Memoir of a childhood in care is brave analysis of society’s failings

Now comes Jenni Fagan with a devastating account of her childhood in care.

She was in 14 different homes before the age of seven. As with the title of MacDougall’s book, do the tragic facts of Fagan’s life mean that it was “already, too late”? Or is there a redemptive force at work through her writing?

One of her favourite pop songs as a kid was It’s My Party, and Ootlin makes it clear Fagan will cry if she wants to. After all, you would cry too if what happened to her happened to you.

One of Fagan’s epigraphs is a line by James Baldwin: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

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Others will know her agony, but few have expressed it with such urgency.

What began 20 years ago as a suicide note is transmuted into a howl of pain – an Arthur Janov primal scream, as scorching as those on the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album.

We follow Fagan through our dysfunctional care system via foster homes, adoptions, social services. Reading her journey, it’s hard not to conclude that Britain is systemically neglectful, that politically we don’t care enough, don’t spend enough.

She says: “Society raises us to avoid any subject that can make us vulnerable or cause shame.”

Ootlin challenges this and is an explicitly political work that demands accountability, that argues forcefully against stigmatisation, “othering”.

Cruelties are exposed, cruelties perpetrated by nominal carers, by other children – and yet Fagan’s storytelling bravura is never gratuitously voyeuristic. Her artful prose construction and canny use of local demotic convince.

The pace is urgent, near dyspnoeic even, at times recalling Hubert Selby Jr in its horrors, or Louis-Ferdinand Céline at his most agitated with Fagan substituting the Frenchman’s recurrent ellipses with exclamation marks …

One kid pitilessly tells her: “Look at your scaffy clothes, ya wee tramp, piss off!”

Unsurprisingly, sometimes Fagan feels she’s a mere thing, an “it”. Carers wear faces “for when people are there and then there is another one when the others are gone”.

In new homes, she sits on a bed and doesn’t move, “or touch a thing until they call me down for tea”.

You can see the little girl in fear, see her flinch: the writing here powerfully demanding empathy from all but the utterly heartless.

Not the least of indignities imposed upon Jenni is perhaps the most basic of all, her naming. We hear there were “multiple variations of spellings of my name(s) (19 within the shortest time)”. This is remarkably coincidental to a work by the Glasgow artist, Graham Fagen – that’s Fagen with an “e”, not as in Jenni’s two ‘a’s’. Graham displayed an archive of misspellings of his own name at Queens Park Railway Station in 2021. Take home lesson: careless bureaucracy hurts.

There are accounts of Fagan’s abuse by men, a suicide attempt, her drug taking, absconding, her petty crimes. But love glints from random kindnesses.

Like other damaged children, she finds security in hospitals and how sad is that? Your need for affection and human touch is so acute you get yourself admitted to casualty. This happens every day in the UK. Don’t believe me? Talk to an acute care physician.

But she has no time for cultural cringing, her skill at writing is such that she can sense “somewhere there is a world where I will be able to live happily and not get picked on for shining”.

Redemption is personal and comes through mobile libraries and her talent with words.

Then too there’s her adoption of “cultural mothers”. She highlights Nina Simone but also reveals a catholic taste that takes in artists like Tracey Emin and Nan Goldin, writers such as Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop, singers as disparate as Dot Allison and Lydia Lunch.

This is a truly brave book that demands we look at scars and take seriously the interiority of others, those who are the most unfortunate, the most in pain.