My father was one of those men who sit in a room and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose, and do something terrible. [Burnside, p. 27]
As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…
He lied all the time even when there was no need to lie [...] He needed a _history_, a sense of self. [Burnside on his father, p. 22]
There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I am face-to-face with a stranger, a companion to something I recognise as mysel...
Everything stayed hidden […] it was all secret – known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured on those Saturdays when Dumfermline lost at h...
