Hypochondria

Growing up in the 1960s at 288a Main Road on the outskirts of Northampton, Mark Haddon spent hours alone in the bathroom, the only lockable room in the house, trying to figure out the universe. In this dark, sui-generis memoir he writes: Even now, insoluble conundrums such as ‘Why was I born as me and not someone else?’ and ‘If the universe is expanding, then what is it expanding into?’ come packaged with images of a shampoo bottle in the shape of a fat sailor with a twist-off head. The author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time has a scientifically inclined mind in which small physical

At some point in the past ten years, trauma became a joke in my household. Should any Ditum suffer a minor mishap, the correct reaction is to adopt a wounded expression, bob your head to the side and whimper: ‘My trauma!’ Not because trauma is funny, but because what Darren McGarvey refers to as the ‘trauma industrial complex’ has become so consuming, the only option is to laugh about it. By ‘trauma industrial complex’, McGarvey means the culture that treats trauma, and those who have been traumatised, as commodities. He’s a good person to write this book because he personally has been commodified in this way. His first book, 2017’s