Matt Rowland Hill
Matt Rowland Hill was born in 1984 in Pontypridd, South Wales, and grew up in Wales and England. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, the Telegraph and other outlets. He now lives in London. Original Sins is his first book.
Books by Matt Rowland Hill
“Instead of telling the story from the viewpoint of an enlightened paragon of recovery—which would have made it fiction, anyway—I decided to do something I hadn’t seen in addiction memoir: fashion an unreliable, often ignorant, sometimes even deranged narrator, who seems to have no idea how much he’s betraying his hypocrisies and self-deceptions. (Towards the end of the project, I read Ditlevsen and—although slightly disappointed to discover I hadn’t been as innovative as I thought—the success of her experiment encouraged me to think I was on the right track.) Then there’s my book’s ending and its ambivalent relationship with redemption—which I won’t say any more about, in case anyone’s interested enough to read it and find out what I mean, but which I think makes it a little different from other addiction memoirs. Although I don’t mind if the book’s called an addiction memoir, in the course of writing it I came to think that wasn’t quite right. I drew as much on another tradition: memoirs about loss of faith…In fact, drugs are absent from most of the book’s action, which is about my sometimes difficult childhood as the son of an evangelical preacher, growing up (or failing to), the catastrophe of losing my faith in my teens—and then my desperate search for salvation elsewhere. Drugs were just the most destructive of the several wrong places I looked; others were literature and women, or the fantasies I projected onto them.” Read more...
Matt Rowland Hill, Memoirist
Interviews with Matt Rowland Hill
The Best Addiction Memoirs, recommended by Matt Rowland Hill
The author and recovering addict Matt Rowland Hill dissects the ‘addiction memoir’—its literary potential, its formal conventions and its offer of hope and catharsis—as he recommends five books that exemplify the form, from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater to Mary Karr’s bestselling Lit.
Interviews where books by Matt Rowland Hill were recommended
The Best Addiction Memoirs, recommended by Matt Rowland Hill
The author and recovering addict Matt Rowland Hill dissects the ‘addiction memoir’—its literary potential, its formal conventions and its offer of hope and catharsis—as he recommends five books that exemplify the form, from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater to Mary Karr’s bestselling Lit.
