Ben Watt is probably best known as half of the alt-pop duo Everything But The Girl, popular during the 1980s and 1990s. He has written a previous memoir, called Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness, published in 1996. This new memoir marks a very welcome return.
As he says in his preface: "We only ever see the second half of our parents' lives - the downhill part. The golden years we have to piece together. It's hard to think of our parents as young - or maybe I mean young adults - when everything stretched out in front of them and was possible." This is a beautifully observed and incredibly sensitive attempt to do just that for his own difficult parents, and it is also the story of his own childhood, success, and middle aged struggle with depression. His father, Tommy Watt, was a working class Glaswegian jazz musician. He was charismatic, larger-than-life, uncompromising, successful for a time until rock and roll edged jazz aside in the 1960s, and later an alcoholic and bitter and disappointed man. Watt's mother was Romany Bain, a successful Shakespearian actor who had triplets in her first marriage before becoming a showbiz feature writer. They were both married when they met in 1957; their passionate affair, divorces, marriage and life together caused significant mayhem across a number of families. This is by turns a harrowing, funny and incredibly moving story of family life, of how we love and live, and of how we try not to hurt each other, but sometimes fail spectacularly.
I loved this book, it's reflective and emotional, and I suspect almost anyone who has aged and/or difficult parents will find empathy and consolation from this book. I'm also pleased to see that Bloomsbury are republishing his earlier book, Patient, at the same time.