MY FAMILY & OTHER DRAMAS
What does it feel like, just as you are congratulating yourself on having been a perfect mother, to have your own beloved son write an embarrassing family memoir that makes you sound like a self-obsessed loony?
For my younger son Will’s new book, The House Is Full Of Yogis, does just that, describing in hilarious – and painful – detail the period when, according to him, his father and I went ‘weird’ and turned his entire adolescence upside down.
Once upon a time, Will writes, we were a normal suburban family. We lived in a normal suburban house and drove a normal suburban car. We sent our two boys to prep school and went on family holidays to Greece.
So far, so suburban. Not much memoir material there.
But then we went on a boat trip down the Thames. This holiday, supposed to be so relaxing, leisurely and idyllic, was, says Will, the scene of some of the bloodiest episodes in the history of the Hodgkinson family. It set in motion a chain of events that culminated in near death, a nervous breakdown, divorce – and a lifelong devotion to meditation.
The boat trip, he writes, ‘started off well enough and at first Mum (me) seemed content to sit in a folding chair on the deck with a glass of wine and a copy of Patriarchal Attitudes by Eva Figes and make less than generous comments about the size of the bottoms of women who hailed us from boats going in the other direction’.
But then, as Will relates, things started to go wrong. Will’s father, Nev, appointed himself Captain, a role in which he managed to combine extreme arrogance with breathtaking incompetence.
It was Carry On Up The Thames with arguments and certainly nobody laughed when he ran the boat aground for the 20th time.
But then I took over – and things got even worse. I steered the boat into a weir, fell overboard, refused to do any cooking and (alleges Will) became a strident feminist, railing against all men.
The only bright spot of the trip, according to Will, although I don’t remember it, was when I was negotiating a lock and somebody mistook me for Cher.
But, as Will records in his book, the trip was just the preface to a bigger catastrophe. Shortly afterwards, my husband, Nev, contracted food poisoning after eating chicken at a party and for months hovered between life and death. When he recovered, he began to review his life – radically.
He gave up his job as a leading Fleet Street journalist, turned the house into a meditation centre, rose at four in the morning, blessed food before he ate it and abjured all sensory pleasures. He had become an extreme ascetic. Instead of drunken dinner parties, our house became filled with white-clad yogis strumming guitars to whale music. Not only were dinner parties out, drink was also out; mango lassis replaced claret and Burgundy.
While all this was going on, Will was growing up and watching his parents become ever weirder. It all culminated in his mother (me) writing a book in praise of celibacy called Sex Is Not Compulsory. Against all the odds, it became an international bestseller and Will was forced to endure the spectacle of his parents going on prime-time television to extol the sexless marriage.
Well, Will, I love you dearly – but you certainly have had your revenge. Since his book was published, it has not just been Will, but critics and reviewers who have taken potshots at us. I have been called a narcissistic mother and an uncaring career woman who packed her son off to boarding school to get him out of the way while she ruthlessly pursued her ambitions.
Will certainly gives the critics some ammunition. Along with many snide comments about my lack of culinary skills and the revelation that all the family was given to eat was pizza heated up in the microwave, he constantly refers to me as a ‘high-earning tabloid hack’. He intimates that I was completely shallow and that the height of my intellectual ability was writing articles under headlines such as ‘How to turn your tubby hubby into a slim Jim’.
He constantly alludes to the fact that I am more interested in having my nails done than pondering the eternal verities and am always having wonderful kitchens installed, as a perfect shrine to somebody who has no interest whatsoever in cooking.
But it’s not all bad. He makes me out to be far more effortlessly successful than I really am, and yes, I can live with that. Will also makes his brother Tom out to be far more of a genius-level brainbox and wit than he really is but, again, Tom says he can live with that.
What Will could not do, however, was to make his father, Nev, out to be weirder than he really was. In fact, he played it down if anything. After flirting with Indian spirituality for a bit, Nev eventually devoted his life to the Brahma Kumaris organisation, living full time in one of their centres and giving them an awful lot of his money.
