Mayhem: A Memoir

by Sigrid Rausing

A searingly powerful memoir about the impact of addiction on a family.
In the summer of 2012 a woman named Eva was found dead in the London townhouse she shared with her husband, Hans K. Rausing. The couple had struggled with drug addiction for years, often under the glare of tabloid headlines. Now, writing with singular clarity and restraint, Hans' sister, the editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing, tries to make sense of what happened.
In Mayhem, she asks the difficult questions those close to the world of addiction must face. "Who can help the addict, consumed by a shaming hunger, a need beyond control? There is no the drugs are the medicine. And who can help their families, so implicated in the self-destruction of the addict? Who can help when the very notion of 'help' becomes synonymous with an exercise of power; a familial police state; an end to freedom, in the addict's mind?"
An eloquent and timely attempt to understand the conundrum of addiction--and a memoir as devastating as it is riveting.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Addiction, Mental Health, Audiobook, Drugs

204 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2017

About the author

Sigrid Rausing is Editor and Publisher of Granta magazine and Publisher of Granta and Portobello Books. She is the author of History, Memory and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm and Everything is Wonderful, which has been translated into four different languages.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

It read like a storyline from the latest thriller. In a £70 million pound mansion in the plushest part of London, in a drug den sealed with duct tape, human remains were found covered by a tarpaulin and a couple of flat screen TVs. The staff were told not to enter the room and with the discretion that the ultra-rich demand, none thought to question the reason why, nor disobey. This wasn't a bestseller though; it was real life. The remains were the body of Eva Rausing, wife of Hans Kristian Rausing, heir to the multi-billion Tetra Pak fortune. The couple had long been addicted to Class A drugs and had often been in the newspapers with the journeys in and out of rehab. Her death of a heart problem had not been ignored by Hans, but his drug-addled state caused him to take actions that a person in normal circumstances would not have done.

Watching Hans and his Eva's lives implode was Han's sister, the editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing. She hadn't really paid attention when he first had become addicted to drugs in his twenties but saw them both relapse after being married for seven happy years. As the drug use spiralled out of control again they drifted in and out of rehab, she took to writing persuasive letters and emails trying to help them with the predicaments. This supportive help failed, but after taking advice she became the legal custodian of their four children, something that Eva strongly objected to claiming that Sigrid wanted the extra children for herself, something that she rebuts in the book.

It is a very personal and open memoir, with stories of her childhood growing up in Sweden and the small pleasures of life that she recalls in snippets. The core theme of the book though is addiction, and how an individual can become so absorbed that the neglect friends, family and themselves. She asks the question how do you help someone with an addiction? Especially if they really don't want to be helped at all, how the twelve step process does work, but after someone has relapsed and entered rehab again, it is easy to repeat the things that those running the centres want to hear, with no real commitment to their meaning or purpose. There are deeper questions too about where the line is where someone is knowing what they are doing and the point where that stops because of the addiction and mental capacity.

It is not an easy read subject wise, thankfully Rausing's sparse but beautiful writing helps makes this an essential read. She is brutally honest about her own life and the failures in helping Hans and Eva, but also now understands the limits of what she could actually do at the time. She doesn't and cannot provide the answers of where to go to get the help that people need, but does highlight how little is understood about addiction and how society can tackle the pain and anguish it causes.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A searing family story of tragedy and loss is combined with the ravages of addiction in “Mayhem: A Memoir” by editor and publisher of Granta magazine and books, Sigrid Rausing. Eva Rausing (1964-2012) and her husband Hans were joint heir’s to the Tetra Packaging fortune, when Eva was found dead in London at the Chelsea Mansion she shared with Hans in July 2012. At the time of Eva’s death, Sigrid hadn’t heard from Eva or her brother in four years.

Hans was arrested due to the circumstances surrounding Eva’s death, and later admitted to a hospital for detox and rehab related to his own drug addiction. Rausing wouldn’t see Hans again until 2014. The family was shocked and devastated-- the couples four children had been made wards of the state in 2007, and were in the care of Rausing and her husband since that time.
Rausing would have no choice but to deal with the media sensationalism surrounding Eva’s death, the toxic impact of public opinion and the lingering effects on the family name. Police do not release details to the public of investigations causing speculation and conspiracy theories to thrive. At one time, drug induced paranoia having no basis in reality led Eva to contact the police with information that came to her in a “mind wave”. Eva’s report was in regards to the shooting death of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme on February 26, 1986. After Eva’s death news headlines read: “Singrid Rausing To Be Questioned About the Palme Murder..”.

