Leaving Home

Novelist Haddon (The Porpoise) pieces together family photographs, illustrations, and vivid biographical snippets for this panoramic memoir. Moving nonsequentially, Haddon mines his memories of growing up in Northampton with self-involved parents (“You have to remember... that he only wanted one child,” his mother told his sister when she complained their father didn’t love her), a stint as a young adult caretaking for a rigidly religious disabled man, and his time as a children’s book author and illustrator. He also discusses his turn to writing for adults, though he admits it’s hard to separate recollections of writing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time from “memories of the answers I’ve given” in interviews. The focus, though, is squarely on his relationships and his intellectual fascinations, including the fickle nature of memory and the mind, caring for his obstinate parents in their decline, and theories about writing as a kind of mysterious descent into the subconscious. Interspersed throughout are Haddon’s drawings, including a painting of his mother sitting at his father’s bedside, along with photos and ephemera like his paternal grandfather’s cigarette cards. Haddon writes of his “inability to weave the patchily remembered events of [his] own life into a coherent narrative,” but the result is utterly transfixing in its meandering approach. It’s a strange, beautiful work that exposes the inner workings of a creative mind. (Feb.)