treated at different times and glimpses of her father, perhaps attempting to give a frame to his voices by immersing himself in the bible. Mills herself describes reading and writing as her ‘daily drug’ and explores the conflict between caring and creating.

Mills is the author of several YA novels and Kate Saunders in the Times observed ‘her creative imagination never leaves her, even at her lowest’. She hailed ‘a brave and original book filled with all kinds of glittering fragments…’ Joanna Pocock in the Spectator admired the memoir’s ‘interweaving of stories, both historical and contemporary’ in ways which display ‘the complexity of the bonds of familial and romantic love and how they can enrich one’s life and work if we allow them to’.