The book chronicles his younger brother Gary taking his own life and the consequences for those left behind.
There is an agonising moment in John Niven’s memoir as he writes of his legs giving way and sliding to the floor after discovering his beloved brother’s debts.
A decade after Gary’s death, O Brother is the most brutally honest account of suicide and what it does to a family. John, now 55, calls the book a forced confession. And the person he spares least in the telling is himself. “You become an expert in suicide after the event. It’s a cliche but even that day I was thinking about how many other people were in the same position with bills mounting up, no electricity because they can’t afford to top up the meter, those purple keys, for god’s sake, charging the poorest in society the most for power, people sitting alone in the dark and cold.”
Music-obsessed John would move south after finding some success with his band, then go to Glasgow university and become an A&R man as Gary remained in Irvine. “That coincided with the toughest time of my life. I’d quit the music business and was trying to make it as a writer and I had no money.” When John got his book deal and Kill Your Friends came out in 2008, he was feted as the new Irvine Welsh, who he met in the 90s and who remains one of his closest friends today.
Two years after Gary’s death in 2010, he wrote a very personal piece about his brother and readers loved it too.
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