According to Rausing, addiction is a disease of varying degrees and levels. At worst, addicts find themselves trapped in a loop, emotional states of intense craving that can only be satisfied temporarily by more drugs. This fractures the addict’s core character, eventually they trust no one. Eva had been briefly been in treatment at an exclusive rehab facility in Malibu just before her death-- and expelled because substance was found on her person. It seems that the (realistic) possibility of relapse should be addressed and covered while in treatment: nothing is proper or set in stone about the recovery process. Clients should not be discharged as long as they want to progress in efforts and attempts to stay clean. Staying in treatment saves lives. Although we know right from the start Eva didn’t make it, her story is important-- too many addicts are dying, and too many families are broken. This family story was sincerely shared in good faith for the benefit of others. **With thanks to the Seattle Public Library.

[CanadianReader · Rating 5 out of 5]

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious like Tombs.
--Emily Dickinson

Mayhem is a powerful meditation on addiction, on how it maims not only the addict but also his or her family. With this reflective, literary, and allusive memoir, Rausing attempts to wrest the highly publicized and lurid narrative of her billionaire/philanthropist brother (Hans) and sister-in-law (Eva)’s long spiral into heroin and cocaine addiction from a media that reveled in splashing the sensational details of the case across newspaper pages. Rausing has been denounced—“condemned”, in fact—by the Kemenys, her sister-in-law’s family. The family regards her decision to publish a memoir as selfish. For them, it is a painful and unnecessary resurrection of a story that ought to have been laid to rest. The Kemenys are incensed at what they perceive to be a misrepresentation of their daughter and sister. They blame Rausing’s taking custody of Eva’s children for Eva’s despair and death.

I feel for the Kemeny family and understand why its members would be opposed to seeing this sad story brought back for viewing. At the same time, I do not feel that Sigrid Rausing “trashed” her sister-in-law in any way. Her treatment of Eva is sensitive and sympathetic. No doubt the Kemeny family members have their own understanding of what occurred, but they should not fear that Eva is represented in an insensitive or unsympathetic way in Rausing’s book. Furthermore, I do not see how anyone could argue that it was appropriate for Eva’s four children to remain with her and her husband. Yes, addicts love their children, but their relationship with the addictive substance is stronger than—takes precedence over--anything else. Addicts, including alcoholics, cannot parent. They are, for all intents and purposes, unavailable to do so.

Because of its literary allusions, Mayhem has been criticized as “pretentious”. I didn’t find it so. For me, it represents an effort to make sense of what happened, but it is also a powerful book of mourning. It offers something valuable to the families of others who have also clung to the wreckage left by addiction.

[Emmkay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rausing’s memoir is an effort to come to terms with events in her family, which has been riven by the drug addiction experienced by her brother and sister-in-law and the latter’s very sad death. She ranges round in time, from her childhood at their Swedish summer home, to the pair meeting in rehab and building a family, to the 12-year relapse that came to a tragic end. Her analysis is fragmentary, and draws on literature and the social sciences (some well-worn ground there, with the marshmallow test and Milgram experiment). As a reader I felt her bewilderment, and her frustration at theories that would place addiction at the feet of the family, when she probably feels like she was held hostage to it for years. Her discussion of rehab for the wealthy, and the often empty promises it makes, reminded me of the poignant comment in Matthew Perry’s memoir about how much he had paid to rehab facilities over the years.

It was a difficult read to penetrate in many ways. I’ve realized recently that I love to use the word ‘elliptical’ in reviews, and I really need to find some more words, so I’ve been synonym-hunting this time for other words that mean, “having an often intentionally vague or uncertain meaning,” and, shaving now a variety of choices at my disposal, will offer ‘enigmatic’ and ‘indistinct.’ In this case, it was hard to get much of a sense of any of the players, and even the course of events to which Rausing was referring was quite confusing for me for much of the book, until I looked up the details online - there I learned that her family are wealthy heirs to the Tetra Pak fortune, and that her sister-in-law’s arrest on drug charges and the circumstances of her death were enormous in the press at the time (this does become clearer as the book goes on, but initially it felt like knowledge was assumed on the part of the reader). I felt her struggle to process events through writing while maintaining privacy and acknowledging the unknowable: at one point, she refers to having lost the keys to a cabinet with documents in it that contain all the sordid details left out of the book. Not that I wanted sordid details, but this enigmatic quality was both thought-provoking and frustrating at times.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Now that it’s all over I find myself thinking about family history and family memories; the stories that hold a family together and the acts that can split it apart.”

Sigrid Rausing’s brother, Hans, and his wife, Eva, were wealthy philanthropists – and drug addicts who kept it together long enough to marry and have children before relapsing. Hans survived that decade-long dive back into addiction, but Eva did not: in July 2012 the 48-year-old’s decomposed body was found in a sealed-off area of the couple’s £70 million Chelsea mansion. The postmortem revealed that she had been using cocaine, which threw her already damaged heart into a chaotic rhythm. She’d been dead in their drug den for over two months.

