Original Sins
An extraordinary memoir of faith, family, shame and addiction
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4.4 • 9 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
An extraordinarily brave memoir about faith, family, shame and addiction - an Observer, New Statesman and Sunday Times Book of the Year
'Brilliant... lively, engaging and extremely well written - scrupulously, painfully honest... sharply funny' PANDORA SYKES, SUBSTACK
Matt Rowland Hill grew up the son of a minister in an evangelical Christian church. It was a childhood fraught with bitter family conflict and the fear of damnation. After a devastating loss of faith in his late teens, Matt began his search for salvation elsewhere, eventually becoming addicted to crack and heroin - an ordeal that stretched over a decade and culminated in a period of hopeless darkness.
Recklessly honest, and as funny as it is grave, Original Sins is an extraordinary memoir of faith, family, shame and addiction. It's about looking for answers to life's big questions in all the wrong places, how hope can arrive in the most unexpected forms, and how the stories we tell might help us survive.
'Remarkable, funny, arrestingly well-written... Brings to mind Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, but is also entirely, exhilaratingly its own thing' The Times
'Electric... Artfully structured with novelistic verve... Hill is a blazing talent' Observer
'A beautifully controlled tale of a life spiralling out of control... One of the best books I've read this year' Sunday Times
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE AND WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exquisite and unflinching debut, the son of a Welsh Baptist minister recounts his harrowing spiral into drug addiction. Throughout his life, Hill dealt with contradictions. Raised in Swansea, Wales, in the 1980s, Hill and his three siblings endured childhood trauma in a home "thick with misery" and dominated by a melancholic, taciturn Baptist minister father and a hypercritical mother who regarded any secular pastime as "the works of the devil." With raging hormones during puberty, Hill ran the gauntlet of "temptation, sin, despair, repentance" and by his teens was having sex and surreptitiously downing bottles of whiskey. After struggling to reconcile his strict religious orthodoxy with the less punitive Anglicanism of his prestigious boarding school, Hill eventually renounced his Baptist beliefs, became an atheist, and turned to drugs in college to blot his pain, shame, and guilt. In visceral detail, Hill recounts his descent into intravenous heroin use and the damage it wrought until he found his way to a shaky recovery after 40 days in a London psychiatric ward. Combined with his stunning prose, his clever use of biblical metaphors—which trace his "Genesis," "Rapture," and "Noble Truths"—makes his story of salvation all the more affecting. In a sea of addiction memoirs, this stands out.
