Leaving Home

Mark Haddon presents a fragmentary, non-chronological memoir built from self-contained scenes and reflections. The book moves freely across decades, layering childhood memories, family portraits, professional milestones, and episodes of mental illness into a mosaic held together by recurring preoccupations: houses and rooms, fear and anxiety, the silence between family members, and the question of what it means to feel at home.

The memoir opens with Haddon woken by his sister Fiona's screaming. She had a recurring nightmare in which their father chased her with a knife, a dream she had for 45 years, ending only when his Alzheimer's disease forced him into a care home. Haddon spirals outward through his own childhood nightmares: terrors drawn from television, a book about great white sharks, and a fall into a neighbor's pond that triggered a lasting phobia of deep water. These fears establish a pattern that runs through the book: Haddon's inner world was vivid and overwhelming, while the adults around him remained emotionally absent.

The family lived for 15 years at 288a Main Road, New Duston, near Northampton, in a house with Scandinavian-modernist touches. Haddon recalls hearing music on the radiogram but no meaningful conversation: "It wasn't so much that no one spoke, it was that no one talked." The most important things happened inside his head, and he did not share them. Mum stayed in bed until the children left for school each morning. Dad grew up working-class and struggled academically before qualifying as an architect through part-time study. He designed buildings for the Open University, Carlsberg, and IKEA, and kept the different spheres of his life so rigidly separate that a colleague of 30 years learned about his rugby career only at his funeral.

Haddon's portrait of Mum is the book's most sustained and unflinching strand. She voted Conservative all her life, scorned working women and people of color, admired Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, read almost no books, listened to no music, and when asked what she wanted for Christmas said she wanted "a bag of time," though she had nothing to fill it with. She showed no interest in Haddon's writing. Her sole review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was that it had too much swearing. She fell asleep during a touring stage production of the novel. When Haddon pressed her to name a single positive thing she had said about Fiona in 40 years, she could recall only a homework assignment and a college project. The last words she spoke to Fiona in person were: "I've never believed a word you've said."

Fiona bore the heavier burden. Dad only wanted one child, and Mum admitted the same. Mum hit Fiona but was not permitted by Dad to hit Haddon. Both parents dismissed the sexual abuse Fiona experienced from family friends and doctors, several of whom were known abusers. Before Dad's funeral, Haddon and Fiona played a grim game they called "Sex Abuser Bingo," guessing how many of these men would attend. Mum defended one who had been struck off by the General Medical Council (GMC) for fondling a patient.

At 12, Haddon was sent to boarding school. He believes the real motive was Dad's desire for social elevation. He describes the school as a place governed by constant fear, where bullying was "the default relationship between teenage boys forced to share too small a space." He was beaten by his housemaster, David Gaine, after honestly admitting he might have damaged a radiator; the beating drew blood through his pajamas. The incident taught him the school ran on contradictory systems: Honesty was officially praised, but rebellion was secretly admired. He took away a lifelong distrust of authority. He also signed up for confirmation classes around this time but withdrew after realizing he did not believe in God.

The memoir traces two severe mental breakdowns. The first occurred after university, when Haddon developed pins and needles in his hands and became convinced he had multiple sclerosis (MS). The conviction haunted him for two years, during which he contemplated stepping in front of a lorry on a street in Edinburgh. The second hit while he was writing the BBC children's television series Microsoap, when stress caused him to become convinced he had skin cancer. He could not look in mirrors, showered in the dark, and saw tumors on strangers' faces. This terror broadened into a general fear of death. In 2024, he cut himself with a scalpel and required stitches, explaining that the speed with which pain converts to calm makes the act addictive.

Between these crises, Haddon built a career. After university, he volunteered as a carer for Ronnie, a young man in Scotland with advanced MS who had joined a rigid evangelical church. He then worked with children and adults with disabilities at day centers and play centers, experiences that shaped his worldview and later fed into Curious Incident. He wrote children's picture books while producing multiple failed adult novels. A turning point came when Sos, his future wife, prompted him to create a compelling voice. He wrote an opening paragraph about a dead dog with a garden fork through it and realized it would be more compelling narrated by someone who does not find the scene funny, a perspective informed by his work with disabled people. The resulting novel became an international success and was adapted for the National Theatre stage.

Haddon met Sos, then a recent graduate who would become a professor of English literature, at a party in 1990. She was six months pregnant with their second child when she was hit by a car while cycling in the Black Mountains. Haddon found her on the road, coughing blood. She was airlifted to Bristol Royal Infirmary with a triply fractured cheekbone and a doubly fractured pelvis. Their unborn son survived, and three months later Sos gave birth to Zack.

The book's later sections chart the decline and death of both parents. Among Dad's papers, a 1986 diary reveals grief, depression, and a loveless marriage: "Seem to have lost my way." Dad's Alzheimer's progressed until he was placed in Oakthorpe House care home. When an infected toe would not heal and amputation was deemed likely to cause more harm, they decided to let nature take its course. Dad died three weeks later. Mum had a serious stroke in early 2020 and was transferred to a nursing home, where she survived nearly two years. On 23 January 2022, Haddon drove to Northampton. He held her hand but did not say he loved her, because he could not remember ever having loved her. She stopped breathing. A nurse removed her rings and placed them in a plastic bag.

Running through these events is a parallel thread about what sustained Haddon: running through woods, making art, volunteering with the Samaritans (a crisis-support listening charity), and writing. In 2019, he underwent a triple heart bypass that paradoxically cured his health anxiety: "Death was no longer a terrifying prospect." Long Covid then severely limited his ability to read and write.

The memoir closes by returning to its central question. Haddon argues that home is not simply the place you come from; sometimes it must be discovered or constructed. He feels properly at home only when doing something: running, making art, writing. An artistic success gives nothing new to work on the next morning, "and it's doing new work this morning that makes me feel at home in the world."