Yes, eventually Will’s strange parents divorced as they had to, and led separate lives. I wobbled back to some sort of normality. Now, decades later, we are forced to meet the younger selves we would rather forget and it all makes excruciating, if amusing, reading.
Most often, parents and siblings react very badly indeed when an off-spring lays bare their family life, especially if he (or she) uses real incidents to point up laughable eccentricities. When Hanif Kureishi published The Buddha Of Suburbia, his sister Yasmin wrote to newspapers complaining that Hanif had ridiculed their private family life for his own gain, and Hanif ’s father was so enraged he did not speak to his son for at least a year.
And when TV producer Daisy Goodwin wrote a book about how her mother, Jocasta Innes, had abandoned her and her younger brother as children to live in a basement flat with her sexy working-class younger lover Joe Potts, Jocasta did not find it remotely amusing.
But in our case, Will’s book has had the exact opposite effect – far from splitting the family, it has brought us together again. For the first time since the disastrous boat trip of 1981, we have fixed up a family holiday along with our five grandchildren, and booked a vast farmhouse on a remote Scottish island. And no, we have not made the mistake of hiring a boat.
During the book’s gestation, we endlessly discussed matters that had been brushed under the carpet for decades, and although there have been some tears, recriminations and upsets, reading Will’s book has forced us to look back and see how ridiculously we handled our midlife crisis. We did not for a moment think we were doing anything strange or upsetting. Nor did we imagine we would be providing comedy material for our own son.
But it’s not finished yet. A television production company has just bought the rights for a four-part drama series based on the book, so in a year or so we will have to cringe again as we are brought to life on the small screen.
As Will goes round the summer festivals promoting the book and reading out extracts, he must be thinking: thank you so much for turning my childhood upside down, and giving me this wonderful material for my memoir.
Whether we will be as pleased with the way screenwriters and actors turn our second childhood upside down – that’s mine and Nev’s – remains to be seen.
The House Is Full Of Yogis: The Story Of A Childhood Turned Upside Down, by Will Hodgkinson, is published by HarperCollins, priced £12.99.
For my younger son Will’s new book, The House Is Full Of Yogis, does just that, describing in hilarious – and painful – detail the period when, according to him, his father and I went ‘weird’ and turned his entire adolescence upside down.
Once upon a time, Will writes, we were a normal suburban family. We lived in a normal suburban house and drove a normal suburban car. We sent our two boys to prep school and went on family holidays to Greece.
So far, so suburban. Not much memoir material there.
But then we went on a boat trip down the Thames. This holiday, supposed to be so relaxing, leisurely and idyllic, was, says Will, the scene of some of the bloodiest episodes in the history of the Hodgkinson family. It set in motion a chain of events that culminated in near death, a nervous breakdown, divorce – and a lifelong devotion to meditation.
The boat trip, he writes, ‘started off well enough and at first Mum (me) seemed content to sit in a folding chair on the deck with a glass of wine and a copy of Patriarchal Attitudes by Eva Figes and make less than generous comments about the size of the bottoms of women who hailed us from boats going in the other direction’.
But then, as Will relates, things started to go wrong. Will’s father, Nev, appointed himself Captain, a role in which he managed to combine extreme arrogance with breathtaking incompetence.
It was Carry On Up The Thames with arguments and certainly nobody laughed when he ran the boat aground for the 20th time.
But then I took over – and things got even worse. I steered the boat into a weir, fell overboard, refused to do any cooking and (alleges Will) became a strident feminist, railing against all men.
The only bright spot of the trip, according to Will, although I don’t remember it, was when I was negotiating a lock and somebody mistook me for Cher.
But, as Will records in his book, the trip was just the preface to a bigger catastrophe. Shortly afterwards, my husband, Nev, contracted food poisoning after eating chicken at a party and for months hovered between life and death. When he recovered, he began to review his life – radically.
