Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour

by Mark Haddon

An unflinching, brilliantly written, darkly funny, lavishly illustrated memoir by the acclaimed author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time:  A ringing testament about how one artist sees the world, and how his experiences have shaped his vision

Simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least he had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham.

Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It’s about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It’s about family. It’s about knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier mâché and mental breakdown and great white sharks. It’s about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. It’s richly illustrated throughout with images from the author’s childhood, some of them altered in unforgiveable ways. As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Biography Memoir, Autobiography, Mental Health, Audiobook

222 pages, Hardcover

Published February 17, 2026

About the author

Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). He won the Whitbread Award, the Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award, the Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.

Reviews

[Stephen the Bookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Sometimes home is a place you have to discover or construct"

As an avid reader, you have an image that successful authors must lead an idyllic existence of countryside retreats musing over your next novel or writings- life is a chain of praise, gatherings and readings. Digging into the lives of authors- especially living writers- isn't something that many do ; the enjoyment of a favourite writer's book is the focus and the anticipation of something new.

Mark Haddon has always been a respected and savoured writer - a man who digs into the underbelly of the human narrative and creates stories that transform and transport.

Leaving Home is an autobiography - it is raw and unflinching as Mark Haddon allows us to be a party to his childhood and the subsequent years of adulthood and literary acclaim. for someone who was a child of the 60s and 70s, the concrete imagery of the time came flooding back. But all is not happiness in the slightest.

" Do objects, in their constancy, provide consolation in a world where adults are unpredictable and distant and loving?

This is a book that rips open a family and reveals the unseen image - parents who were never truly happy, children who were not visibly loved and were isolated in their existence from their parents and a world where praise and understanding was very limited. To share such a childhood and teenage years is not an easy read- especially when you know your own was the opposite. Mark Haddon describes in detail the family home and his life as an insular child who very much felt alone and the negativity his mother placed upon his sister. Ultimately, his life long search for a home beyond that of the his childhood whilst recognising the impacts of the past.

Subsequent mental health challenges and the dynamic within the 'nuclear' family are exposed. When you grow up in certain circumstances, trying to acknowledge or understand alternatives is not easy. The prose in this book is very moving- sometimes it cuts like a knife. But there is also light amidst the dark and the love Mark Haddon feels for his sister, wife and children is palpable. A wonderful array of illustrations, photographs and imagery accompany the text- adding further depth to the read.

It would be easy to add different details from Leaving Home but this is a book that needs to be read with an open mind from the start and to follow the extraordinary personal life that Mark Haddon has shared with us- his need to self heal and find understanding..

This is a book that could be construed as incredibly sad but by sharing the enclosed events will bring recognition for many and of course help to reduce the shielding and self protection that all of us feel after traumatic events.

Powerful, moving and inspiring.

Reviewing such a book is from our own personal experiences and interpretations and we will all react differently. But there are many instances that connected with me- albeit from adult experiences.

Thank you Mark Haddon .

Thank you to Chatto and Windus and Netgalley for the advance copy

[Margo Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's tricky reviewing a memoir. I found the bits of 'Leaving Home' about Mark Haddon's writing & illustrating career astute and interesting, and the family history bits often deeply sad (they reminded me of Lorna Sage's 'Bad Blood'). A moving, and reflective, read.

Some of the writing nuggets:
"...a watershed moment was realising that I should take what I'd learnt writing for children and apply it to writing for adults, most notably the principle that young readers don't care about you. The youngest readers don't even think of books as having been created by another human being. It's just them and the text and the pictures." (p.131 on kindle)

"I am a writer who is deeply in love with stuff - cutlery, outhouses, false teeth, cows, violins, spanners... - the aura these things possess and the stories they tell simply because they have been part of intimate human life for a hundred, five hundred, two thousand years. A jet-pack, in short, will never resonate like a bicycle." (p.176 on kindle)

"I realised that Shakespeare himself, a man whose historical knowledge was shaky at best, was a master of the plausibly hypothetical, a creator of exuberantly cavalier historical worlds motivated primarily by the desire to beguile and transport..." (p.177 on kindle)

"I've learnt that an artistic success, however big, gives you nothing new to work on this morning, and it's doing new work this morning that makes me feel at home in the world." (p.189 on kindle)

And some random great lines:
"Dan believed for a long period that his parents were paid actors and that when he went to bed at night his pretend-father would loosen his tie, pour himself a stiff drink and say to Dan's pretend-mother, 'I think we fooled him again.'" (p.96 on kindle)

"Home was decorated mostly with framed, hand-coloured maps of Northamptonshire and, after our move upmarket, a few brass bed-warming pans, giving it the air of a high-end country pub." (p.136 on kindle)

"I am, almost certainly, the only person to have read Proust twice by mistake" (p.97 on kindle)

"The grave was temporarily marked with a wooden cross of the same kind they were using in the church cafe to hand to people waiting for cooked food so that it seemed as if Dad had put in an order for a cappuccino and a Welsh rarebit from beyond the grave." (p.94 on kindle)

[Erik B.K.K. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a rule: if an autobiography doesn't catch and hold my attention in the first 25 or so pages, it's a dud. Unfortunately, Leaving Home falls into this category. It's too haphazard and disjointed for my taste. It also doesn't help that Haddon starts this book by talking about dreams (boring!!!). I do like the pictures though. A lot. I wish I liked this.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant writer. The way he writes sometimes reading I felt like I found golden coins! But sometimes he went on tangents I had no interest in. At times philosophical and other times quite raw reading of his anxieties and troubled mind. His writing really puts you right inside!

