This review is written with thanks to the publisher for my copy of Eighteen Seconds via Netgalley.

Blurb:

Family is the best thing in your life. And the worst.

My mother once said to me, ‘I wish you could feel the way I do for eighteen seconds. Just eighteen seconds, so you’d know how awful it is.’

I thought about it. Realised we could all learn from being in another person’s head for eighteen seconds. Eighteen seconds inside Grandma Roberts’ head as she sat alone with her evening cup of tea, us girls upstairs in bed. Eighteen seconds inside one-year-old Colin’s head when he woke up in a foster home without his family. Eighteen seconds inside the head of a girl waiting for her bedroom door to open.

Writer, Louise Beech, looks back on the events that led to the day her mother wrote down her last words, then jumped off the Humber Bridge. She missed witnessing the horror herself by minutes.

Louise recounts the pain and trauma of her childhood alongside her love for her siblings with a delicious dark humour and a profound voice of hope for the future.

Review:

Before we begin, let me just issue the customary Louise Beech disclaimer. As always, absolutely nothing I write will do justice to this book and the only way to know how truly brilliant it is will be to read it yourself. The other part to this disclaimer is that Eighteen Seconds is not a novel: it is Louise Beech’s personal story, so I’ll try not to say too much because it is hers to tell. 

You can tell from the blurb that Louise Beech deals with some difficult topics in Eighteen Seconds and it is incredibly hard to read. However, Louise Beech is a hugely talented wordsmith and as with her novels, she finds words that describe the trauma she went through perfectly so that we can feel everything with her. I, for one, started crying in the first chapter and did not stop until several minutes after I’d finished reading the last. 

An unusual feature of the memoir is that Louise Beech has invited her family and friends (mostly her siblings and uncle) to comment on some of the passages. This has a strong impact as it helped me to see how the events in the author’s life are remembered by others who were present at the time. It also demonstrates both the importance and fluidity of memory in a very powerful way. I also loved the snippets of WhatsApp conversations between the family, which shows the reader the wonderful dark humour which they used with each other to help them through the most difficult of circumstances. 

Eighteen Seconds was originally entitled “Daffodils” and I loved the motif that runs the whole way through the memoir. I enjoyed reading the facts and quotations about daffodils at the beginning of each chapter and was fascinated by how each one applied to the contents of the chapter. 

I have never been touched quite so much by a memoir as I have by Eighteen Seconds, so even if you don’t read non-fiction very often and only read one memoir this year, make it this one. 

Eighteen Seconds is available from Amazon.