Matt Rowland Hill (2022) Original Sins: A Memoir.

Matt Rowland Hill (2022) Original Sins: A Memoir.

I failed to appreciate the cover of the book. That’s no sin and not much of a joke either. I pay more attention to book covers than most. Being in the writing game with millions of other writers trying to sell books covers is the best chance of grabbing what we crave—readers’ attention. The book cover has an apple with a bit taken out of it, obscuring the words in gold lettering: Holy Bible.

Matt Rowland Hill’s father was a Baptist Minister. He came from working-class origins and entered the middle-class. His mother was ‘at her wit’s end’ and believed literally the Bible was the word of God. You got on the train with Jesus. As long as you didn’t get off, He’d meet you in heaven. Everyone else would end up in hell. James Hogg (1824) had some fun with this idea of predestination in The Private Memoirs of a Justified Sinner.

Rachel, Matt’s big sister, played the game until she was old enough to get to university and never look back at such silliness. His wee sister, Abigail, played along until puberty, then she played with bad boys that smoked cigarettes and went for long drives with her as entertainment. Jonathan, his younger brother, despite being a precocious musician, won a scholarship to a public school named as being ‘Very Famous’ for the very rich and those above common laws. Jonathan was destined for hell not because he went to the school for parasites, but because he liked boys. Matt somehow wangled his way of the Welsh valleys and somehow also entered the land of milk and honey that (I believe) was Eton also on a scholarship.

The difference between Matt and his middle-class brothers and sisters wasn’t their expectation of meeting Jesus or the devil. His addictions left no room for hubris and much room for humility. He was an addict. His hatred of all things religious and his parents’ hypocrisies had come back to bite. He was already in hell.

Prologue sets this up very clearly.

‘Is there anything more lovely than the sight of clean works, fresh from the pharmacy in the morning?

…Laid out on the toilet lid are three aluminium spoons in blister packs, six yellow sachets of citric acid, four orange-capped 1ml in sealed plastic wrappers…’

Matt is thirty-years old and an addict attending the funeral of another addict in Wales.

In Genesis, he uses a holiday to Guernsey as a factional way of introducing the main characters. His father, Phil, is literally in the driving seat. Beside him, his mother, Angela. The narrator and his family are in the back seats, watching and listening to a parental argument that has no beginning and no end. Their mother’s hectoring tone. Their father’s passive response, until he reacts and tells her to ‘fuck off’. And there’s weeping and wailing and gnashing of mother’s teeth. The younger children cry with her. The older kids try to get a game of ‘I Spy’ going to try and make such unpleasantness go away until they can.

Matt falls in love with girls and wanking. A theme emerges of this being The Very Last Time. After, for example, feigning sickness and leaving church, he has a wank in his parent’s car. He promises God that will be The Very Last Time. We all know how that ends.

He falls in lust with Emma and Ranna. And he has sex with the former for The Very Last Time. She even travels up from Wales to have sex with him in the school for parasites for The Very Last Time.

God knows why anyone studies Theology, but Matt goes to a University favoured by parasites and gets a degree nobody cares about and a heroin habit, which everyone does.  Even though heroin and crack fill him with a sense of bliss, he’s never experienced before, he’ll give up after the next hit for The Very Last Time. We all know how that ends.

In the script-writing bible it’s laid out, with the ‘unexpected twist’ and the ‘final choice’. Heaven or hell? When only one exists? Matt Rowland Hill admits to the miracle of our NHS. He wouldn’t be here without it. In picking up the pieces of his life, he’s created an honest and entertaining account of a warped religion and his addictions. One day at a time. Read on.