[Ashleigh Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike anything else I’ve ever read or seen. Just brilliant.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Quiet Power of “Leaving Home”: A Book About Attention, Rooms, and the Strange Ways We Learn to Breathe Again
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 17th, 2026


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos

Mark Haddon’s “Leaving Home” arrives with the mild audacity of a book that declines to do what memoirs are currently hired to do. It does not audition for your sympathy. It does not build a courtroom case. It does not climb a tidy hill from damage to triumph and plant a flag on the summit labeled HEALING. Instead, it unpacks a box.

Out come the contents: a handful of childhood scenes with the off-kilter clarity of remembered light, a boarding-school education in cruelty and conformity, a body that periodically malfunctions and a mind that sometimes responds to overwhelm by simply leaving the premises. There are hospital corridors and rented rooms and the kind of jobs that feel less like steps on a ladder than like sideways shuffles across a wet pavement. There are, too, artifacts: photographs, diary entries, drawings, prints, diagrams, sculptures, record sleeves, architectural images, the humble evidence of making. Haddon lays these items on the table with a steady, unsentimental hand, as if to say: this is what I have. This is what I can prove. If you want a story, you may assemble one yourself.

The method is not gimmick but temperament. Haddon has always been a writer with an engineer’s suspicion of grand claims, a novelist of perception more than confession. In his fiction, the world is often seen askew, through a consciousness that is both hyperliteral and hyperattentive, and in “Leaving Home” that attentiveness becomes not merely style but ethics. The book’s short numbered sections feel like rooms rather than chapters, each a compartment in which a memory can be placed without being forced to pretend it is part of a smooth continuum. Memoir, here, is not a river but a floor plan. You walk. You open doors. You double back. You stand in the doorway a little longer than you planned because the light on the desk is doing something precise and inexplicable, and it would be rude to look away.

In the current climate, this refusal to perform emotion can read as chill. Some readers will call it cold. They will be wrong, but understandably so. “Leaving Home” is not a book that raises its voice. It is, instead, a book that listens. And because it listens so closely, it sometimes feels as if it is listening around the reader, not at them. That may be its greatest strength and its mildest frustration. Haddon is not, by nature, a sentimentalist. He has a dry, exacting wit and a keen eye for the comic absurdity embedded in bureaucratic life, even at its most solemn. There is a moment in which, asked at an office to describe his relationship to the deceased, he answers “Troubled.” It is funny in the way that truth is funny when spoken too plainly, without the cushioning euphemisms that social life depends upon. The joke is not decoration. It is a pinprick that releases pressure.

“Leaving Home” is full of pressures. The most pervasive is not the dramatic kind you can name and narrate in a satisfying arc, but the ambient kind that saturates a childhood when feelings are never directly discussed. Haddon’s parents are not rendered as melodramatic villains. They are not cartoon neglecters, not monsters in the style of certain confessional memoirs. They are something more ordinary and more painful: emotionally illiterate, inconsistent, often preoccupied, allergic to explanation. Love may be present, but language is not. Silence is the family dialect. The result is that the child becomes fluent in inference, in reading the atmosphere the way sailors read weather. You sense in these pages what it costs to grow up in a house where nothing is named and therefore nothing can be held safely.

If this sounds like the premise of a trauma memoir, it is worth emphasizing how firmly Haddon refuses that template. He does not stage “moments.” Dialogue is scarce. The memoir does not bristle with scenes in which someone finally says the thing and everything changes. Instead, there are objects. There are rooms. There are small recollections delivered with the blunt modesty of someone who distrusts the mind’s dramatizations. Haddon does not offer his past as a narrative of special suffering. He offers it as a set of conditions, a climate.

And climate is what the book is really about. The title suggests a plot point, the day you leave, the door closing behind you, the clean break. But in Haddon’s hands, leaving is less an event than a long habit of seeking a livable interior. “Home” is not only a place. It is a feeling of air. Can you breathe here? Can you think? Can your body relax its vigilance? The memoir repeatedly returns to the idea that space is moral, that rooms make us. Haddon’s father, trained as an architect, haunts these pages through drawings and plans, through a life of practical making that could not quite translate itself into emotional language. In one of the memoir’s most moving reversals, the father we meet through family life, brusque and unreachable, begins to soften when Haddon encounters his private writings. The father becomes a person of flashes: an observer, a note-taker, a man with a secret lyricism. The archive gives him dimension. It also gives the son a new problem. How do you mourn someone you never fully met?

