Books & Poetry

Mary Loudon’s sister Catherine led an extraordinary life. Diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager, she spent her youth snarling and fighting against her cosy, middle-class upbringing, heading down the hippy trail to India before relocating, after spells in mental hospitals, to sheltered accommodation in Bristol. There, she cut off most ties with her family, began to dress as a man, and renamed herself Steve. At 47, she contracted terminal breast cancer and died, still refusing to contact her parents or siblings. Only after her death did Loudon pick up the pieces of her sister’s story.

Almost as extraordinary as Catherine’s life story is Loudon’s reaction to it. When the family was first contacted by the hospital that cared for Catherine in her last illness, Loudon apparently made an almost instant decision to write a book about the search for her sister’s hidden life. Entering Catherine’s Bristol flat for the first time, Loudon immediately starts taking photographs; meeting the doctors and nurses who treated Catherine, she comes brandishing a tape recorder. The effect is unsettling; we are told that Loudon’s meticulous data-collection is an act of love, the only way of tracing her sister’s fast-vanishing vapour trail, yet at times the story is so refrigerated in the telling that it could be mistaken for a routine research exercise.What mitigates the lingering sense of distance between writer and subject is Loudon’s granite-jawed frankness about the process she is going through. For every deliberate step she takes away from her grief, there is a melancholy admission that this is what she is doing: ‘Dispassion is oddly possible, when on the job at least… Unless you’re a masochist, you don’t choose to write about something you can’t cope with.’ For all its oddness of tone, this strangled cri de coeur was clearly therapy of some kind.