The Wrong Son: A memoir

The Wrong Son is a memoir of emotional precision - a searching, unsparing

account of what it means to come into being in the absence of love.

In 1963, a young husband loses his pregnant wife and eighteen-month-old son

in a car accident. Six months later, he meets a woman who abandons her own

husband and child for him - a man who seems to her everything she has ever

wanted.

Within two years, a boy is born into this family of grief and guilt, into a house

already filled with ghosts, where neither parent can see him clearly through

what each has lost.

His mother demands perfection. His father, meanwhile, decides early on that

this child exists only because the first one died - and cannot forgive him for it.

Moulded by his mother, rejected by his father, he is given no space in which to

become himself.

Throughout his life, no matter how much he tries to invent himself, he is driven

by the fear that nothing real exists underneath. Fifty years on, after his parents'

deaths, that fear begins to unmoor him.

He turns to the work of psychoanalysts who were pioneers of early childhood

psychology around the time he was born.

Drawing on the insights of D.W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan, The Wrong Son

traces a life shaped not only by loss and violence, but by psychic damage that

may never fully be shaken off.

With forensic clarity and unexpected humour, The Wrong Son is a quietly

devastating work: deeply human, psychologically attuned, and unafraid to stay

with what cannot be resolved.