Haddon answers by building a different kind of portrait. He does not invent a reconciliation scene. He does not submit a final verdict. He offers, instead, paper evidence: diary lines, drawings, photographs, the residue of a mind at work. Here “Patrimony” comes to mind, the Philip Roth book that finds a father not through melodrama but through the work of care, the daily, unglamorous attending. Yet Haddon’s care is different in texture. He is less operatic, more oblique. His tenderness arrives in the form of attention rather than declaration. If Roth’s grief is a narrative, Haddon’s is a still life.

Still life is the right mode for much of “Leaving Home.” Consider how often Haddon remembers objects more vividly than people. A record sleeve. A magazine photograph. A particular kind of chair. A room on an LP cover that seems to promise a calm, bright adulthood. The boy looks at these images the way one looks at a door in a burning house. Not to escape the fire in a dramatic sprint, but to find the place where air is cooler. When he hears Benjamin Britten’s “Hymn for St Cecilia” in a chapel, the moment is described with the simplicity of a true aesthetic shock: the sensation of being transported by something you did not know could transport you. He then raids a music library and picks a Michael Tippett symphony largely at random, and is struck by the modernist image on the cover, that quiet, uncluttered room. “I want to be in that room,” he thinks, essentially. I want to live that kind of life. It is not a grand ambition. It is more intimate than ambition. It is a hunger for an interior that does not hurt.

The memoir’s most contemporary resonance lies exactly here. In an era when “home” is a subject of constant anxiety and impossible arithmetic, when housing has become both fetish and crisis, when many adults live in a state of extended temporariness, Haddon’s search for a livable room feels quietly urgent. He does not write about rents or mortgages as news items. He doesn’t have to. He writes about the psychological weight of space, the way certain architectures make a nervous system tense and others release it. That is a current-events tie that doesn’t require headlines. It is embedded in the body.

So is the book’s relationship to attention. The fragmented form, the short sections, the leaps from memory to object to quotation, can feel uncannily aligned with the contemporary mind, trained by feeds to process life in bursts. Yet Haddon’s fragments are not feed fragments. They are the opposite of scroll culture. They require you to linger. This is not a memoir that wants to be “consumed.” It wants to be handled. “Leaving Home” reads better slowly than quickly, and on reread it becomes more generous, as patterns that initially seem like drift reveal themselves as echo. In this sense, it joins books like “The Rings of Saturn” and “The Argonauts,” works that demand a reader willing to collaborate, to carry threads across gaps, to accept that meaning will not be preassembled.

The comp titles that hover around “Leaving Home” are instructive because each reveals something about what Haddon is not doing. “Speak, Memory” is lush, jeweled, built from sentences that sparkle with their own certainty. Haddon is plainer, funnier, more skeptical. “Bluets” turns obsession into a prism and sadness into a philosophy. Haddon is less lyrical, more craftsmanlike, his metaphors embedded in objects rather than announced. “I Remember” by Joe Brainard offers pure fragment as a radical democratic gesture, memory as inventory. Haddon shares the inventory impulse but brings to it a narrative intelligence that keeps the fragments in a subtle conversation. “W, or the Memory of Childhood” is a crucial touchstone because Georges Perec demonstrates how formal constraint can tell a truth that linear confession cannot. Haddon, too, seems to believe that the only honest way to approach certain experiences is indirectly, through structure.

The book’s indirectness is perhaps its defining feature. When something painful appears, Haddon often approaches it by side door: a quote from Plato’s “Symposium,” a reflection on a teacher’s incompetence, an architectural photograph, a piece of music, a drawing. On a superficial read, this can look like evasion. On a deeper one, it looks like fidelity. People raised without emotional language often do not suddenly acquire it in adulthood and begin narrating their feelings with therapeutic clarity. They acquire other languages. Haddon’s languages are visual and structural. He draws. He builds. He organizes. He walks. He makes.

The body’s role in this is striking. Haddon writes about self-harm not as melodrama but as mechanism, a method of relief, a dangerous but comprehensible strategy in a life where the nervous system has few other outlets. He writes about fainting and blackouts with the same matter-of-fact tone, as if the body itself has its own escape hatch. The metaphor is almost too neat: a memoir called “Leaving Home” by a person whose body sometimes leaves him. Yet Haddon refuses to tidy that into a thesis. He merely places the fact on the table and moves on. The restraint is infuriating and admirable. It is infuriating because readers have been trained to expect interpretation. It is admirable because it trusts the reader’s intelligence and refuses to sell pain as content.

This refusal is, in its way, a quiet rebuke to contemporary spectacle. “Leaving Home” is an anti-spectacle book. It contains no twist. It offers no viral hook. It does not behave like a memoir designed for discussion panels. Yet it is deeply of its time precisely because it proposes an alternative to our performance economy: attention, steadiness, maintenance. The book’s emotional center is not transformation but upkeep. Adulthood, in these pages, is not a breakthrough but a set of routines that make living possible: a desk, a walk, a studio, the daily return to making.

