The billionaires who descended into hell
opera of 2016 that insinuated that Hans’s addiction was revenge for his grandfather’s insatiable greed.) And yet there is a fastidiousness in her, a cool scholarliness that flinches from the melodrama. “To tell it at all threatens to become an act of vulgarity,” she shudders.
I have to say that a person who is worried about being vulgar would not be my top choice to tell a story that is basically Strindberg on speed. Still, Rausing starts well. She is excellent on the damnable conundrum of addiction – “There is no medicine: the drugs ARE the medicine” – and on the cruel bind of relatives who try to help the people they love and end up acting as “a familial police state”.
Hans and Eva met in rehab, recovered, married in 1992 and had four children. It was on Millennium Eve that the couple drank champagne, triggering a catastrophic relapse that lasted for 12 years. Sigrid was sick with guilt over the tough-love strategies imposed on her brother and his wife, who ended up being unable to look after their kids.
“Of course, Hans and Eva loved them,” she writes, “but what’s the point