Wonderful Evening Standard review

Read this wonderful review, by Nick Lezard of the Standard. I will quote the entire text here, because the Standard don’t put book reviews on their website. Boo!

Around this time of year, it’s worse than usual: the public drunkenness, the unfunny shouting matches in pubs, the sick on the pavements. This country floats on a sea of booze at the best of times; you wonder, sometimes, about the damage people are doing to themselves. And who, out of us all, can be called an alcoholic? The definition is mutable; as the old joke has it: an alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do. Tania Glyde is an alcoholic, although she doesn’t use the word that often, interestingly. I actually used to know her, during the decade she describes as the one she’d like back. (The nineties.) Quite the party animal, as I recall, but not, I thought, noticeably out of control. Which goes to show the little we notice of other people, particularly when we’re smashed.

For those of us who drink, the presence of the sober can be disconcerting; they can make us feel awkward and guilty. And I was bracing myself for some such reaction on reading this book. It is not an unfamiliar genre: the account of the screwed-up childhood, the adult years spent roaring out of control, followed by the penitent, finger-wagging clean-up.

In a way, Glyde follows that pattern to a nicety. Her childhood, while not extravagantly unendurable, will still have you putting your hand to your mouth as you gasp at her mother’s petty but vicious cruelty. Her adult binges had me, at more than one point, going “blimey”. I have occasionally plucked the gowans fine in company not unadjacent to hers, but in comparison I am something of an ingenue. Thank God. You’re astonished that everyone walked out alive from some of the parties she describes. The details do not bear repetition in a family newspaper.

But what sets this book apart from other similar memoirs is that it is not only very well-written, it’s actually useful, both for the sober and the not-so-sober. It is illuminating about the inner emotional damage that leads to wildly self-destructive behaviour; and also about the society that allows such behaviour to flourish (whatever the laws of the land might have to say about the matter). She has thought long and hard about the subject, obviously, and what particularly exercises her is people’s attitude to the drunken woman. Actually, women are in a rotten position these days, drunk or sober: “When I was growing up, childhood ended at about eleven. Now it’s more like eight, and descending. The female ideal looks like a teenage boiy with pith helmets stuck on his chest.”

Reminiscence and analysis are interleaved here in a particularly fruitful way. When she points out that the NHS seems to regard mental health as a priority on a par with verrucae, or that treatment of the mentally damaged is analogous to mending a broken leg by tying string round it, she knows what she’s talking about. (Tellingly, the sober section of the book is often very funny indeed.)

But what makes Cleaning Up particularly valuable is the way Glyde does not preach (except when she’s pointing our government hypocrisy regarding drinking; for example, how it is alcohol, rather than cannabis, that is the great, gaping gateway drug that leads on to the others). She’s out not just to tell her own cautionary tale, but to enlighten the rest of us as to what it means to give up intoxicants. It’s not only for the recovering alcoholic: it’s for anyone who might know one, or has sat next to one, or who is interested in the state of the nation. It’s also pretty much unputdownable.