In this stark and fearless memoir, Neil Griffiths investigates the emotional inheritance passed down through silence and grief, and the lifelong consequences of being the child who should not have existed.
In 1963, a young husband loses his pregnant wife and eighteen-month-old son in a car accident. Six months later, he meets a woman who abandons her own husband and child for him — a man who seems to her everything she has ever wanted. Within two years, a boy is born into this family of grief and guilt: into a house already filled with ghosts, where neither parent can see him clearly through what each has lost. His mother demands perfection. His father, meanwhile, decides early on that this child exists only because the first one died — and cannot forgive him for it.
Moulded by his mother, rejected by his father, he is given no space in which to become himself. Throughout his life, no matter how much he tries to invent himself, he is driven by the fear that nothing real exists underneath. Fifty years on, after his parents’ deaths, that fear begins to unmoor him. He turns to the work of psychoanalysts who were pioneers of early childhood psychology around the time he was born. Drawing on the insights of D.W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan, The Wrong Son traces a life shaped not only by loss and violence, but by psychic damage that may never fully be shaken off.
With forensic clarity and unexpected humour, The Wrong Son is a quietly devastating work: deeply human, psychologically attuned, and unafraid to stay with what cannot be resolved.
Neil Griffiths is a novelist, publisher and founder of the literary prize, The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, now the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize. His first novel, Betrayal in Naples was winner of the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, Saving Caravaggio was short-listed for the Costa Best Novel Award 2007, his last novel is the critically acclaimed As a God Might Be.
My thoughts: All the way through this memoir I wanted to give Neil a hug. He seems so lonely at times, even when surrounded by people.
His parents’ relationship is quite strange and his father remote and unpleasant. Having lost his first wife and young son in a car accident where he was driving, he is full of grief and probably some guilt. He’s a police officer, good looking and women are attracted to him. But his habit of pursuing married women, as with the woman who becomes Neil’s mother, is unhealthy.
Neil’s mother abandons her first marriage, and crucially her young daughter, for his father. Neil is the result of this, as is his younger sister. His mother worships his father but also seems afraid of him.
Raised in this awful environment, ruled over by a tyrant whose mood dictates how everyone behaves, is a terrible time for artistic and gentle Neil, who compares himself constantly to Michael, his father’s dead son, who by forever being at one age and deceased is of course a paragon. Whereas Neil must grow up and change.
Neil as an adult has clearly done a lot of research into psychology and refers to some of the big names, he’s fully aware of the damage his childhood did, and how he’s responded to it. But he has also learnt over time to manage it, to reduce the impact so he can have a life, a career and a family of his own.
Our parents cast long shadows over us, Philip Larkin was definitely right about that (This Be The Verse) and our childhood selves are never completely gone in adulthood. I hope for Neil that writing this was cathartic and healing.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 