When Damian Barr’s memoir Maggie and Me was published last April, complete with Margaret Thatcher beaming beatifically from its front cover, it seemed immaculately timed. Thatcher had died earlier that month, and his book began with Barr as an eight-year-old, watching on a black-and-white portable as Thatcher emerged “Terminator-like” from the rubble of the 1984 Brighton bomb, “dust clouds billowing around her”.
Barr doesn’t so much grow up as grimly survive his childhood – careering from the devastating break-up of his parents’ marriage into verbal and physical abuse from his mother’s new partner. It gets worse. Barr’s mother descends into appalling drink-fuelled squalor, the extended family spending their Wednesday “benefits bonanza” blitzed on Buckie, partying all day. This asthmatic, geeky, gay and intelligent boy eventually can’t take any more. One memorable chapter begins: “The second time I try to kill a man I’m 14.”
All of which sounds utterly miserable, but Barr’s writing has a lightness of touch and warm humour which makes it easy to root for him. Even though at school he suffers taunts such as “gay Barr”, he has friends – Mark and Heather – with whom he acts out Dirty Dancing routines and listens to Madonna. The quiet way in which Barr describes the comparative idyll of Heather’s home – the first “bought hoose” he’s ever been to, where they have garlic chicken and “nobody shouts” – is unbearably well observed. Little asides, such as calling Childline and worrying about Aids when Rock Hudson dies, will strike a chord with anyone born in the mid-1970s.
In fact, as Barr fills in his Ucca form in the early 1990s, his life has, somehow, become a triumph. There’s still room for a shocking twist – which too many reviewers spoiled last year – but Maggie and Me should have ended there, rather than allowing Thatcher to lumber into view again as, bizarrely, “my other mother”. Barr is trying to say he understands that she “snatched milk and smashed miners”, and gave him “choices when he needed chances”, but that, for him, it wasn’t as black-and-white as loving or hating her. A valid point, but it sits uneasily.
Click here to read the review of Damian Barr’s Maggie And Me as it appeared in The Observer
