At the start of Matt Rowland Hill’s bracingly candid memoir, we find the author locked in a bathroom about to shoot up heroin. Having observed with satisfaction that the bathroom is clean, he notes that if he could change one thing, “it would be the fact that it’s in a church filled with mourners at the funeral of a friend of mine who died from an overdose of the same drugs I’m about to mainline into my bloodstream”.
Subtitled “A Memoir of Faith, Family and Addiction”, Original Sins tells of Hill’s difficult childhood as the son of a Welsh Baptist minister father and a mother whose dedication to the Bible was matched only by her love of supermarket discounts. Despite their belief in the institution of marriage, his parents’ contempt for one another was clear: “Woman,” Hill overheard his father saying: “If you died tonight, I would dance on your grave.”
Hill embraced his parents’ religious beliefs in adolescence, while taking any opportunity to engage in feverish, guilt-filled masturbation. Later, after going to study at Oxford, he read Dawkins, renounced God and committed fully to drugs instead. The Welsh actor Daniel Hawksford provides a richly textured narration, conveying the absurdities of Hill’s evangelical upbringing and the agony and chaos of his addiction. From an explosion of withdrawal-induced diarrhoea at the aforementioned funeral to trying to score drugs in Bethlehem, Original Sins is full of moments of dark farce. But the humanity and pathos in Hill’s writing ensures that we never stop rooting for him.
• Original Sins is available from Penguin Audio, 9hr 38min.
Further listening
A Death in the Parish
Reverend Richard Coles, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 8hr 25min
Read by the author, the second in Coles’s Canon Clement series sees the lives of the residents of Champton turned upside down following a ritualistic killing.
More Than a Woman
Caitlin Moran, Penguin Audio, 9hr 32min
In her second look at womanhood, the author of the bestseller How to Be a Woman deploys her winning humour to talk hangovers, smear tests, teenagers, ageing parents and the tyranny of the to-do list.