Those are the bare facts. Scandalous enough for you? But Mayhem is no true crime tell-all. It does incorporate the straightforward information that is in the public record – headlines, statements and appearances – but blends them into a fragmentary, dreamlike family memoir that proceeds through free association and obsessively deliberates about the nature and nurture aspects of addictive personalities. “We didn’t understand that every addiction case is the same dismal story,” she writes, in a reversal of Tolstoy’s maxim about unhappy families.

Rausing’s memories of idyllic childhood summers in Sweden reminded me of Tove Jansson stories, and the incessant self-questioning of a family member wracked by remorse is similar to what I’ve encountered in memoirs and novels about suicide in the family, such as Jill Bialosky’s History of a Suicide and Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows. Despite all the pleading letters and e-mails she sent Hans and Eva, and all the interventions and rehab spells she helped arrange, Rausing has a nagging “sense that when I tried I didn’t try hard enough.”

The book moves sinuously between past and present, before and after, fact and supposition. There are a lot of peculiar details and connections in this story, starting with the family history of dementia and alcoholism. Rausing’s grandfather founded the Tetra Pak packaging company, later run by her father. Eva had a pet conspiracy theory that her father-in-law murdered Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986.

Rausing did anthropology fieldwork in Estonia and is now the publisher of Granta Books and Granta magazine. True to her career in editing, she’s treated this book project like a wild saga that had to be tamed, “all the sad and sordid details redacted,” but “I fear I have redacted too much,” she admits towards the end. She’s constantly pushing back against the more sensational aspects of this story, seeking instead to ground it in family experience. The book’s sketchy nature is in a sense necessary because information about her four nieces and nephews, of whom she took custody in 2007, cannot legally be revealed. But if she’d waited until they were all of age, might this have been a rather different memoir?

Mayhem effectively conveys the regret and guilt that plague families of addicts. It invites you to feel what it is really like to live through the “years of failed hope” that characterize this type of family tragedy. It doesn’t offer any easy lessons seen in hindsight. That makes it an uncomfortable read, but an honest one.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Rudy Parker · Rating 1 out of 5]

How can you take such a fascinating story and turn into a dull one? Easy, inject a lot of pretentious English literature and various pop psychology ideas into it. This book did not really describe the incident that made me most curious about the book, the death, and decomposition of Eva Rausing whilst her husband Hans was in a drug-addled state. Nor does it offer any real insight into why Eva and Hans became drug addicts or ended up where they did.

[Lea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd never heard of Rausing before I picked this book up in a sort of yard sale. Sigrid Rausing is the owner of Granta and a Tetra Pak heiress. In 2012 her sister-in-law was found dead in her house, the husband, Sigird Rausing's brother, hadn't reported her death for two whole months.

The book doesn't dwell much on those sensational parts of the story, instead it's more calm and tells the story of her brother's addiction in broad strokes and with distance. Emotionally, I can fully understand that decision, and even with that distance, there were parts of the book that are difficult to read for anyone with a family member suffering from addiction. Other parts of the book are suprisingly mellow and almost a little too slow. Still, Rausing's writing talent and her family's fame make this an usual book about addiction and its impact on families.

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Addiction memoir from the family perspective. Also from the perspective of wealth and power. Addiction through the insulating lens of privilege and piles of money.

So many unanswered questions, as there always are, many families nurture great mysteries, but great questions can frustrate the reader.

So many stories are untold here — like those of the staff at the scene of the crime. What would they have had to say about the whole tawdry spectacle?

Addiction memoir from the perspective of someone in the glare of a media spotlight.

[Jacob · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 stars rounded up.

I have to start by confessing that I read this (or rather, listened to it) entirely because I wanted Maggie Gyllenhaal to read me a story.

This book is ostensibly the story of Hans Rausing, the Swedish heir to the Tetra Pak company, his wife Eva, their opiate addiction, and Eva's eventual death from overdose, as told by Hans's sister Sigrid, who is a philanthropist/businesswoman/sometimes writer trained as an anthropologist (she has a PhD). Apparently Eva's death was a highly tabloided case in Sweden and in the UK, where Sigrid Rausing lives, but I certainly had never heard of these people before I read this book.

Possibly to Sigrid Rausing's credit, it must be difficult to write a memoir that is not actually about your experience. That is exactly what she tries to do, and that is one of the things I found so offputting about it. She's telling someone else's story - telling a story of addiction as someone who has clearly never used drugs, and in fact describes them quite naively, resorting to describing scenes from documentaries about drug use to try to understand what it might be like. And although she is writing this memoir, there is strangely very little of her, or even of her relationship with Hans before he got deep into his addiction and went MIA, in this book. I wondered through the whole thing whether he was even still alive. Turns out, he is, and is in recovery, though we don't get that part of the story. She also doesn't say what he thinks of her writing this book.

She describes in great, bewildering detail various memories that build on sweeping Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian metaphors for addiction, (e.g. the Bacchus myth, the story of Adam and Eve) but these stories do little to move the narrative forward. In fact, there really isn't a narrative here. There are just random stories about snakes.

