Jenni Fagan’s account of growing up in Scotland’s broken care system.

Jenni Fagan was property of the state before birth right when she drew her first breath in care and by the age of seven, she had lived in fourteen different homes, and had her name change multiple times. Twenty years after her first attempt to write this powerful memoir, Jenni is finally ready to share her account. Ootlin is a journey through the broken UK care system – it is one of displacement and exclusion, but also of the power of storytelling. It is about the very human act of making meaning from adversity.

The fact that it is a memoir should make us angry at how child could be so badly and consistently let down. Fagan, who was taken from her alcoholic mother at birth and say no recored exists o her first three months, lived in a world where kindness and compassion were the exception, cruelty and indifference the norm. But Fagan not only survived, let alone went on to flourish as a novelist, poet, screenwriter, playwright and now memoirist.

If the new Labour government is serious about reforming Britain’s care system, then Outline should be top of its reading list, as Ootlin writes “There are a lot of kids out there being told they are less than everyone else. They are made unsafe by that story alone”.

Outline was the name that Fagan gave her infant self when she began writing the story of her life 20 years ago “ as suicide note” she says in her prologue.

She was moved through children’s homes, fostering and two failed adoptions in small towns and villages near Edinburgh, carrying her possessions in black bin bags. Think about the turmoil inside the smiling child.

Despite all this instability, she excelled at school and was always imaginative, telling an adult that she “wanted to pray because I don’t know where I come from”. Her memoir is full of heart breaking moments, and about her teem there is much worse. Fagan was raped at least twice the first time aged 12. She used drugs and alcohol to numb her pain, drifted away from school, fell into petty crime and almost went to prison. She said “ always look for beauty, especially in the hardest moments”. She draws a gothic landscape where high0rises resemble “big fingers sticking up at the sky”, pubs open at 6 am and people are ghoulish, pathetic and occasionally heroic in their kindness towards her.

Fagan leaves the care system at 16, by which point she had moved into a flat and was reading her literary mothers, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou. 

Vulnerable people should not need to be exceptional to be deemed worthy of attention and joy. Other children Fagan knew in care did not survive their ordeals.

Outline: A Memoir by Jenni Fagan, Hutchinson Heinemann £16.99, 336 pages.