Reading this third memoir by Graham Caveney, a knot in my chest tightened. It wasn’t only because it’s a cancer memoir; it was because the unfolding of history so often shows that abuse begets self-destructive behaviour. To parody Auden:
I and the public know
What all healthcare staff learn
Those to whom evil is done
Destroy themselves in turn.
Caveney’s two previous memoirs, The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness and Agoraphobia, outlined his working-class childhood in Accrington, Lancashire, and his winning of a place at a Catholic grammar school. But where the school succeeded in helping him achieve his aim of becoming a writer, it also screwed with his head, because he was not only taken to plays but also played with by a member of staff.
Caveney then embarked for a few years on a course of self-destruction, involving alcohol and drugs, though it’s testimony to his talent that he still managed to forge a successful career as a writer. Sadly, all such actions have consequences, and however understandable it was that an angry man should take refuge in heavy substance abuse, in May 2022, after several surreal episodes of hiccuping while eating, Caveney was endoscoped and a malignant tumour in his oesophagus was found.
As he and his partner Emma struggled to absorb this shock diagnosis (Caveney was only 57), they were told that the subsequent CT scan showed that the cancer had spread to the liver, and that he had six months to live without treatment, and perhaps 18 months with it. Caveney’s initial reaction was that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life on NHS wards; but he reconsidered, and underwent an onerous course of chemo-therapy, each cycle of which left him exhausted, breathless, and with signs of peripheral neuropathy.
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