These are the musings of a poor little rich girl who oscillates between feeling guilty about and defending her great wealth and privilege, and her and her family's role in her brother's addiction. I think dealing with a family member's addiction is difficult no matter who you are, and she does take in her brother's four children when he loses custody of them. So it's not that I have no sympathy for her, it's just that she did very little to make herself or her family relatable here because everything was so abstracted.

In the afterward of the book, S. Rausing mentions legal restrictions on the narrative, and questions whether she has said enough. Maybe these restrictions account for the fact that she spent more time off on tangents than she did telling the story. She must have relayed just about every theory of addiction, and every social psychology experiment I learned about in intro psych all those years ago. For example, she drones on about Freud's ideas about addiction, his concept of the uncanny, its etymological origins in both German and Swedish, and then how it is taken up in the children's moomin book series by Tove Jansson. Mildly interesting, but a far drift from the story. It's like she's trying to fill space. In talking about Eva's attempts to recover, she describes in detail the website for a luxury treatment facility Eva attended, and then the website for a payday loans business linked on the treatment facility's website. Her point is that the treatment facility is very expensive. Her rich family can access it and other people can't. No kidding! Did she have to describe these websites in detail to tell us that? It goes on like this. For. Everything.

In summary, it was painfully tedious.

I was astounded I made it to the end. I did so only by virtue of the dulcet tones of Maggie Gyllenhaal's voice.

[Robert Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author’s father started several successful companies; by most accounts, he amassed over a billion in assets. Sigrid Rausing, one of his daughters, is a successful woman herself, currently the owner and editor of Granta magazine and publisher of Granta books.

In this memoir, she writes of her brother and sister-in-law’s addiction to drugs and alcohol. Her brother, Hans married Eva—they are wealthy too, and their story reinforces the maxim that addiction doesn’t discriminate by race, creed or wealth.

Both Eve and Hans ran the gambit in treatment protocol –however, by the time of their last relapse, they “had stopped going to 12-step meetings. They let go of solidarity with other addicts; they became funders of addiction causes instead, flattered and praised, like all philanthropists.”

Rausing often focuses on the supportive family, themselves abusers of mind-altering chemicals at times—while trying to help, they were at times “walking on eggshells, setting new boundaries that were broken again and again.” The family’s good deeds were sometimes a “cover-up” for their “distress.” (“I covered up how distressed I was and hid my panic attacks – time and time again I thought I was dying, my mouth numb, my mind faint with anxiety.”)

Rausing discusses the complexities of addiction. Is addiction genetic or environmental? But, this is not a self-help book, rather the author exposes the pain and suffering she (and other family members) endured as they watched loved ones digress into the abyss of addiction—not from afar, but up close.

Her writing skills are obvious and heartfelt—she knows that trust between the addict and helper is critical for recovery (“a definition of hell is a lack of trust,”) and has learned there are limitations and necessary boundaries between the two. Rausing writes a compelling memoir that is truthful, sad, and important.

[María Greene F · Rating 2 out of 5]

La idea en principio me gustó mucho: Testimonio de un caso muy famoso - en su zona - de lo que fue una drogadicción. El nieto del imperio Tetra Pack, multimillonario, que desde jovenzuelo tuvo problemas al respecto y que luego se casó con una mujer que venía de algo similar. Luego de años rehabilitados, ya con cuatro hijos chicos, recaen súbitamente y ella muere y como él está drogado y en negación, se aísla con ella durante semanas sin enterrarla porque no quiere aceptar lo sucedido (sin nadie aún saber que ella ha muerto). Luego lo descubren, hay gran escándalo en la familia y en los medios, él vuelve a rehabilitación durante años y la hermana cría a sus hijos en vez, la misma hermana que escribe este testimonio. Por último, años después, logran encontrar cierta paz y reafirmar lazos todos.

El libro está escrito con mucho cuidado, no solo por ser un tema delicado, sino que también por la posición de poder y a la vez vulnerabilidad que la autora sabe que tiene la familia siendo tan ricos e importantes. Aún así trata de explicarse con toda la candorosidad posible, cosa que no le resulta mucho, trae mucha información complementaria con mucha dedicación, pero el resultado queda un tanto estéril, muchas veces parece más una tesis filosófica que algo personal, cita a más artistas y escritores y pensadores de los que puedo contar con los dedos de todas mis extremidades, y muy poco a lo que piensa ella misma o piensan el resto de la familia.

Al principio pensé que tantas citas y tantas alusiones eran un acto de snobismo, pero luego me di cuenta de que la autorai simplemente trata de paliar lo amargo de la experiencia con sus herramientas lo mejor que puede. Después de todo, ella misma es editora, su trabajo diario son los textos y su análisis y citar a todas esas personas. Lo malo - a nivel libro - es que pasa la mayor cantidad de tiempo como decimos en Chile "sacando la vuelta" y diciendo cosas sin decirlas, entonces, a la hora de la verdad, como testimonio real no cumple tanto.

