Jenni Fagin (2024) Ootlin

I put aside a few hours on Sunday to read Ootlin, Jenni Fagan’s memoir, straight through. ‘Ootlin’ in a simple sense means outsider. From the Scottish word oot.

Fagin tells the reader in the prologue, there are stories about stories. The social work department in Scotland, adoption agencies, psychiatric hospitals and the police all had files on Fagin and her family. The in-spectre of mad, bad or sad stories went before her even as a baby. She was the wrong kind of baby, born into poverty, madness and neglect.

‘I began writing my memoir as a suicide note,’ she tells the reader.

Fagin is telling it as it is. Poet Laureates, like Larkin might declare, families fuck-you up. But not having a family fucks-you up even more. Being a property of the state meant Fagin belonged to no one. Not even herself. Her name was changed, nineteen times, but nobody counted. Her date of birth variable. She was shuttled from one placement to another.

Care it was called. That’s the most fucked up description of all.

Part one, Age 0—5 is fictional and factional.

‘I was not meant to be here,’ Fagin tells us. Her mum tried to abort her. But she was sectioned and Jenni Fagin was born.

‘Trees rustled outside the ward,’ Fagin tells us. She cannot know that. Nor can she know how staff sat around the psychiatric ward, drinking tea and discussing her mum’s previous admissions, her psychotic breaks and shock therapy. Two generations of admissions. The usual suspects lined up. Genetics. Depression. Suicide attempts. Schizophrenia. A third if neonate Jenni Fagin that scrap on humanity counted as anything. Pass the problem on. Jenni Fagin is given to a Catholic adoption agency. This is fiction, but also factional. A story of note-taking criminal neglect and buck passing.

Jenni goes home to her mum and brother.

A social work report outlines a few difficulties.

‘Unchanged nappies. No toilet training. Mother sleeps all day. Can’t be left alone with brother. Brother a concern at school, he hurts children and shows no remorse. Boy is so neglected he appears retarded. Boy is found wondering an estate at midnight with bruises askes staff from a daycentre to take him in. Both children have weeping infected sores all over their bodies. Covered in scabies! Record of severe malnutrition. Both children are taken into care. Then again and again, and again…It’s a pattern… The girl has started to wet herself when she sees certain men on the street…’

A picture of Jenni as a toddler in her little bobble hat and a little anorak with false fur. Far too young to go to school. But not too young to be raped. I wrote about some of this stuff in Beastie (https://bit.ly/bannkie). Reality would make you weep.

Bill, Jenni’s new social worker, has kind eyes. Her foster mother has a cloud over her. She’s grey and that’s the way she wants Jenni to be. Her grey mother has a real family. They count for something. Jenni counts for nothing.

A factotum replaces Bill, the social worker she likes and knows. The search for a ‘forever family’ goes on. Jenni just wants to be loved.

The wee girl finds an oasis in a temporary placement. Family and friendship with other kids her age. But she is powerless when they come to take her away to her ‘forever family’.

She can tell her new mum is cold and cruel. Her new stepdad no say or interest in the way she is neglected, starved, beaten, and used as a family servant. She finds her superpower in reading. In writing poetry.

Picked on at school because she wears all the wrong clothes, and there’s that smell of neglect, but she’s an A-student.

Hope is hard to reach. Always out of reach. Jenni is an object. To be ridiculed, raped, ignored. Taken for granted where she’s going to end up. Caring means fast tracked to drugs, prostitution, and graduation to adult prison or a place on a psychiatric ward (now called—and not ironically—mental-health units).

The reader knows when reading her memoir this is not the path she takes. Jenni the former A-student is the exception to the rule. Get a fucking life if you think that’s a good thing. Read on.

Unleash the Beastie! https://bit.ly/bannkie