Making, indeed, is the memoir’s truest plot. Haddon is a writer who has always carried the illustrator inside him, and here the visual is not garnish but method. The later sections, which become increasingly image-driven, feel less like an ending than like a studio visit. Some readers will be disappointed by this. They want the concluding paragraph that announces what it all meant. Haddon offers a portrait of a desk, a set of tools, a handful of sculptures, an acknowledgement of collaboration. He includes a portrait of Simon Stephens, who adapted “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” for the stage, a reminder that even solitary work enters the world and becomes communal. The gesture is modest, almost radically humble. Instead of a moral, he shows you where the work happens.

If “Leaving Home” has a weakness, it is the one that comes attached to its virtues. The collage method can flatten momentum. The coolness can occasionally feel like a shield. The refusal to dramatize can make certain stretches feel slight, not because nothing is happening but because the book refuses to do the work of conventional propulsion. Haddon does not always arrange his fragments with the ruthless elegance of a Perec. There are moments when the reader may feel the drift of the archive, the slight slackening of tension when an image arrives without enough contextual charge. Yet these are minor imbalances in a work whose overall architecture is remarkably sure.

What remains, after the fragments have been handled, is a portrait of a mind. Not a heroic mind, not a mythologized mind, but a mind shaped by silence and made livable by attention. Haddon’s memoir is, among other things, a book about class without making speeches about class: the provincial English atmosphere, the state schools, the awkward awareness that certain tastes feel like passports to another world. It is a book about masculinity without ideology: a generational inheritance of emotional reticence, softened not by confession but by care, by the quiet competence of making and maintaining. It is a book about memory in an era obsessed with documentation: an argument, implicit rather than stated, that objects sometimes remember better than we do, and that the self might be less a story than a curated collection.

And it is, finally, a book about leaving without annihilating. Many memoirs of childhood hardship end with a symbolic burning of the old house. Haddon does something more difficult and more adult. He keeps the artifacts. He allows the past to remain complicated. He does not fix his parents on the page like insects pinned to felt. He does not exonerate them either. He simply acknowledges the cost of their limitations and the strange ways those limitations shaped his own capacities. The father becomes, in the end, not a villain or a saint but a person you can almost see at a table, pencil in hand, drawing something he can control.

As a reader, you may finish “Leaving Home” with the sensation that you have not been told a story so much as invited into a particular quality of attention. That is not a universal pleasure. It is, however, a distinctive one. In a culture that rewards loudness, this book values quiet. In a moment that wants narratives to be either inspirational or outraged, it offers steadiness. It is not perfect, but its imperfections are the kind you forgive in a work that feels honestly made rather than cleverly engineered. My own response settles, fittingly, in the realm of measured admiration: “Leaving Home” earns an 88/100 by refusing to be more than it is – a memoir built like a workbench, stocked with the tools and scraps from which a livable life was assembled, one careful object at a time.

[Nicola]

I read this almost at one sitting, partly in the way you can't draw your eyes away from a disaster. I'm a huge fan of his books (including the kids' books on Penguins from Mars which he seems to have disowned, unless there's another Mark Haddon!) and given the quality of his writing it somehow feels hard to believe what a difficult life he's had, both in terms of emotional estrangement from his parents (especially his mother, who sounds awful) and his struggles with mental ill-health. He skips over his horrible time at boarding school because, as he explains, it's a cliche. The book is illustrated in a variety of ways, from brownish 60s photos to his own very varied artwork - cartoons, imagined landscapes - and he is so good at evoking a time period, partly by mention of long-disappeared objects (sheets of Letraset, Watney's Party Seven, pale men sunbathing in shoes and socks on stripy deckchairs...) and by brutally satirising attitudes of the time, when traumatic events just weren't named- a sketch of his local rugby club labels each member with his penchant (sex abuser, sex abuser...). There's still plenty of anger and pain showing, and it seems all the more remarkable what a versatile and interesting writer he is. He also sounds like he's a brilliant writing tutor, as he describes some of his experiences from Arvon Foundation courses, and it's very illuminating and inspiring to read about his own writing processes. Much is very funny, but much is also very painful.

[Lynn Gambardella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wanted to read this because I read Curious incident of the Dog in Nighttime and really enjoyed. This memoir was a very interesting read. I found the author to be extremely candid about his early life and his parents. He was also extremely candid about his mental health struggles . Sounds like he balances everything well at this point. Have since put another one of his books on hold.
Also, I LOVED the format….all the photos and illustrations! Very cool and added so much more depth to the story!

[John Tuson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is completely wonderful. it made me snort with laughter on several occasions, but is also profound and wise and laced with a melancholic sense throughout. Haddon's sister, Fiona, and wife, Sos, are the two heroes of it all, and the warmth with which he writes about them is another lovely element of this. As is the fact that zoos are mentioned on four occasions.

[Ellis · Rating 4 out of 5]

About the phrase "don't speak ill of the dead", Haddon asks, "Which dead? And for how long after they've died?" I really liked how he didn't shy away from being honest about his parents. I think it's helpful to have memoirs about relatively ordinary families like this.