Así que, pese a que agradezco el intento de mostrar un caso de drogadicción desde adentro encontré que el testimonio era meh. Mucho ruido y pocas nueces, aunque por las razones más válidas posibles. Con algunas joyitas deslizadas de cuando en vez.

Un par de citas que destaqué de todas formas:


1.
Como dijo Ishmael Reed citando a George Bernard Shaw, si no contamos nuestra historia, otros la contarán por nosotros y nos vulgarizarán y degradarán. Escribo este libro a sabiendas de que tal vez se considere una traición a la familia; un acto vergonzoso, una forma de sacar tajada.

Si algún lector piensa eso, quiero que sepa que yo lo he pensado antes. Si algún lector piensa eso, que tengan en cuenta cómo crecimos mis hermanos y yo: riqueza, privacidad, silencio, discreción. Pero alguien murió, temprano de madrugada, o bien avanzada la noche. Creo que Eva estaba a punto de recuperarse cuando falleció. Había señales de que empezaba a recuperarse. Y aún así murió. Mueren muchos drogadictos. Muchas familiar quedan destrozadas.


2.
El mismo pelo castaño, idénticos ojos verdes, las mismas pestañas oscuras. Yo era poco agraciada y Lisbet guapa. Yo era rebelde y ella buena. Aunque en realidad no éramos muy distintas. Los gemelos y las naciones vecinas mantienen lo que Freud denominó "el narcisismo de las pequeñas diferencias". Pese a que nosotras fomentábamos nuestra diferenciación, en ocasiones nos confundían por la calle. Yo también podía ser guapa bajo una luz favorable. Y Lisbet se rebeló en su momento.


3.
¿En qué se convertiría? [Hans Christian, el hermano]. Lisbet y yo nos convertimos en profesoras de universidad, como lo había sido mi madre. Las dos dejamos la enseñanza, del mismo modo que la había dejado ella. No nos dábamos cuenta de que considerábamos a nuestra madre un modelo de conducta, pero lo era, claro está: trazamos nuestra vida en relación con nuestros padres y nuestra cultural.

¿Y quién podía ser el modelo de mi hermano? En una sociedad meritocrática como la sueca, era imposible que fuera como nuestro padre.


4.
Un día se presentó mi primo, al que apreciaba, con su mujer. No me acordaba de que los había invitado a comer y cuando llamaron al timbre sentí pánico. Los llevé al restaurante indio de la esquina, un esfuerzo supremo. Superé la situación, aunque por los pelos. No dejaba de disimular.

¿Por qué era tan importante disimular la angustia? Lo ignoro, pero así son las cosas. Expresar vulnerabilidad resulta fácil cuando somos fuertes y casi imposible cuando no lo somos.


5.
Una noche tranquila de principios del verano cogí un cuchillo y me hice unos cortes superficiales y largos en el brazo. Brotaron gotas de sangre, sartas de perlas rojas. Mientras en la cocina trazaba rayas y dibujos sobre mi brazo, mi gata se me enroscaba en las piernas, maullaba, zigzagueaba, se pegaba a mí. Recuerdo que me pregunté si su reacción era una señal de inquietud o bien la excitaba el olos de la sangre.

Y luego me vine abajo. Lloré hasta quedarme sin aliento. Llamé al centro de rehabilitación y al día siguiente me encontraron una cama.


6.
Las drogas embotan la capacidad de sentir. Y sin emociones no podemos vivir. Leí en el New Scientist o en el Scientific American que la mosca de vinagre se "inquieta" al ver sombras que se asemejan a sus depedradores.

El miedo es crucial para la supervivencia, claro: las moscas con miedo deben de contar con una enorme ventaja evolutiva con respecto a las que no lo tienen. Los animales necesitan emociones para sobrevivir. Igual que nosotros. Sin emociones podemos convertirnos en un náufrago en pleno centro de Londres. En un vagabundo que hurga en la basura de su propia casa.

[Mind the Book · Rating 4 out of 5]

En kollega/vän skickade med mig den här från de brittiska öarna till den svenska ön, med orden "Den här var intressant. Den läser du snabbt." Så var det. Tyckte den var mycket välskriven och mycket tragisk.

Tänkte tidigt på Tolstojs "alla olyckliga familjer..."-citat. Vi pratade om hur Rausingbrodern tågluffade österut i sin ungdom och råkade träffa ett par italienskor på stranden i Goa. De frågade om han ville prova lite heroin och det ledde till ett långt missbruk. Vi pratade om hur det kan vara möjligt att ha fyra barn och tjänstefolk i ett stort Londonhus med ett minst sagt familjenormbrytande, väldigt hemligt, låst rum högst upp, där mamma och pappa tar tunga droger och ibland äter lite glass på nätterna. Det var också där Evas döda kropp hittades sommaren 2012 efter flera, flera års folie à deux.

