Just as I\u2019m thinking \u201cThis sounds like Holden Caulfield. Is he channelling J. D. Salinger\u2019s The Catcher in the Rye?\u201d, William Leith mentions Karl Ove Knausgaard. Knausgaard\u2019s series of books, My Struggle, chronicles his thoughts and feelings, beginning with his father\u2019s death. Leith orders the series, and when it arrives in the post he is terrified \u2013 he feels \u201cdread\u201d, wants to put the books on a high shelf with the spines facing the wall. Then, when he begins reading the first volume, A Death in the Family, he is gripped. Leith often depicts himself having two opposed reactions. In his earlier memoir, The Hungry Years: Confessions of a food addict (2005), he writes: \u201cI am always too empty, and yet too full. I am always too full, and yet too empty\u201d. There\u2019s quite a lot of that here.<\/p>\n
Leith came early to the confessional writing game. A Guardian article published in 2005, by which time his tortured relationship to food, drink, money and drugs had become a staple of his journalism, described him as the \u201cposter boy of binge living\u201d. His binge living was driven by anxiety, and the writing about it, displaying his appetite for self-harm and honing his expertise in liking himself less and less, gave him a living. The Cut That Wouldn\u2019t Heal has a present-tense immediacy, beginning ten seconds before his father\u2019s death, but some of the material is recycled from earlier writings. The \u201ccut\u201d of the title is on his father\u2019s leg, and Leith doesn\u2019t press the obvious metaphorical application to himself. Beginning with his birth, which his father didn\u2019t welcome, and continuing through a childhood in which his father was mostly absent, physically and emotionally, Leith charts the many ways he failed to be good enough. His father, a psychologist, apparently didn\u2019t notice or didn\u2019t care that his son was bleeding.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a> (subscription).<\/p>\n 'Beginning with his birth, which his father didn\u2019t welcome, and continuing through a childhood in which his father was mostly absent, physically and emotionally, Leith charts the many ways he failed to be good enough.\u2019 (@nclarke14<\/a>)https:\/\/t.co\/V78ggSbLX4<\/a><\/p>\n — The TLS (@TheTLS) June 3, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n