Before I Go by Catherine Cookson: book review

Before I Go (2017 posthumously) is the autobiography of prolific British writer Catherine Cookson.

Catherine Cookson (1906-1998) commences writing this autobiography in 1984 at the age of 78, with remembrances of her illnesses and doctors.

She moves onto meeting her husband Tom, their marriage in 1940, and the first year of the war when she had ‘ten blind evacuees and mental patients in the house.’

Her bad physical health led to ‘unspoken’ years of ‘nervous hysteria’ in which she describes the stigma of mental health issues that fed her world with ‘fear, hysteria and self-pity.’ She says she wasn’t ’only absolutely fearing – I became aggressive!’ But this gives her an insight into the minds of many people around her, suffering in silence, and being misunderstood: ‘I have been living behind a facade for years.’

Cookson does reach a state of ‘peace of mind’ through her writing and her constant companion Tom. He died less than three weeks after her. Her autobiography is best when she begins to mention the ‘ripening’ of her talent as a writer. She first begins to draw, and write stories for her landlady’s son.

It is Cookson’s honest account of her physical and mental health, her suffering, and years of pain and torment. It is also how her writing was a distraction from her pain, and why her childhood was such a significant period for her. Overall though, the account is as grey as the darkest day of England, which is a pity because England can also delight and fascinate, with it’s beautiful landscape and history, but readers don’t see anything outside of her four dark walls.

Although Cookson was a prolific best-seller, starting to write in 1945 until her death in 1998, inspired mainly by her childhood in the northeast of England, I have not read any of her novels; not one of the 100 or so. And for me, it was difficult to read this largely depressing autobiography.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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