Synopses & Reviews
A searingly powerful memoir about the impact of addiction on a family.
In the summer of 2012 a woman named Eva was found dead in the London townhouse she shared with her husband, Hans K. Rausing. The couple had struggled with drug addiction for years, often under the glare of tabloid headlines. Now, writing with singular clarity and restraint, Hans’ sister, the editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing, tries to make sense of what happened.
In Mayhem, she asks the difficult questions those close to the world of addiction must face. "Who can help the addict, consumed by a shaming hunger, a need beyond control? There is no medicine: the drugs are the medicine. And who can help their families, so implicated in the self-destruction of the addict? Who can help when the very notion of ‘help’ becomes synonymous with an exercise of power; a familial police state; an end to freedom, in the addict’s mind?"
An eloquent and timely attempt to understand the conundrum of addiction — and a memoir as devastating as it is riveting.
Review
"Remarkable: both a memoir of a sister and a family circling, helpless, around the still point of an addict in tragic decline, and a deeply necessary quest — through memory, science, literature, psychology, and art — to understand the cause. Sigrid Rausing’s disarming and masterful book is an important addition to the literature of addiction. Written with a restless, probing intelligence and a palpable humility, Mayhem is surely the most powerful book I’ve read on the impact the disease has on the family of an addict since David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy." Bill Clegg
Review
"In this mesmerizing account of her brother’s descent into addiction and her sister-in-law’s untimely death, Sigrid Rausing explores sweeping questions about what it means to choose or refuse a moral life; what tragedy looks like when it is woven into privilege; and how we control or surrender to our perceived destinies. Written in elegiac, lyrical prose, Mayhem is deeply passionate in its impossible attempt to adduce a redeeming vitality from an agonizing chaos. This is a brave, elegant, inspired book." Andrew Solomon
Review
"In this intimate and compassionate memoir, Rausing recounts the lives of her brother Hans and her sister-in-law Eva, who were addicted to drugs… Rausing explores [her family’s] tragedy with grace, humility, and razor-sharp insight. Throughout she attempts to better understand the fierce compulsions of addiction. Her writing is rich with humble wisdom." Publishers Weekly
Review
"A profoundly articulate and harrowing memoir of a family grappling with addiction. With love and tenderness, respect and reserve, Sigrid Rausing explores the evolution of her brother and sister-in-law’s addiction and its effect on her entire family. Her deftly layered observations about how one can be both knowing and not knowing capture a parent’s innate sense of a child’s being in danger; one sibling’s desperate attempts to save another; and a deeply private family who find themselves suddenly exposed. Ultimately, what Rausing finds is a way to tell her own story, including among objects from the past that remind her of what once was, or might have been. I was impressed and moved." A. M. Homes
Review
"A stylish and devastatingly lucid memoir...The narrative resonates because Rausing, a private person, shares intimate memories; as she understands it, addiction is not only a family disease, but also an ‘endlessly revolving merry-go-round’ that keeps addicts and family members trapped.... Piercing." Kirkus
About the Author
Sigrid Rausing is the editor of Granta magazine and the publisher of Granta Books. She is the author of two previous books: History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia, and Everything is Wonderful, which was short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. She has a PhD in Anthropology from University College London, and is an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics and St Antony’s College, Oxford. She lives in London with her husband, film and theatre producer Eric Abraham.
Sigrid Rausing on PowellsBooks.Blog
I went to a funeral the other day, deep in the English countryside. We traveled down on the empty local train, the London contingent sitting together, more or less. The church was packed, the coffin — plain pine, decorated with now somewhat wilted flowers — stood to the side...
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