[Ros Kimber · Rating 4 out of 5]

A childhood family memoir as stream of consciousness rather than neatly packaged into chronological chapters. Isn't this how we all recall our past? The images scattered throughout the text serve well to illustrate Haddon's thoughts, emotions and interpretations of key family events. I also loved his insights into how he teaches writing.
The process of reading this was utterly absorbing and sent my mind off on similar tangents whilst also drawing me deeply into his worlds.

[Sarah Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was really looking forward to reading this - an author I liked writing about a time period I’m nostalgic about. Honestly I struggled, felt disjointed and a bit self indulgent.

[Nick Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found it a brilliant read, particularly with all his imaginative illustrations. Honest, sensitive to others, even when being blunt.

[Linda Thoren · Rating 3 out of 5]

disappointed

This book received a rave review from the Washington Post. I was looking for insights into disturbing family relations particularly memory gaps and the need for cut-offs per the review. This book had no insights and only served to review the author’s feelings towards his life over many years; the illustrations only served to make the book longer than it was.

[Bookreporter.com Biography & Memoir · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the course of my work as a reviewer, I’ve covered more than 150 memoirs. Without question, none of them resemble LEAVING HOME. Comprising 87 loosely connected segments, the book is an episodic exploration of Mark Haddon’s personal and professional life, filtered through his fertile and idiosyncratic mind. What makes it most distinctive is a format that intersperses photographs and drawings with his revelatory prose. He has created a unique sort of literary scrapbook that simultaneously excavates his past and charts the course of the artistic life he forged as he left it behind.

Haddon was born and grew up near Northampton, England, in the 1960s and ’70s in a comfortably middle-class household. To describe his parents, a handsome couple judging from their photographs here, as emotionally disconnected would be generous in the extreme. Neither his father, Peter --- a self-taught architect who developed a successful business designing abattoirs --- nor his mother, Maureen, seemed to have wanted children. But somehow they ended up with two (Haddon has a younger sister, Fiona, with whom he’s close). While his description of their parenting doesn’t suggest overt abuse, he recalled himself in an interview as an “anxious and depressed child,” even before he was forced to endure the misery of boarding school beginning at age 12.

As distant as Haddon’s parents were from their children, their own emotional relationship was equally barren. “They never hugged, never touched one another with affection,” he recalls. Haddon can remember listening to the music of Bach and Paul Simon on the radio, but he can’t summon up the sound of conversations in the household. “It wasn’t so much that no one spoke, it was that no one talked,” he writes. “I never heard an adult tell or ask another adult something that really mattered.” Based on some persuasive evidence, he long suspected that his father sought comfort in an affair with his much younger secretary, “S.”

It’s perhaps understandable, then, that Haddon has been plagued by anxiety and depression and a variety of phobias --- such as deep water, flying, and the fear that he has contracted a fatal disease --- throughout his life. One exceptionally shocking event occurred as recently as 2024, when he intentionally cut his arm with a knife (he provides a photograph of the stitched-up wound). He underwent triple bypass surgery in 2019 and has suffered from long COVID after two bouts with the virus. He’s not the only family member who’s faced a medical crisis, as he describes in a terrifying account of his wife Sos’ injury in a bicycle accident while pregnant with their second child.

As an antidote to obsessing over these darker times, Haddon has taken a productive step: volunteering for several hours each week with the Samaritans to staff a helpline for people experiencing mental health crises. It’s an echo of the work that he did with those suffering from physical handicaps and learning difficulties during the time he was establishing himself as a writer.

In describing one of his early volunteer experiences, Haddon reveals some of the roots of the empathy that’s a distinctive characteristic of his writing: “You treat other human beings with an unconditional dignity, full stop. The question is not ‘Is anyone in there?’ but ‘What exists between us?’ Our humanity is not an individual quality that can be measured and traded and celebrated and ignored, but an activity, a thing human beings do together.”

While Haddon’s book tilts heavily toward the personal, he does offer a few glimpses into his writerly preoccupations. As a child, his first love had been science, not literature (he entertained dreams of becoming a paleoanthropologist), and he grew up in a home where books and reading were not valued. Before his novel, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, became a multi-award-winning bestseller, he had been a prolific author of children’s books and an artist.

Haddon prefers books in what he calls the “weird zone,” and he shares a few captivating thoughts about their magic, which for him means “the idea of stepping out of time or into a parallel world, or finding that this world has layers of which we have been unaware.” In his writing, he’s driven by “the idea that some kind of answer exists if you can only find the right word, then the right word to follow it, then the right word to follow that.”

Even as it recounts troubling times in Haddon’s life, the tone of LEAVING HOME is often breezy and self-deprecating. At one point, he confesses to a “catastrophically poor memory” and at another to the handicap of the “patchily remembered events of my own life.” There are dashes of humor, such as the story of his brief rugby career (his father was a star player). He admits that “even now I miss the mud and the bruises and the legalised brutality, but it was not a milieu in which you could talk easily about poetry.” Dark moments outweigh light ones in this memoir, but its multihued portrait of the artist as a young and older man is a memorable one.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

[Carlton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Geoff Dyer’s autobiography, Homework: A Memoir, earlier this year which covers another southern English writer’s childhood and adolescence from a just slightly earlier period. Dyer’s book had me mentally reminiscing about similar aspects of my own childhood, it was such a good read for me because it prompted me to reimagine my youth, but Haddon’s book is different.

