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eleanorfranzen's review against another edition
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
A memoir about the destructive power of drug addiction within a family. Rausing is a former editor of Granta and comes from a family of Swedish packaging heirs (her grandfather invented TetraPak). Her brother Hans, and his American wife Eva, were heroin addicts for decades; they even met in rehab. In 2000, they relapsed. After a twelve-year downward spiral and the removal of their children from their care, Eva’s decomposing body was found in their West London home. (Hans was cleared of culpability in her death, and remains alive and sober.) Mayhem is Rausing’s attempt to figure out, to her own satisfaction, what happened; she conceives it as an explicit move past the facts and figures of official paperwork like court testimony, coroner’s report, and so on. The idea is very good, and the facts are heartbreaking, but for me Rausing’s approach is somewhat alienating. She dwells on psychoanalytic theories and studies about addiction, and on fragmented memories of her and Hans’s childhoods, but rarely brings these together into scenes with dialogue, or into an insightful synthesis. It feels cruel and unfair to ask someone to be insightful or artistic about the devastation of their family, but if they’ve chosen to write a book about it, that’s the brief. I would have preferred a stronger sense, too, of who Hans and Eva were as people, both pre-and post-relapse. By the end of the book I didn’t feel I knew them particularly well, just their actions. Maybe that was Rausing’s point, but there must be addiction memoirs that manage this. Any recommendations? Source: local library #LoveYourLibrary
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Drug abuse, and Drug use
madeline29's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Death, and Drug abuse