IN THE opening of his book Original Sins, Matt Rowland Hill is in a bathroom, frantically shooting up Class A drugs to help him get through the day.
His equipment is set out on the lavatory lid. “I know by the end of the day I’ll be rifling through pockets of blood-soiled litter for a needle that isn’t bent and clogged beyond use,” he writes. “But for now, looking at my tools in the rhomboid light cast by the window above the sink, I feel inspired, like a gifted painter standing before a blank canvas.”
The bathroom is, at least, tolerably clean. “If I absolutely had to find fault with this bathroom — if I could change one thing — it would be the fact that it’s in a church filled with mourners at the funeral of a friend of mine who died last week from an overdose of the same drugs I’m about to mainline into my bloodstream.”
He injects, staggers through the service, gets into a pointless fight with his friends at the wake — and ends the day scrabbling in the puddle of his own diarrhoea for a left-over wrap of heroin on the bathroom floor.
It’s a gut-punching prologue to what the publishers describe as “a story of faith, family loss, shame and addiction”. Beautifully written, it is also darkly funny.
The bones of the story are this. Hill is the oldest child of a Baptist minister, one of four siblings. His parents espouse a fundamentalist faith in which every verse of the Bible is taken literally — and their marriage is toxic.
There is a painfully vivid description of an interminable car journey that begins with prayer (“We pray you will hold us safe in your loving arms as we make our way to Guernsey today. Help me to drive safely, Lord. We pray that traffic conditions will be favourable, particularly at Junction 33 on the way into Cardiff, which can get very congested, especially during the school holidays”), before lurching into vicious verbal ping-pong.
“It is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and angry woman,” Dad says. “For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?” flings back Mum. “Woman,” his father says at one point, “if you died tonight, I’d dance on your grave.”
Hill’s adolescence is turbulent. He and his brother win scholarships to “a famous public school” (understood to be Harrow), where he is a fish out of water. He berates the school chaplain for his shockingly liberal approach to scripture, while at the same time wrestling with doubts, drinking, and smuggling his girlfriend into his dormitory for sex.
HE TURNS his back on religion. He goes to Oxford, where he is “pathologically unhappy”. One night, he asks a homeless man for some heroin, and is immediately, violently ill. “And yet, inwardly, I noticed a strange phenomenon,” he writes.
“I understood that an alarm bell had been screaming inside me every second of every day for some unknown period, years certainly. Its ringing had been long and persistent enough that, like tinnitus, it had become intrinsic to my consciousness. Now, I was engulfed by a gorgeous, amniotic silence. And it was only this silence that alerted me to the alarm’s former sound and how desperate I’d been to silence it.”
The addiction years are ugly, littered with sabotaged relationships, thefts from friends, flight from dodgy dealers. On more than occasion, he should have died; eventually, he finds his way to rehab and recovery.
The memoir — which is searing, angry, and comic by turns — is a way of making sense of his journey. “I started writing in 2017, when I was 33,” he says. “When I was 31, I had been lucky enough to go to a wonderful rehab which helped me turn my life around. So I was a couple of years clean from drugs, but I was still living as part of that institution, because they had this wonderful kind of community, a space where you carry on living, while you put your life back together.”
Reflection on his life led to writing about it. “It just seemed like such a strange series of events. I wanted to figure out what that story meant, and who I was. I just started writing. I wasn’t sure what I was writing — I thought maybe I was writing a novel at first, but I wasn’t too sure.”
He did not have a laptop at the time, because he had sold it to buy heroin. “So I started with a piece of paper and a Bic biro.”
Thanks to the help of a friend who knew something about publishing, by 2019 the completed manuscript was subject to an eight-way auction. It was bought by Chatto & Windus and published this summer to critical acclaim.
Has it been cathartic? “I think, in certain respects, yes,” he says. “The book describes all of these kinds of really painful and dark moments from my life, as well as some comic and bizarre moments. And I think I did feel that having written it had given me some peace.”