Det märks att Sigrid Rausing är akademisk, litterär och har erfarenhet av att vara analysand i Freuds tradition. Finner mig snabbt till rätta bland hennes socialpsykologiska och sociologiska Milgram- och Goffmanreferenser. Vissa svengelska meningar känns lite hemtrevliga, t.ex. "I am, for the first time since it happened, alone in the house." (Tunga adverbial placeras först eller sist, som det heter, till skillnad från i svenskan.)

Tillstår slutligen att det är oundvikligt att känna ett visst klasshat; utöver Chelseahuset gråts det på gods i Sussex, i sommarstugor vid kustlinjen i Sverige etc. - så hur synd är det egentligen om den här familjen? Svar: mycket.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Otroligt intressant men fruktansvärt rörigt.

[Emma Townshend · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a scorching book, yet all delivered in the quietest prose. Sigrid Rausing's brother was so addicted to drugs that when his wife died, he lived with her body for several months, unable to face the facts of what had happened. I loved the way this book is constructed - it allows no easy generalisations, and I don't think she is easy on herself either. She keeps asking all the hard questions - about family, responsibility, explanation, narrative, fault, drama, blame.

One of the parts I found the most moving was when she tells her fairly alpha-sounding billionaire businessman dad she is writing a book about it. And instead of going 'how dare you' or being shocked or something like that, he says, 'good'. She says you imagine when something that bad happens there would be an official record somewhere, that you could look up, to establish what actually happened, and of course there isn't. What actually happened is tons of tabloid speculation and someone wrote an ACTUAL OPERA. Imagine someone taking your family tragedy and making an opera of it (I want to write that horror face emoji here).

Some of the most beautiful passages describe her quiet country childhood and her appreciation of being away from civilisation in wild places. I will definitely now seek out her book about being on anthropological residency with a small rural community in post-soviet Estonia, as i just LOVED her quiet and reflective writing style.

[Marieinsweden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jag är golvad. Så intressant.

[Pernilla (ett_eget_rum) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Malström är en biografi om ett tragiskt missbruk och om människorna omkring.

Det handlar om TetraPaks arvinge Hans Rausing som träffar sin blivande fru på ett behandlinghem. De gifter sig och får barn. Men de får återfall efter återfall och tillslut avlider hustrun Eva Rausing som hittas först flera veckor senare.

Systern Sigrid Rausing berättar en historia som är kantad med hopp och förtvivlan, skuld och oro.
Hur kommer det sig att vissa börjar missbruka? Hur tidigt kan man se tecken?

Det är fragmentariska minnen blandat med kulturhistoria och vetenskap. Rausing vill berätta sin historia, vid sidan av rubriker och spekulativa artiklar.
Det är också en påminnelse om att missbruk kan hända vem som helst, även dem som "har allt". Fascinerande och intressant utan att vara snaskigt.
Blev tyvärr inte lika golvad som jag hoppades och som många andra verkade bli men ändå bra läsning.

Rekommenderas till det intresserade.

[Karenina (Nina Ruthström) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bitvis fantastiskt tjusigt. Fragmentarisk. Distanserad. Den där förtvivlade känslan som jag utgår från måste ha funnits beskrivs ej. Ganska skönt tycker jag.

[Susan Emmet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drawn to "Mayhem" because of Rausing's position at Granta and because all the families I am part of have been overtaken by the "perfect storm" of addiction and mental/emotional illness, I offer heart- and mind-felt applause for her apparent honesty, fear, love, guilt - and the kaleidoscope of physical and mental and emotional upheavals addiction creates.
No need to recap the story, the tabloid coverage, the anguish of disclosure, the battle between truth and lies.
What I am left with is a lucid recapturing of the waves stirred, the inability to consistently believe (or know) if what is done or undone is "right." Trust in experts whose advice varies? Trust in law and medical enforcement? Trust that "bottoming out" has happened? Trust in recovery? Trust in self?
As Rausing notes mid-memoir:
"You can argue the causes of addiction and the efficacy of treatment models every which way. I believe that addiction is a spectrum condition - and that we are all on the spectrum. The neurological model, based on the binary distinction between neurotypical and addictive brains, one or the other, doesn't seem to me to recognize that. The genetic model of course is less binary, since the view now is that so many genes are involved, one way or another. Each one plays a part. And I imagine it's likely that some mutations give protection against addiction, rather than the other way around.
There is a factor of time, too: what we are and what we become, in essence, can change."
In that there may be hope even when Eden lies in the bubble.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sigrid Rausing's Mayhem focuses on an incident that seems to have been relatively widely reported in the press, especially in Sweden, although I had heard nothing about it before beginning to read her memoir. The body of Rausing's brother Hans's wife, Eva, was found in their London flat in 2012. It was clear that Eva had already been dead for a number of weeks, and that the cause of her death was crack, which disrupted the workings of her pacemaker and stopped her already damaged heart. Both Eva and Hans had struggled with drug addiction for years, and Sigrid took over the care of their four children after the couple's latest relapse. Mayhem, a deliberately fragmentary and, in Rausing's words, unfinished, text tries to make some sense of what happened to Eva and Hans.

