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.”
