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Mother’s Ruin

NICOLA Barry’s childhood didn’t fit the usual picture of neglect. Her wealthy parents lived in a big house crammed with antiques in one of Edinburgh’s posher suburbs and her mother never struggled to pay for the alcohol that wrecked her life.

But as Press and Journal columnist Nicola illustrates in this frank and touching memoir, a comfortable background does not shield a family from the damage that alcoholism can do.

Indeed, because money wasn’t an issue, Nicola and her brothers were spared the intervention of social services which might have turned their lives around.

With the boys packed off to boarding school and her father – a respected consultant anaesthetist – past caring for his alcoholic wife, it fell to Nicola to cook, clean and call 999 for her mother from an early age.

Ashamed to bring friends home and with little in the way of parental guidance, she never learned to relax in social situations and turned to drink herself to give her the confidence she lacked. Only after the death of her mother – by then a pathetic husk stripped of her possessions, beauty and any shred of dignity – did she vow to stop repeating her mistakes.

With its soft-focus crying child on the cover, the publishers are clearly pitching Mother’s Ruin at the phenomenally popular misery memoir market – but don’t let that put you off.

Small moments of aching sadness are told without self-pity, and the author’s humour, sympathy and love for her damaged mother shine through in an ultimately uplifting read.

Morag Lindsay