Mayhem was obviously a very difficult book to write. Rausing recognises the risk she is taking in writing about issues that have so profoundly affected her family, most obviously the lives of her four foster children. However - and fairly enough, in my opinion - she makes the case that Eva and Hans's story has already been so extensively covered by the press that her book will add little to public knowledge of the facts of the case while hopefully setting parts of the record straight. One of the saddest bits of Mayhem is when Rausing simply lists some of the press headlines that deal with her family story in reverse order, illustrating the seemingly inescapable spiral of addiction. However, elsewhere in her memoir, she worries at some cliches about drug addicts, trying to take a look at the science behind addiction and illustrating how partial and biased our knowledge of the condition still is. I found much of this material very familiar, but it's an effective summary for those who have read nothing about the topic.

Mayhem didn't quite work for me, in part, because of necessary restrictions on the text. I fully respect Rausing's decision to protect the privacy of her family as far as possible. However, because of this, much of the text feels rather distant from the story at its heart, with clinical accounts filling in the gaps. If this had been fiction, I would have wanted to know much more about how Rausing coped with suddenly having to take on the care of four children (increasing the size of her family from three to seven) and the difficult court battles around that decision, when Rausing was bizarrely accused of simply wanting more children for herself. I obviously understand why the book says little about this, but I was left questioning whether there was enough left to make a memoir. 3.5 stars.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for review as part of the Wellcome Book Prize shadow panel.

[Ginger Webb · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's quite amazing that this was a Sunday Times Book of the Year and that it was also shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize.

One can have nothing but deep sympathy for the author, who wrote Mayhem as a way of reflecting upon the years of terrible drug addiction endured by her beloved brother and his wife, addictions that led to the downfall of both and, eventually, the death of her sister in law.

Writing the book was clearly cathartic for Rausing, and that is a good thing. But it offers nothing to the reader, either as a straight tale of tragedy or as a wider consideration of the causes and consequences of addiction.

Partly this is because Rausing chooses a perversely disjointed way of transmitting the story, flitting from one thing to another and never settling for long on any subject or thought, either chronologically or thematically. Even the basic facts of what happened to her brother and sister in law have to be pieced together from snatches of information relayed begrudgingly every 20 pages or so and never offered in much detail.

Mainly, however, the defect is in the lack of substance to Rausing's musings. Underneath her articulate veneer of intellectualism, with its frequent references to 'high' art and philosophy, there is nothing actually to get hold of – no conclusions, no meaningful observations, no answers to any questions. Although Rausing often feels as if she is being terribly profound, in fact she has nothing to say.

The result is a surprisingly anaemic, passionless treatment of a heart-rending subject. No doubt the author felt terrible anger, sadness and despair throughout the whole ordeal - and probably still does. But such emotions have been pushed aside in favour of a pretentiously studied approach that strives ineffectively for intellectual depth.

[Tor Pothecary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mayhem: A Memoir is a rather inoffensive book that struggles to say much and spends most of its time musing in abstraction than talking about anything concrete. The book is a memoir of the author's brother but feels more like an introspective diary of the author herself, and lacks depth or detail to make it a compelling read. The subject, drug addiction, is a difficult one to write on, and perhaps the author's own lack of experience in drugs was a factor in the book's weak tone and lack of message or stance. Those who are expecting a book capitalizing on the sensationalism of the event it is based on, will not find that here, and the more sober tone is quite compelling and uplifts the book. In sum, not a fantastic read, but if one is interested in the case of Hans Rausing or wants a different perspective on drug addiction, then this is at the very least readable.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible how this sensational story was told in way that acknowledged those parts of the story, that are quite shocking, but still remained focused on exploring the universal pains family members experience when a loved one has an addiction. It's beautifully written and a touching memoir.

[Rebecca Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this memoir riveting. The author takes an intensely personal experience and makes it universal. Having grown up around addiction and now finding my adult life impacted by someone else's addiction, I found myself nearly in tears when reading certain passages, sentences, phrases. It took courage to explore this experience and bring it forth to the world. I will no doubt revisit this book at some point.

[Noelle Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really powerful and cathartic read for anyone who has been touched by addiction.

[Inken · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 200 pages Sigrid Rausing tells the story of the destructive and heartbreaking effect her brother Hans’ addiction had upon their family and the shattering results when Hans and his wife, American businesswoman Eva Kemeny, relapsed. It is also Sigrid’s desperate need and attempt to make sense of what went so horribly wrong with her family, how/why addicts are made, what drives their behaviour, their thought processes and their inability or refusal to see the devastation their addiction creates for others.