Juxtaposition without warning. Far colder parents, fewer intense memories, dislike of being at boarding school.
Compensated by good descriptions of adult life, becoming a writer, becoming a family man, but far more mentally difficult.
Interesting, but more difficult reading, and I felt emotionally distant.

This autobiography jumps around in time for each of its nearly one hundred short chapters, copiously illustrated with photos, drawings and altered images. So many pictures.
Haddon’s memories appear fragmented, and unhappy, especially about his mother, who it would appear, never enjoyed having children.
A lot of early memories are also small, just a couple of images for what were significant events. Chapter 14 is Haddon’s recollection of his Interrail holiday from before he went to university, which is amazingly brief (recollections, not his three weeks holiday). [The Interrail card (mine from 1983 cost £115) allowed one month’s unlimited train travel across most of Europe’s train network in the 1970’s and 1980’s (excluding UK), and my journeys were very memorable.] However, Haddon says:
Many memories of my early life are like this, as if I were leafing through a damaged photo album, individual snapshots separated by gaps where many other pictures have fallen out. There is no soundtrack, no commentary, no overarching narrative. Some pages are completely blank. A few years ago my sister told me about a teenage party I'd hosted at home. Friends from school came and slept over. Cigarettes were smoked. A hole was burnt in a curtain. My mother said it would never happen again. I have no memory of this party. Fiona tells me that there were girls present. Real girls. It's not simply that I can't remember who they were, I have no memory of who they could have been.
I think I approached a great deal of my childhood and teenage years in much the same way that I approached the Blue Grotto, weeping internally and with a towel over my head, pretending that it was not happening and waiting till it was all over, and consequently forming very few memories of what was happening outside my head on the other side of the towel.

Worth reading as a counterbalance to other people’s memoirs, as so much more fragile.

[Ellen F · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of my favorite quotes from Leaving Home:

"I've learnt to talk less and realise in retrospect how I often used to speak to fill silences despite having little if anything useful to say. I'm far more aware of how ordinary conversation works, that dance of anticipation and expectation, the signals we give off about what we're prepared to hear and what we don't want to know. I've learnt that 'Look on the bright side' or 'The same thing happened to me' sound like 'I don't want to hear about your problems'. I've learnt that we all have closed doors and that if you're genuinely interested and show that you can be trusted, people will often open them for you. Sometimes they will never have shown anyone else what's behind those doors. I've learnt that 'Tell me more' is the answer to many, many problems in life. I've become much more at home with other people's sadness and loneliness, their pain, their anger, their suicidal feelings, their self-harm, the knowledge of the harm they've done to others. I now understand that looking the monster in the face nearly always makes the monster less frightening." (p 180)

"For a long time I pictured literature as a great house wherein celebrated writers of the age gathered around the flaming hearth, and to whose steamy windows I pressed my sad face..." (p 187) "I've learnt that an artistic success, however big, gives you nothing new to work with this morning, and it's doing new work this morning that makes me feel at home in the world." (p 189) "A good writer is like a conjuror who keeps showing us how the magic is done then fools us with the same trick over and over... One moment we're conscious of the real world around us... The next moment we're unconscious of this world and vividly conscious of another... Once we're in this imaginary world we find ourselves crossing a further border and entering into the minds of its imaginary inhabitants. It's already happening in the Book of Job:

When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone? and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day. My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome. My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope.

"I find it hard to read this without the intervening two and a half thousand years dissolving like mist and the thought, Yes, that's exactly what it's like, the tossings to and fro, the weaver's shuttle." (pp 190-192)

[Katharine · Rating 4 out of 5]

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Discussions of suicide, self-harm and one particularly graphic photo of the results of self-harm in numbered section 20

Random note: Both Goodreads and Amazon list this book at 320 pages, but my hardback copy from the library is only 212, including notes and acknowledgments

Leaving Home is a memoir by Mark Haddon, most famous for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Leaving Home appears to be Haddon's attempt to exorcise his demons, most of which seem to have first emerged as a result of his youth. He even asks at the beginning of numbered section 34 "What does it mean, the injunction to not speak ill of the dead?" Because he clearly very much wants to take a heavy, blunt tool to his parents' heads and waited until after their passing to do so.

There is a lot of pain in this book, and a lot of struggle to rise above the pain. There is also a softer side, when Haddon discusses his spouse and their children. But, I hurt for him a lot while reading his disjointed, scattered, mostly sad little sections.

Because of the subtitle "A memoir in full color," this memoir will not work if you are reading the eBook version on a black and white device or listening to an audiobook. There are many illustrations that lend additional weight to the words. So, interested people should find a paper copy or read it on a full-color ereader.

4.25 stars

[Alicia Farmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read and enjoyed two books of fiction by Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Spot of Bother). So when my spouse had it in his latest stack from a library run, I claimed for myself this pointillist memoir, told in 86 one- to two-page chapters that are generously sprinkled with the author's own artworks.

