The author of Original Sins, an account of addiction and shame, on his book’s impact on his evangelical parents, reading the Patrick Melrose series while waiting for drug dealers, and how looking middle class saved him from arrest
Matt Rowland Hill, 38, is the author of Original Sins, about growing up as the son of a baptist minister before falling into a decade-long addiction to heroin while studying at Oxford. Out in paperback, it was longlisted for last year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction while being praised by Geoff Dyer for its “novelistic virtues of vivid scene-making, fully realised characterisation and psychological subtlety”. Hill and I sat in a park near his home in east London.
I might have read this as a novel had it not been subtitled “a memoir”.
The subtitle wasn’t my choice: I was open to it being published as fiction if my publisher had wanted that. I approached it like a novel, thinking about point of view and how I’d produce moments of irony and humour, which maybe liberated me to write with an emotional distance that paradoxically allowed me to be more honest. Nothing is fabricated. I did go to psychiatric units. I was a heroin addict for all that time. I used my imagination to make vivid the bits of dialogue or details about what we were wearing, although it’s surprising how detailed your recollections are once you dig in; what my father told my mother on that car ride to Guernsey – “If you died tonight, I’d dance on your grave” – was scored into my childhood memory.
Original Sins by Matt Rowland Hill is published in paperback on 4 May by Vintage (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
