patient 1 (charlotte raven)

Raven’s book appeared in my library for two reasons. Firstly because I am old enough to remember when she, alongside Burchill, appeared on the scene as a literary enfant terrible. How strange to think that she was working for Toby Young’s Modern Review. In so many ways this seems to encapsulate all that went horribly awry with Britain in the nineties. Raven and Burchill were brilliant writers who captured a certain zeitgeist, flames that burned for a while. As Raven acknowledges in her memoir, it was a flame which burnt itself out far sooner than it should have done. Toby Young turned out to be an over-privileged dork with a patina of intellectualism which was enough to pull the wool over people’s eyes, (reminiscent of a former prime minister), whose greatest skill was probably appropriating the talent of gifted women for his own greater good. The flair of Raven the journalist had nowhere to go, and as she notes, was coerced into writing lame controversy pieces, which didn’t do her any good. The other point of reference is that one of my closest friends had a close friend himself, called Tom, who I would meet from time to time, and always seemed lovely. Tom was Raven’s husband for many years. A long-suffering husband, as the book makes clear. It was a curious reading experience to vicariously share the history of an acquaintance, and his combustible marriage. There are all these lives out there, in London, which run parallel to our own, with their dramas and their tragedies and their false dawns and happy moments and unhappy endings and we see just the very edge of these lives, like catching a glimpse of a lurid lining inside a coat. This book effectively turned the lining inside out. Whilst primarily a memoir about living with the hereditary Huntington’s disease, I read it as a roman a clef, shedding shards of light on a world I walked beside but never quite knew. 

On the day of writing, there’s an article in the Guardian with the author making the case for assisted dying, stating that her disease is worsening and she is in great psychological and physical pain. In the book, Raven talks a lot about the dire possible outcomes of her having Huntington’s disease, but ends on something of an up, as she gets a place on a treatment test which could lead to a breakthrough. Even though the news that the test has not worked is revealed at the close of the book, we don’t really as readers register the severity of what is soon to hit the writer, in part because she writes so cogently. Today’s article brought it home in tragic fashion.