It's a robust, relentless carnival of wonderful ideas, both written and visual. The chapters jump around in time and context, which can make it hard to piece together a unified narrative. But they nonetheless convey a narrative of the basics: Haddon's ancestors (working class), childhood (unhappy), adult personal and professional development (interesting).

What I'll remember most about it is its original format. It was like going through someone's junk box of memorabilia: a ticket stub, a page from a diary, an old prescription and a ribbon from a school competition. I had no idea Haddon was so talented as a visual artist. He started in books as an illustrator.

Quick and interesting. I'm glad I checked it out.



Haddon's descriptions of his childhood home remind me of David Sedaris's, especially with their cold and aloof mothers.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Haddon mentions the marvel of “everyday words you could hear on the bus…, arranged in a near magical order” and “if you could only find the right word, then the right word to follow it, then the right word to follow that.”

In my opinion, that’s exactly what he’s done in Leaving Home, a brilliant, pitch-perfect work by an extraordinary man. The poignant telling of his and his sister’s life with remote, deeply flawed parents is told with brutal honesty and sparks of smart humor. While his accounts of his sister Fiona’s life are raw, they’re unsparingly kind. His own unapologetic story is woven throughout with precision and scalpel sharp insight. He navigates these complex relationships as they take their toll on his health and mental state.

Haddon excites the same feelings in the reader as we had for Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. We’re rooting for him as he struggles with the darkness, the triple bypass surgery, and the near fatal bike vs. car accident of his wife and soon to be born son. We enjoy his remarkable artwork throughout the book. He’s a committed husband and dad, we admire his energy with writers’ workshops, and time well spent with those less fortunate.

What I find remarkable was his years seeing to his aging unwell parents, unwavering in their toxic comments, and finally the clinical descriptions of their deaths. An Exorcism. Putting them to rest.

[Anne Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book for both its format and content. I found the way the way Haddon interwove his childhod memories with his adult reflections and with his parents' journeys into care and eventual death very interesting. At times it almost felt like we were in a therapist's room, hearing Haddon revisit his past memories (supported with images from his art and photos), then reflect on their impact on him as an adult. While this is playing out, his parents are aging, their health declining and they each move into care and eventually pass away. By the time they have both gone, and perhaps not until they have, Haddon has truely "left home".

I want to acknowledge how open and candid Haddon is about his own mental health, and his feelings towards his parents. My partner and I recognised many of his parents' characteristics and relationship dynamics from both a child's perspective and as adults navigating a parent into care and continuing to visit out of a sense of responsibility. The suburban straight-jacket environment that was 1970s england (and New Zealand for that matter) and the education systems and society of the day infiltrates and permeates this memoir. The swinging sixties and seventies liberation was happening somewhere, elsewhere, but generally not where we were growing up!

[Martin Southard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Haddon’s Leaving Home is a masterful and deeply affecting memoir that captures the complexities of childhood, family, and creative life with extraordinary honesty. Eschewing conventional narrative, Haddon presents his experiences in vivid, fragmentary vignettes, combining humour, reflection, and visual artistry to create a work that is both intimate and expansive.

From the very first pages, the memoir balances wit and tenderness, confronting difficult truths — parental unhappiness, isolation, and the search for belonging — with a refreshing lack of sentimentality. Haddon’s prose is precise yet evocative, and the inclusion of drawings, photographs, and visual fragments transforms the book into a collage-like experience, where text and imagery enhance one another.

Leaving Home is profoundly humane. It illuminates the ways humour, creativity, and connection can sustain us, even in the face of emotional turbulence. The memoir resonates on multiple levels: as a portrait of Haddon’s formative years, a reflection on the creative impulse, and a meditation on memory, family, and self-discovery.

Many thanks to Random House UK, Vintage and NetGalley for providing this advanced copy

[Shen Xu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book for several reasons:
- the unloving parents resonates with me, as someone suffering PTSD-like symptoms everytime I think of my own mother. A parent has a lot ask themselves when they drive their children to such extreme.
- the professional and diverse artwork and illustrations in the book. I kept wondering who did them until I found out it was Haddon himself.
- quite a few unexpected learnings: workshop ideas such as using random words and limitations (eg. everything needs to be written in negation) to demonstrate the idea that how easy it is to make a plot and a writer does not need to over-explain and can simply leave the gap for readers to fill.
- many insightful quotes that I found myself contemplating at the time of reading, such as there is truth in happiness resides in one devoting to something larger than ourselves.
- interesting books for me to read that got mentioned, including children’s for my own kids

Something not quite hitting a five-star for me:
- the stream of consciousness sometimes lost me, especially it was not describing an event
- the effort in humility, in spite of its genuineness, felt contrived at places (I could be biased as being overtired hearing public school educated white bots’ voices in literature)

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour by Mark Haddon is a beautifully structured and deeply personal memoir. Best known for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Haddon brings the same intelligence and observational precision to his own life story.

