Book Review: A Place For Everything

I’m a sucker for a good memoir. I’m not sure when the obsession with reading them started but I’ve always naturally been drawn towards true storytelling. It intrigues me when a TV Show has ‘Based on a True Story’ emblazoned upon the screen as it begins or when a documentary features ‘normal people’ sharing their tales of triumph and woe, whether they be wild or quotidian. As far as reading is concerned, for years I stated that fiction was my genre and that I didn’t care for autobiographies. It took years before I realised that I don’t really care for celebrity autobiographies and biographies. With a few exceptions I’m rarely tickled by the apparently secret gossip now suddenly revealed or by the step-by-step recounting of the years driving towards success. I always thought that as an aspiring actor I should have been keen on these types of reads. It turns out however that I instead have an insatiable appetite for non-celebrity memoirs. For stories that might not otherwise come to the surface, rarely the types of tales you would get to in small talk (back in the days when we actually met for small talk) but nonetheless stories that need to be told and must be heard.

I can’t promise to remember what the first memoir was that I read but it was quite possibly either The Diary of Anne Frank (not strictly a memoir I accept) or Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmood. The latter has certainly had its critics but at the time I read it obsessively, unbelieving that this was a real person’s experiences. I have since read countless memoirs and I can tell you which have stuck with me. The one I always harp on about is David Adam’s The Man Who Couldn’t Stop, a memoir that must have been difficult to write but I have no doubt helped countless people. Another is When Breath Becomes Air, a book written as its author neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi was dying, that grapples with ideas which have never since left me. Then there’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen, a perfect example of a book taking me into a world I’d probably never otherwise know anything much about and Cathy Retzenbrink’s heartbreaking and thought-provoking The Last Act of Love.

I assume I must have snapped up Anna Wilson’s A Place For Everything on Netgalley as soon as I saw that it was a memoir about her mother’s late-diagnosis of autism but I have no memory of doing so. However, when I came across it one evening recently I was absolutely hooked within the first few lines. Wilson tells such a heartbreaking story with an unbelievable amount of detail and vulnerability. While the main bulk of the book focuses on the last few years of her mother’s life, she also explores her own childhood in flashbacks, revisiting moments that highlight specific incidences of behaviour that are now seen differently in light of her mother’s diagnosis.

The book explores and exposes the strengths and weaknesses of our National Health Service with a strong focus on the lack of support and joined up thinking within our mental health services. Naturally, it’s difficult to pile anything more onto the NHS and those who serve it while we’re mid-pandemic but Wilson reminds us that these issues regarding mental health provisions have been endemic in our society for far too long, something I can also personally attest to. I was taken aback by the harsh reminder that mental health engenders so much anger when other illnesses cause those around the patient to react with empathy and sorrow. I won’t claim that there isn’t also anger towards physical illness and care towards those who are mentally ill, but mental health is so much more difficult to understand as a bystander, it’s hard not to feel anger at a person whose behaviour seems abnormal or avoidable. This can often stay true even after a diagnosis has been sourced. It’s true too in Wilson’s recounting of how she and her sister Carrie respond differently to their father’s cancer and their mother’s mental health problems. That said, this memoir is also a love letter to carers, and one in particular, and a reminder of what an incredible job it is.

Though it was compulsively readable, I also found the book very painful to spend time with. Wilson doesn’t shy away from chronicling her darkest thoughts or her mother’s most horrific moments, and the level of unflattering description felt so visceral at times that I found myself cringing and feeling deep empathy not just for Wilson but also for the lack of dignity the book affords her mother. No doubt this transparency will help people in similar situations but I questioned whether I, as a writer, would be able to reveal someone else so thoroughly on paper. My circling thoughts aside though, it’s this very thoroughness that captivated me. There’s long been an issue with diagnosing autism in females and the sad truth at the heart of this memoir is that doing so would have changed Wilson’s mothers life for the better, and that of her family.

I really can’t recommend this book more and am so surprised that this was the first I’d heard of it. I imagine it might hit differently depending on the reader’s individual experiences and I would encourage caution if it might hit a little too hard at this moment in time. For me personally it was an enlightening and fascinating read that will stick with me for a long time.