Addict who can’t cure her own self-absorption

The Liberty Tree: Drunk to Sober via Love, Death, Disintegration & Freedom
by Suzanne Harrington (Atlantic, £12.99)

Suzanne Harrington’s addiction memoir opens with the image of a lifeless body hanging from a tree on the South Downs, “tongue bulging and blue”. She describes the scene with the dispassionate eye of a crime writer straining for a moody Channel 4 adaptation. In fact, the body belongs to her husband Leo, who has killed himself, one year after she left him.

The Liberty Tree, which Harrington addresses to her two children with Leo, is her account of the years that she spent behaving “like an extra in some druggy version of EastEnders” and the damage she caused. Considering she admits quite early on that “Wisdom was not something I possessed. Not even a tiny bit”, you wonder whether she will be equal to the task.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of this odd memoir is that there’s no real explanation for Harrington’s two decades of selfishness and addiction other than that she liked alcohol as a teenager and she is Irish. What little we see of her parents suggests she had a comfortable background, though she refers more often to her love of The Guardian than her family. She spent her twenties in steady employment before deciding that work wasn’t for her, whereupon her income becomes a complete mystery as she opts for a diet of ecstasy, ketamine and Blossom Hill wine, and holidays in New York (twice), Madeira, Barcelona, Paris and India.

She meets Leo, marries him and swiftly mainlines a vat of cava and a fistful of ecstasy: “I thought that being a vegetarian and eating a lot of tofu was enough to make me bullet-proof — and for a long time, it had been.” An early clue that their relationship is not going to rival Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe’s comes in his opening words to her: “I wish my surname was Nine, because then I would be Leo Nine. You know. Like feline.” From here, we learn little about him, except that he is a black Asian minor public schoolboy with a penchant for cuddly toys and he doesn’t do it for her in bed (in case you were hoping for some drug-fuelled sex tales).

The book’s limitations are reflected in Harrington’s erratic prose style, which feels as approximate as she was during her most mashed-up years. It’s amazing how many times “posh” is used to try to capture people or places, while her repeated descriptions of her life as a “car crash” do a disservice to those caught in road traffic accidents.

“The moment hung, and hung, swinging between us,” she writes of the visit from the policeman who broke the news of Leo’s death, revealing quite a talent for an inappropriate metaphor.

Still, this need not have impeded Harrington from producing a readable memoir — a good editor can work wonders at the sentence level, after all. But the general lack of empathy here feels like an indictment of Harrington as a human being as much as a writer. She excuses herself with the repeated assertion that she was so “self-absorbed”, “self-involved” and “fucked up” that she didn’t have the capacity to know what was happening in anyone else’s life. But what is the purpose of such honesty if it is not allied to wisdom?

Rather than search her own psyche, Harrington uses her frustrations with Leo and his subsequent suicide as a barometer for how messed up her life is. But you can’t help feeling that this quiet, worried man, who was so private in his sadness, would never have wanted this kind of attention.