The Fragments of my Father

A memoir of madness, love and being a carer

By: Sam Mills

Narrated by: Sofia Greenacre

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR

In the vein of the Costa-winning Dadland, with the biographical elements of H is for Hawk, The Fragments of my Father is a powerful and poignant memoir about parents and children, freedom and responsibility, madness and creativity and what it means to be a carer.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BARBELLION PRIZE

My life had been suspended, as though I had inhaled and was still waiting to let out that gasp of breath. I set aside my dreams for a future time when life might be normal again. But that night, on my mother’s birthday, as I sat and watched the sky turn from blue to black, I wondered for the first time if it ever would …

There were holes in Sam Mills’s life when she was growing up – times when her dad was just absent, for reasons she didn’t understand. As she grew older, she began to make up stories about the periods when he wasn’t around: that he’d been abducted, spirited away and held captive by a mysterious tribe who lived at the bottom of the garden. The truth – that he suffers from a rare form of paranoid schizophrenia, and was hospitalised intermittently – slowly came into focus, and that focus became pin-sharp in 2012, when Sam’s mother died and Sam was left as his primary carer.

In this powerful, poignant memoir Sam triangulates her own experience with the stories of two other carers, one she admires and one, on some days, she fears she might become: Leonard Woolf, husband to Virginia and F Scott Fitzgerald, husband to Zelda, and a man whose personality made him ill-equipped – in a great many ways – to be a carer for his troubled wife.

A mesmerising blend of literary biography and memoir The Fragments of My Father is a compelling and moving account of what it means to be a carer.

©2020 Sam Mills (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"Mills takes you into the human heart at its most broken and its most hopeful in this brilliant book that will make you laugh and cry. It is a passionate cry for the millions of carers across the world, unpaid, unthanked, fighting every day out of love." (Kate Williams, author of Rival Queens)

"A powerful and tender book. It shows us, through a fearless account of personal experience and an erudite study of the lives and letters of Leonard Woolf and F Scott Fitzgerald, the dark intimacies and the unspeakable costs of care. It reminds us, most of all, that to care is to labour as well as to love." (Jenn Ashworth, author of Fell)

"Sam Mills presents her story with unflinching honesty, as delicate as her father’s health, as brave as her mother’s example. A book about what it means to be a carer, what it takes from you and, finally, what it gives. (Will Ashon, author of Chamber Music)