Dust yourself off
Isabel Hardman
I Never Said I Loved You
by Rhik Samadder
Headline, £14.99, pp. 320
There are many books about what it’s like
to live with mental illness and the after-
math of child sexual abuse. Most of them,
though, fall into that deeply off-putting
category of ‘misery memoir’: greyscale
covers and cloying titles such as ‘The Child
Who Everyone Hurt’ and ‘When the Dark-
ness Never Lifts’. You’re unlikely to want
to read 300-odd pages of pain porn when
healthy, let alone find yourself looking
forward to the next page if, like me, you
end up reading the book when you’re
depressed too.
I Never Said I Loved You isn’t like that.
It’s funny. It’s not egregious: every time Rhik
Samadder tells us more of the repeated sex-
ual abuse he suffered when growing up, or
of the graphic things he did to himself or to
small creatures such as snails and bees as he
was trying to comprehend quite how much
mental pain he was in, he carefully flicks us
away to something lighter. His obsession
with death moves straight to a remark that
‘the average lifespan is 1,000 months, less in
fact, and I have spent at least four of them
trying to persuade the website LinkedIn to
stop emailing me’. As his father lies dying,
Samadder realises he can’t work out what
to say, and ends up wittering about the
boiler. You are, from page to page, wincing
with horror, and then smiling wryly again.
His relationships as an adult are messy
but lovely. It’s as much a memoir of his life
with his mother as it is of suffering from ill-
ness. One ex-girlfriend whom he thanks
at the end of the book for being present in
every page decides that they should holda breaking-up ceremony with their family
and friends. He writes letters to people who
have hurt him — and who he has hurt.
The informality of the book makes it
a gentle read when the subject matter is so
heavy, but at times Samadder tries too hard
with this, ending up with the sort of contrived
language you’d expect from someone who
tells everyone else that they’re fine, when
inside they’re anything but. He talks about
‘scientific accounts of the major bummers —
depressive personality disorder, bipolar II,
cyclothymia, whatever your poison’, and triesHis therapist tells Samadder to
have a go at seeing household chores
as valuable achievementsa witty aside of ‘I’m pitching the Snow White
sequel to Disney as we speak. It’s going to be
called “Coal Black: when shit gets real, prin-
cess”. Don’t steal my idea.’ Well, we probably
wouldn’t want to.
It’s a tall order, telling ‘the story of
a depression, and how I got out of it’ with-
out either pulling your readers down with
you — as many of us find ourselves doing to
the family and friends who have to live with
our own mental illnesses every day — or
ending up with a saccharine self-help book.
It’s certainly not the latter, even though all
the chapters are entitled ‘How to...’. There’s
‘How to Keep Going’, ‘How to be in Your
Body’, ‘How to Talk’ and so on.
But there are only a few passages in this
rambling book where Samadder really turns
to his readers to tell them what he thinks
they should be doing if they’re in a similar
situation, and that’s when he’s looking back
on feeling suicidal. ‘If you ever come near
that point, I urge you to get help, from people
qualified to listen,’ he writes. It’s refreshing
that someone who set out to write a mem-
oir about their own depression has actually
done that, rather than veering into claiming
that they themselves are now an expert on
the illness — like someone who thinks they
know how to teach because they too went to
school once.
What he is an expert on is describingMaster’s in Philosophy
Course Director
SIR ROGER SCRUTON
LONDON PROGRAMMES
THE UNIVERSITY OF
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of their supervisors, on a philosophical topic of their choice. Scholarships are available.For further details contact: the Graduate Admissions Officer T: 01280 827514
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or visit: http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/humanities/ma/philosophy