“Every family has a secret and the secret is that it’s not like other families,” Alan Bennett writes in A Life Like Other People’s. This family memoir, extracted from his 2006 autobiographical volume, Untold Stories, is at once a touching portrait of his parents, “the tenderest and most self-sufficient couple,” and a sobering tale of depression and dementia.
Bennett, the British dramatist best known on this side of the Atlantic for the satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe, and his stage and screenplay versions of The History Boys and The Madness of King George, first uncovered a deep family secret in 1966, when he was 32. He and his father were checking his mother into a mental hospital for depression, the first of what would be many hospitalizations. When asked if there was other mental illness in the family, Bennett unhesitatingly answered no. “After all, I’m the educated one in the family. I’ve been to Oxford. If there had been ‘anything like this’ I should have known about it.”
He was wrong….