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.
Did you have any literary models for the book?
I read the Patrick Melrose series on a bench just like this one when I was an addict waiting for dealers. I read them again when I was clean and the influence on the prologue is clear. The book starts at a moment where I still have the ability to self-mythologise – he’s anaesthetising himself with gallows humour against the horror of what he’s experiencing. But if I ever had the sense [while addicted] that I might be a potential character in a book, it disappeared by the end of my addiction, which was wretched and desperate. I was just dying. Nothing glamorous or literary was going on.
How did the people who appear in the book feel about you writing it?
The people who aren’t in my family have been gracious. It would have been problematic if Maria – the pseudonym of the person whose money I stole – hadn’t agreed for me to write about what was clearly a rock bottom moment. It was one of the most horrific things I’d done and I needed to be able to write about it. With my family, it’s more complex. My parents very reluctantly allowed me to write the book and in the small world of evangelical Christianity, where they’re public figures, I think it’s been a scandal. My mother says she will sue me and never speak to me again if I ever write another book like it. But she also keeps close tabs on how it’s doing on Amazon.
How do you justify their discomfort?
The fact I come off worse than anyone else in the book probably gives me room for manoeuvre. Telling a truthful literary story is somehow more important than the feelings of people close to me. That sounds monstrous. Yet I feel a lot of writers have that feeling. As a reader I’m grateful for the liberties taken by autobiographical writers like Emmanuel Carrère or Annie Ernaux or Édouard Louis. It’s murky territory but I feel there’s moral value to it. A lot of memoirists aren’t reckless enough.
Is this a book about class?
Probably the whole reason I never got arrested is that I read as middle class to police officers; the two years I spent at private school on a scholarship and the three years I spent at university, even if I did spend most of my time there taking drugs, probably left their imprint on me, identity-wise, for life. My experience of class has been unusual. I was born in Pontypridd, a very poor town in south Wales, in 1984, when a miners’ strike was happening. By the age of 16, I’d gone from being working class to being lower middle class and then ending up on a scholarship at Harrow, the poshest place you can be. So I’d already had this tumultuous experience of class and then when I went to Oxford I ended up in a kind of underworld below where I started. My education gave me the ability to write a book but I don’t think it’s at all true to say it gave me the ability to overcome my addiction.
Has writing been conducive to recovery?
I absolutely didn’t want a book that said: “And now because I’ve been able to narrate my story, I’ve redeemed it.” The ending almost says the opposite. Within weeks of getting my advance – after four and a half years where I hadn’t touched a thing, not even one of these [his vape] – I relapsed and sadly shovelled a lot of Penguin Random House’s money into the pockets of local dealers around here. The irony was that I’d been paid to relive my past on the page and then instantly went and relived it in reality. Maybe I’d unconsciously learned that addiction had brought me success. I’d long wanted to be a writer and drugs had, in a way, been a route to that, by way of terrible pain and misery. But there was a sense in which the book did give me a reason to keep going: after I relapsed, my brother died and I ended up having to write it while trying to recuperate my life.
What do you make of Rishi Sunak’s pledge of £421m to help addicts recover and reduce crime?
Most free rehabs in the UK are like Victorian workhouses. I was lucky to go to one of the few good ones. So I’d be pleased if the money goes towards proper rehabs but if he wants to reduce drug crime, stop making drug-taking a crime. Drugs are already legalised if you’re white and middle class. We should have the same system for everyone: treat addiction as a health problem, not a criminal one.
Which writers have you admired lately?
I thought Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms established her as probably our leading novelist. Reading it was almost physically painful. I read some of her other books afterwards and they’re good but that one was so brutal it seemed to come from somewhere almost occult.
What are you working on now?
I want to write another memoir, focused on my brother, his life and death. I think there’ll be an almighty struggle in the family.
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
