Being John Burnside was a remorseless exercise in human resilience. Even after he left behind childhood deprivation and became a professor at an ancient university, there were always demons to be banished, myths to be busted and issues urgently to be addressed for Burnside, who has died aged 69 after a short illness. Writing was his best revenge, the means by which a sense of stability could be imposed on personal turbulence.
It was his abusive, alcoholic father George who taught him how to make a living by telling stories, though the stories his father told were more often than not lies. “No one,” recalled John in A Lie About My Father (2006), the first of three celebrated memoirs, “ever did find out where my father came from. He was really a nobody: a foundling, a throwaway. The lies he told were intended to conceal this fact, and they were so successful that I didn’t know, until after he died, that he’d been left on a doorstep in West Fife in the late spring of 1926, by person or persons unknown.”
