In another age Christina Patterson’s Outside the Sky Is Blue would have been marketed as a misery memoir. It’s true that it’s the record of a life that has contained an uncommon amount of misery. But this book is a bracing, heart-lifting read, a narrative that consistently, courageously rises above the horrors it recounts. Patterson is a superb writer – part of the redemptive message of this memoir is that beautiful prose can make almost anything bearable – but she’s also clearly a pretty wonderful human being. On page after page, she’s hit with the kind of sucker punches that would floor most of us, and yet she comes back sparkling with humour, with love, with hope. Outside the Sky Is Blue is a lesson in generosity, in accommodation, but most of all it’s a lesson in resilience.
Patterson’s story begins with the birth of her sister Caroline in Thailand. Her mother is Swedish, her father British and he has what promises to be a splendid diplomatic career ahead of him. Caroline is followed by Tom, and then Christina. By the time Christina is born, though, there are already signs that Caroline is troubled. Christina realises early on that her “skinny, sensitive, beautiful sister” is mentally ill, although the true extent of Caroline’s schizophrenia only becomes apparent when she is a teenager. Their father gives up his dreams of roving the world and settles down – grudgingly, we feel – to a job in the Treasury. Patterson reconstructs her childhood with a beautiful, sun-drenched nostalgia, summoning up holidays with her family in Sweden and a happy if shy existence in Guildford, drawing always on the rich store of her mother’s diaries and files. “My mother wanted to mark every moment of her life. She took photos of almost every meeting with a relative or friend.”