The Rausings are a wealthy Swedish family with connections to the UK and America. Growing up Sigrid and her brother had a pretty idyllic childhood (certainly a privileged one) but a trip to India in his early twenties resulted in Hans coming home addicted to heroin. Hans’ first stint at a British rehab centre coincided with a massive and debilitating depression in Sigrid. Ironically her doctor chose to send Sigrid to a rehab centre for her therapy, where she rapidly discovered the many limitations of treatment in these places.

In a later rehab centre Hans met Eva, they fell in love, married and managed to stay sober for several years. Tragically they both relapsed in the late 1990s and in 2007, after a bitter custody battle, their four children went to live with Sigrid and her family. In the throngs of addiction, paranoia and denial, Eva never forgave Sigrid for this “betrayal”, even tho the alternative would have been custody within social services. Years of abusing heroin, cocaine, crack and prescription drugs followed until the family’s problems became public property in 2012 when Eva’s body was discovered in her and Hans’s London home two months after her death. Unable to cope with the reality of her death, Hans had hidden the body under a pile of clothes and tarpaulin.

(Part of the Rausings’ addiction problems had to have been exacerbated by the fact they met in rehab. Having dated a couple of recovering addicts I know from what they’ve told me that being in a relationship with a fellow addict is usually considered a bad idea. If one of them slips, the chances the other will too are magnified enormously. Denial and rationalisation become so much easier if you have someone agreeing with you.)

Sigrid has been accused by several people of exploiting her family’s tragedy but that isn’t the sense you get from this book. Never mind that she really doesn’t need the money (being one of the UK’s wealthiest businesswomen and philanthropists), her grief and pain at Hans' and Eva’s addictions and especially the effect this had on their children are described in searing and vivid language. She explores addiction and treatment theory, hypothesizes on addicts’ peculiar viewpoint on life and describes the limitations of both the legal and medical systems in Britain and Sweden. Sigrid makes it very clear the tremendous toll, regret and guilt she and her family suffered as a result of trying desperately to understand and help the people they all loved but who could/would not be helped.

[Therése Mellby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jag ville verkligen att den här boken skulle vara bra: boken som TetraPak-miljardären Sigrid Rausing skrev om sin bror Hans Kristian Rausing som gömde sin döda fru Evas kropp i två månader i sitt sovrum efter att hon dött av hjärtfel till följd av sitt drogberoende. Och den är välskriven. Och Sigrid låter uppriktig och djupt ledsen. Men hon håller också en märklig distans, med många referenser till litteratur, dokumentärer, undersökningar och forskning, något som gör boken underligt kylig. Jag önskar att hon hade kopplat bort sin akademiska hjärna och bara berättat den sorgliga berättelsen om Hans och Eva. Fin inläsning (Storytel) av Maggie Gyllenhaal som lyckas riktigt bra med de flesta svenska ord och namn och som har en mycket behaglig röst.

[Motvalls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Läsvärd men mycket speciell. Många resonemang kring ord men aldrig kring distinktionen mellan beroende och missbruk. Jag saknar det och undrar hur det står i engelska originalet. Lite om familjen Rausing och jag förstår att hon inte vill utlämna alla men det blir ändå lite platt. Det skiner igenom hur speciell och udda familjen är i det uttalade kring säkerhet och förmåga att betala dyrt för saker - men kanske än mer i sånt som ”förnimmelsen av räv” eller vardagsbetraktelser. Nu väntar jag på ngt av barnens biografi...

[fyrtorn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Die Geschichte von Eva und Hans Rausing ist, bei aller Tragik, auch echtes Boulevard-Gold. Kein Wunder, dass sich die Presse vor 10 Jahren um die neuesten Enthüllungen in diesem Fall riss. Hans' Schwester Sigrid probierte dann vier Jahre später, die Geschichte der Familie nachzuerzählen und gewährt intime Einblicke in das Innere der Familie. Vieles wird aber auch ausgespart, was man als Leser sehr gut nachvollziehen kann, allein um unschuldige Dritte wie die vier Kinder von Eva und Hans Rausing zu schützen. Hier liegt aber meiner Meinung nach auch die Schwachstelle von "Mayhem", weil sich das Buch irgendwie unvollständig liest. Auch das Hadern der Autorin, überhaupt dieses Buch zu schreiben, ist absolut verständlich, wird mir aber etwas zzu häufig thematisiert. Auch die zeitlichen Sprünge haben mir nicht sonderlich gefallen. Unterm Strich eine interessante Lektüre, die aber noch weitaus packender hätte sein dürfen, in Anbetracht der Backstory.

[wilma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lite rörig på ett mycket bra sätt, gillade att den blandade teori med minnen och upplevelser

["Robert Ekberg" · Rating 2 out of 5]

Man kan tydligen skriva vilka böcker man vill nu för tiden.