What I admired most was the structure. The book unfolds in fragments and reflections rather than a strict timeline, which makes it feel true to the way memory actually works. Each section builds quietly on the last, creating a portrait that feels both intimate and thoughtful.

Some of the most powerful moments come in Haddon's recollections of his mother and father. These passages are striking in their honesty and vulnerability. At times they are clearly painful to write, and that rawness gives the memoir a real emotional weight. Nothing feels polished for effect; instead, Haddon allows the complexity of family and memory to stand as it is.

The result is a poignant, reflective book that lingers long after you finish it—personal, humane, and quietly profound. 📚

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual and quirky memoir interspersed with drawings by this talented artist and writer. It’s sad that so many children grow up disliking their parents. His memoir about his childhood isn’t that unusual but the way he writes about it works well - entertaining. I now want to read his famous novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time which won so many awards.

P.180
I’ve learnt to talk less and realize in retrospect how often I used to speak to fill silences despite having little if anything useful to say.

I’ve learnt that “Tell me more” is the answer to many, many problems in life. I’ve become much more at home with other people’s sadness and loneliness, their own, their anger, their suicidal feelings, their self-harm, the knowledge of the harm they’ve done to others. I now understand that looking the monster in the face nearly always makes the monster less frightening.

P.187
It’s a widely accepted, and I think correct, idea that happiness depends on our being devoted to something larger than ourselves - a political movement, a football team, a religion.

[Ruth Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Curious Incident wasn't a wowzer for me, but I loved A Spot of Bother and heard this book being reviewed on R4, I think, and it piqued my interest.
There is no coherent narrative here, but recollections from Mark's child and adulthood, with the odd essay / philosophical discourse thrown in.
He had a difficult relationship with both of his parents. His mum was very conscious of keeping up appearances and neither Mark nor his sister, Fiona, ever felt loved. His Dad was more gregarious but with no overlap between his job, church and sports clubs. His circles never mixed.
I found all of Mark's reminiscences moving, be they happy or sad. They are often sad. The adult
Mark is an illustrator as well as a writer and the book is filled with his drawings. He has also worked with people with learning difficulties and is a Samaritan, which has given him much fulfillment..
This book is a fascinating insight into Mark's life, and his mental health. He is so much more than The Curious Incident.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doubleday sent me a memoir unlike any I have previously read, "Leaving Home" by Marc Haddon. Not only is it in full color with photos and art throughout, its also a showcase of Haddons great storytelling capabilities. I was already a fan of his, as I'm sure many of you are, familiar with "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time", so I was very excited to get into this one. This book isnt necessarily told in a linear fashion, but it works. I think I enjoyed this aspect of it, because it reminded me of having a conversation with a friend and the natural flow of how that goes, how you touch on a topic, then circle back again.

     This is a book about family, mental health, art in many of its forms, the human condition. Haddon offers some very keen observations that often made me pause and give a moment of extra thought. Who doesn't love when a book does that?!

     What really struck me was the bits of humor sprinkled throughout some heavier topics that made this a very enjoyable read,  I didn't want to put it down. Grinning, pearl clutching, I went through it all. This is not generally the case of memoirs for me, they aren't exactly edge of your seat page turner, you know? This is going to be one of my favorite books this year. I know, its only now just March, but I can already tell.

[Daniel Allen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author writes a memoir that explores his dysfunctional childhood growing up in England, his various struggles with mental illness, his creative journey as an author and his family. Interspersed throughout the book are family photos and the author's artwork.

I would have preferred to give this two and a half stars. The biggest takeaway from this scattershot memoir is that Mark Haddon's life isn't interesting enough to justify the existence of this book. The structure is loose throughout. No point best exemplifies this than Haddon spending time opining on his favorite foreign language tv series, his favorite children's book, his many, many phobias and fears and many other rambling asides. His childhood, shared with a younger sister, was shaped by his parents and their flawed marriage. I did appreciate that Haddon took the reader into his creative process and spent some time explaining his influences and his goals when creating.

[Graeme Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour is a striking and vividly told account of Mark Haddon’s life, blending humor, pathos, and artistry in a way that only he can. Haddon’s narrative moves fluidly between childhood memories, family dynamics, and the formation of his creative identity, with illustrations that enhance the memoir’s playful and poignant tone.

The book is at once deeply personal and universally resonant, exploring themes of family dysfunction, mental health, and the ways in which art shapes our understanding of the world. Haddon’s keen observational wit and emotional honesty make this memoir a compelling read for both fans of his fiction and anyone interested in the life of an artist navigating a world that often feels out of step with their vision.

[Andrew Atkinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult one to rate. I have read and enjoyed several of this author’s fictional works. This, too, is very well written. However, the subject matter is not one of enjoyment. A difficult childhood is described and a seemingly relatively unloving parental relationship is portrayed. The author had/has physical and emotional traumas. Well done he for surviving them. And well done he for not shying away from describing the life he had/has. This will certainly not put me off reading more from the author; maybe, just the opposite. It gives somewhat of a deeper insight into the author’s character and it provides a sounding board for understanding and, hopefully, appreciating his other writings.