Ootlin

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Before she was born, Jenni Fagan says the government told a story about her. She was property of the state before birth, and drew her first breath in care. By the age of seven, she had lived in fourteen different homes and had her name changed multiple times, her childhood shaped by constant movement and official decisions.

Ootlin is her account of growing up inside the broken UK care system, written after a long struggle to find the right moment to tell it. The memoir moves through displacement and exclusion, and the ways a life can be defined from the outside, with little room left for selfhood.

Running through it is the power of storytelling, not as a tidy resolution, but as a way of making meaning where meaning has been refused. It asks what it takes to reclaim your own narrative when so much of your early life has been written by other hands.