The book’s opening scene is “farcical and desperate”, he says, but it also represents a moment of homecoming. “Here I was, back in a church, face to face with addiction and its darkest consequences, because it really could have been me in that coffin. And on that day I kind of had this emotional experience where so much from my past came up. It happened that the funeral was in Wales, which is where I come from originally; so I heard the Welsh language for the first time in a long time.
“And it kind of caused some sort of emotional reckoning inside me, which I half understood at the time and didn’t really properly understand till later.”
HILL’s account of himself and his behaviour is unsparing. He is also unflinching in the description of his parents. (“My mother only really loved two things: Jesus, and special offers. In a way, Jesus was the ultimate special offer, because all you had to do was believe in him to go to heaven for all eternity.” His father, meanwhile, thunders judgement from the pulpit while keeping a secret supply of cigarettes in his garage.) What have they made of the book?
“My parents have read it. And I’m really grateful to them that they allowed me to tell the story from my own point of view, and to try and tell the story truthfully,” he says carefully. He hopes that he has been kind, and open about his failings. “I thought that was the most important thing, to be honest about my own flaws, my own mistakes. . . I have many, and they’re all there.”
His parents are “not bad people”, he insists. “They were not unloving. They wanted to do their best, like all parents do, and I love my parents very much. It’s just a family’s a very complicated thing, isn’t it?”
He thinks that they are proud of his being published. “But it’s always going to be difficult for any family to see its dirty linen aired in public.” The three of them are “working on” their relationship.
“You know, I didn’t think when I was writing this book that I was writing the Gospel of St Matthew. It’s very clearly a subjective account of my experience of being in that family. I have no doubt whatsoever that if my parents wrote their account, or if my siblings wrote their account, it would look completely different,” he says. “That’s one of the things that you’re grappling with, when you’re writing memoir, the intractable subjectivity of experience.”
There is no question that his loss of faith as a teenager was devastating. As he writes: “Could it really be true that everything I’d ever believed — and the whole moral world-view that went with it — was a lie? If I couldn’t trust a word my parents said, what could I be sure of?”
Of the defining moment, he says: “I actually stood in front of a mirror one day, and I said out loud the words ‘I’m not Christian.’ And when I said that, I almost flinched, thinking that God might strike me down with a thunderbolt.”
His rejection of religion was total. “That style of religion, it gives you two options: complete surrender and obedience, adherence, or complete rejection. And I chose complete rejection for many years. And I was spiritually and emotionally and psychologically lost. It wasn’t that long afterwards that I became a heroin addict, and those events must be connected.”
HE SPENT his twenties as “an angry, fundamentalist, evangelical, non-Christian”, he says. “I felt like religion was just basically mental illness. The irony was, I was mentally ill at the time.”
A greater irony still was that, after various false attempts to get clean, the treatment that finally set him on the path to recovery came from a Christian rehab charity. “They were Christians, but they had a different style of Christianity to my parents’. They felt that they were helping me because they were expressing God’s love, and that just blew my mind,” he says.
“You know, I had no idea that there was that style of Christianity. I’d hear the word ‘Jesus’, and it would make me flinch. But, gradually, I kind of came to see that there was a different way of being religious or being spiritual, and that it didn’t necessarily have to be all about whether you believe the right things. . . Instead, it was about how you acted, how you were with other people, and maybe your inner life.”
The people running the programme were some of the most loving, kind, compassionate, and insightful people he had ever met. “Did I then become the prodigal son and come back to Christianity? It would have made a very nice story if I had.”
Nowadays, he doesn’t mind thinking of himself as “a bit spiritual” sometimes, but that’s as far as it goes. “I wouldn’t say I’m a Christian. I feel agnostic about a lot of questions around faith and spirituality. But I’ve got a respect and even a reverence for a certain kind of spirituality. And I wish I could emulate it more myself.”
