In the Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott and Miranda Doyle’s A Book of Untruths are each powerful, distinctive memoirs in their own right, but they have threads in common, such as dysfunctional family, charismatic, flawed fathers, damage, loss, love, and how institutions have the power to destroy individuals.
Both books come with the blessing of key family members. In Stott’s case, her dying father asks for her help in documenting his own role as an influential (and intimidating) preacher in the Exclusive Brethren, the ultra-hardline Christian fundamentalist creationist sect (still active today) into which Stott was born.
The Exclusive Brethren kept themselves separate from ordinary people (“worldlies”), believing that the world was run by Satan, and that they alone would be saved by the Rapture. Trapped in this parallel reality, Stott wasn’t even aware of the moon landings, saying: “We were of course living on a kind of satellite planet of our own.” As the sect grew more separatist in the 1960s under extremist leader Jim Taylor Jr, interrogations, denouncements and excommunications (“witch hunts”) led to intimidation, broken families, PTSD, sexual exploitation, suicide and murder.
The Exclusive Brethren were also wholly patriarchal, and the young Stott (now a novelist, expert Darwinist and professor at the University of East Anglia) is depicted silently bridling at how females must be “subject” to men, wear headscarves and sit in endless meetings listening to exclusively male blather. In a terrifying passage echoing Margaret Atwood’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale, Stott describes how one of her female relatives was sent to an asylum for decades, ostensibly because she was epileptic, but also because she was “wilful”.
However, Stott is only a frightened, powerless child – it’s her father who facilitates their escape from the Brethren. Even then, Stott talks of “vertigo-inducing changes”, how people are not always “exhilarated” to escape a cult: “You can’t just refuse to believe in Satan”. Her family disintegrates in the aftershock – her father into womanising, gambling and, eventually, embezzlement.
While Stott honours her mother’s strength, it’s her father (complicated, cultural, commanding) who looms large; sometimes overbearingly so. It’s a testament to Stott’s fearless, honest account that the reader emerges not only with a rare insight into the Brethren’s secret world, but also with a sense of what it took for her, not only to survive, but to emerge, creative and individualistic, from the kind of childhood that could destroy anybody.
Miranda Doyle’s A Book of Untruths comes with clearance from her dying mother to “write anything you want”. It’s related in a series of short passages of numbered lies – building to form a kind of literary mosaic of a life story. While Doyle sometimes muses conceptually on the essence of truth, lies and memory, it soon becomes clear that her story is quite enough on its own.
Doyle’s late father, dominant, volatile, first terrorised then abandoned his wife and children (as a philandering lecturer, he gave his religious wife VD, and kept an Italian letter from a mistress “for the stamp”). A lesser writer than Doyle might have conjured a paternal monster (his “man-only” toilet in Saudi Arabia, festooned with pornographic images, is convincingly repellent). However, Doyle remains forensically fair, even when it becomes obvious how much his behaviour harmed her family life, and beyond. More disaster strikes when she is sent to Gordonstoun (Prince Charles’s old school) and is soon begging in tears to come home. While this elite boarding school may make some people instantly think “Uh-oh, posh misery memoir”, the Gordonstoun as Doyle remembers it is a living hell, with one suspect teacher instructing children to strip naked for “birthday baths” and swimming (so as “not to get their costumes wet”).
In this inappropriately sexually charged atmosphere, it hardly seems surprising that Doyle ends up casually fellating boys at the school: “It wasn’t rape. Merely submission. Everyone knew their place.” Or that she goes into adulthood (“mess and sex”) barely aware of what constitutes normal: “It would be years before I realised that promiscuous isn’t the opposite of frigid.” After suffering what amounts to a sexual assault, she describes lying on her attacker’s bed, “his despair weeping between my legs”.
In the end, love and motherhood awaken Doyle’s own agency, and her voice. Sometimes this book of lies becomes confusing, unresolved (perhaps on purpose?), but ultimately the darkest truths are teased out, and examined – on one occasion literally, as Doyle asks to look at sliced sections of her father’s autopsied brain. It probably says it all about A Book of Untruths that this isn’t even close to being the most disturbing passage in the memoir – with Doyle challenging the reader to stick with her tense, candid, sage testimony to the last unsettling, rewarding word.
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