He gave up his job as a leading Fleet Street journalist, turned the house into a meditation centre, rose at four in the morning, blessed food before he ate it and abjured all sensory pleasures. He had become an extreme ascetic. Instead of drunken dinner parties, our house became filled with white-clad yogis strumming guitars to whale music. Not only were dinner parties out, drink was also out; mango lassis replaced claret and Burgundy.
While all this was going on, Will was growing up and watching his parents become ever weirder. It all culminated in his mother (me) writing a book in praise of celibacy called Sex Is Not Compulsory. Against all the odds, it became an international bestseller and Will was forced to endure the spectacle of his parents going on prime-time television to extol the sexless marriage.
Well, Will, I love you dearly – but you certainly have had your revenge. Since his book was published, it has not just been Will, but critics and reviewers who have taken potshots at us. I have been called a narcissistic mother and an uncaring career woman who packed her son off to boarding school to get him out of the way while she ruthlessly pursued her ambitions.
Will certainly gives the critics some ammunition. Along with many snide comments about my lack of culinary skills and the revelation that all the family was given to eat was pizza heated up in the microwave, he constantly refers to me as a ‘high-earning tabloid hack’. He intimates that I was completely shallow and that the height of my intellectual ability was writing articles under headlines such as ‘How to turn your tubby hubby into a slim Jim’.
He constantly alludes to the fact that I am more interested in having my nails done than pondering the eternal verities and am always having wonderful kitchens installed, as a perfect shrine to somebody who has no interest whatsoever in cooking.
But it’s not all bad. He makes me out to be far more effortlessly successful than I really am, and yes, I can live with that. Will also makes his brother Tom out to be far more of a genius-level brainbox and wit than he really is but, again, Tom says he can live with that.
What Will could not do, however, was to make his father, Nev, out to be weirder than he really was. In fact, he played it down if anything. After flirting with Indian spirituality for a bit, Nev eventually devoted his life to the Brahma Kumaris organisation, living full time in one of their centres and giving them an awful lot of his money.
Yes, eventually Will’s strange parents divorced as they had to, and led separate lives. I wobbled back to some sort of normality. Now, decades later, we are forced to meet the younger selves we would rather forget and it all makes excruciating, if amusing, reading.
Most often, parents and siblings react very badly indeed when an off-spring lays bare their family life, especially if he (or she) uses real incidents to point up laughable eccentricities. When Hanif Kureishi published The Buddha Of Suburbia, his sister Yasmin wrote to newspapers complaining that Hanif had ridiculed their private family life for his own gain, and Hanif ’s father was so enraged he did not speak to his son for at least a year.
And when TV producer Daisy Goodwin wrote a book about how her mother, Jocasta Innes, had abandoned her and her younger brother as children to live in a basement flat with her sexy working-class younger lover Joe Potts, Jocasta did not find it remotely amusing.
But in our case, Will’s book has had the exact opposite effect – far from splitting the family, it has brought us together again. For the first time since the disastrous boat trip of 1981, we have fixed up a family holiday along with our five grandchildren, and booked a vast farmhouse on a remote Scottish island. And no, we have not made the mistake of hiring a boat.
During the book’s gestation, we endlessly discussed matters that had been brushed under the carpet for decades, and although there have been some tears, recriminations and upsets, reading Will’s book has forced us to look back and see how ridiculously we handled our midlife crisis. We did not for a moment think we were doing anything strange or upsetting. Nor did we imagine we would be providing comedy material for our own son.
But it’s not finished yet. A television production company has just bought the rights for a four-part drama series based on the book, so in a year or so we will have to cringe again as we are brought to life on the small screen.
As Will goes round the summer festivals promoting the book and reading out extracts, he must be thinking: thank you so much for turning my childhood upside down, and giving me this wonderful material for my memoir.
Whether we will be as pleased with the way screenwriters and actors turn our second childhood upside down – that’s mine and Nev’s – remains to be seen.
The House Is Full Of Yogis: The Story Of A Childhood Turned Upside Down, by Will Hodgkinson, is published by HarperCollins, priced £12.99.