Boyhood
David Keenan
Independent Scottish Booksellers
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Independent Scottish Bookshop
In stock
Scottish BookAuthor: Dr Jenni Fagan
£10.95
Ootlin is Jenni Fagan’s memoir of growing up in the UK care system, moving through multiple homes and identities while enduring neglect and instability. Told with raw, lyrical intensity, it traces survival, storytelling and the struggle to reclaim a sense of self. For readers of powerful memoirs about childhood, resilience and systemic failure.
dispatched by Royal Mail Tracked 48
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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.