The Boy with the Topknot

"Yes. The new title is Boy with a Topknot but it was also called If You Don’t Know Me By Now in hardback. This is just a beautifully written and, again, painfully truthful account of a life. Because Sathnam has to admit that he lived in this close-knit family and he didn’t notice that his father was really very odd. He was a grown man before he heard the world schizophrenic applied to his father. Like all children he took his mother totally for granted and it wasn’t until he started to find out about the family history that he understood – she is really a heroine, a wonderful, wonderful woman, who endured an extraordinary degree of suffering. It’s extremely moving. At the end he has a wonderful passage about why we shouldn’t lie in our families. About how devastating it is. His point is that if in generation after generation there was something amiss in his father’s family and if each succeeding generation had not lied to one another then maybe he, the father, would have got treatment, his mother would not have suffered the violent attacks she suffered and wouldn’t have been blamed for his father’s illness. It’s actually a much more moving conclusion even than at the end of Obama’s memoir, Dreams of My Father , where he writes, again movingly, about the lies in his own family. Many of the psychologists I have worked with over the years, we often talk about the reading list we would draw up for people training to be clinical psychologists. And this is definitely one that would be on my list, as describing the lies that are told in families and the destruction they cause. The lies live on through generations until somebody starts to tell the truth. But this was why Father and Son was such a shocking book – because Edmund was not obeying the Fifth Commandment to ‘Honour thy father and mother so that thy days be long in the land’ – ie, criticise your parents and you’re dead. Well, they are writers – they realise they have good material. When I was starting to work on siblings for my book on that subject, I realised something from the way that perfect strangers wanted to tell me their stories about their siblings. I realised that this generation had grown up with the understanding that we can now talk about our parents and tell stories about them at dinner parties – in fact we get the story down pat. But we don’t tell stories about siblings because they are still around and they can kill us. It took me back to the days when, at the beginning, I was struggling to get clients to talk about their parents. With Sathnam, because he is writing about a different culture, you can see how his mother would have put up with terrible suffering in order to say, ‘Well, my boy has married a good girl.’ And he would have done things in order for her to be able to say the things that balance her own suffering. Nowadays it is still slightly dangerous to admit to family problems – people will say things like, ‘I had a perfectly happy childhood, I don’t remember much about it but I know it was perfectly happy.’ Or you will read an autobiography that begins later in life, which is always suspicious."