The Bible remains a lasting influence on his writing. “When I sat down to write the book, I don’t think I’d really read the Bible since I was 18. And yet, as I was writing, all of these different phrases from the Bible just started coming out. Even when I described walking away from my faith, you know, the phrase that came to me was, ‘I shook the dust off my feet, and I didn’t look back,’ which, of course, is a phrase from the New Testament.”
He believes that the Bible has formed him. “It’s completely, inextricably bound up with who I am and how I see the world. There are bits [in the book] where I’m quoting the Bible — sometimes it’s a subtle allusion that only people who are familiar with the Bible will pick up. Sometimes, it’s a more kind of conscious thing.”
The King James Bible, the Wesley hymns, The Pilgrim’s Progress are “my mother’s milk”, he says. When he went to Oxford, he thought that he had been brought up without literature, compared with those who came from “posh and cultured” homes. “And then I realised I’d had an intensely literary upbringing. And it wasn’t just the familiarity with the 17th-century or 18th-century texts, or whatever. It was more than that: it was the idea that the answers to the most important questions in life could be found in a book, in the written word, on a page. And I put that down to the upbringing that I had, and I’m grateful for that.”
Today, he is well, but there is no sense of triumph at the end of the book. “It’s been some time since I’ve struggled with addiction to hard drugs,” he says. “But the thing about books about addiction is that they usually end on this kind of thumping note of redemption. And I didn’t want to write mine in that way.
“While I was writing the book, after a long, long period away from drugs, I had a relapse. And I had to kind of find a way of folding that into the story. And, you know, it’s been an ongoing education in how difficult life is, and how difficult the idea of redemption or recovery is.”
The reviews of Original Sins have been hugely encouraging. It has been longlisted for the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. He wants to continue writing, perhaps a novel next. (“Novels are the thing that I love the most. I mean, even when I was waiting to meet a drug dealer, I’d sit on a park bench, and I’d be reading Jane Austen, or Dickens, or Kafka, or whatever.”)
But the next project may be something about the devastating death of his brother Jonathan, who died suddenly at the age of 34 in December 2019, from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. They were extremely close — “he was probably the closest person in the world to me, and certainly the person that I loved the most” — and Hill is struggling to come to terms with his loss. Writing about it may take some time.
“When he died, I took a long break from writing the book, and I wasn’t sure if I could continue writing at all. I didn’t want to keep going — I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep living at times, let alone write a stupid book.”
He kept going, though. The book is dedicated to his brother: “His name is right there. And, you know, anyone who reads the book will see his name.” Writing scenes where he featured allowed Hill to spend a little more time with him.
Then there were his brother’s final words to him. “I met Jon the night before he died for dinner — that was a lovely coincidence that some would call a miracle — and we had a lovely talk. I had just signed this book deal, and he said to me, ‘Don’t you dare fuck it up.’ So I tried to honour him by keeping that promise.”
Listen to the full interview on the Church Times Podcast.
I WENT to church the next morning with a mouth that felt like sandpaper and a skull that felt like something was trying to punch its way out. As I sat in the pew listening to my father preaching on the doctrine of predestination, I wondered why, if my parents possessed all the answers to life, they were so unhappy. Why was it that joy seemed to belong to non-Christians like George and Jack and Emma?
After the service I was in a combative mood. Over lunch with my family I raised my voice above the clatter of cutlery. “Dad, tell me something. If God’s already decided who’s going to heaven and who’s going to hell, what’s the point in praying for unbelievers to be saved?” My father waved a forked potato like a conductor’s baton “That’s a very good question, Matthew. A very good question. Some of the finest theological minds in history have wrestled with it.”
”So what’s the answer?”
”Scripture tells us that God determined our eternal destiny before time began. Take John 15: Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you. Meanwhile in James 5 we are commanded to pray one for another, that ye may be healed.” My father brought his potato to his mouth and chewed. “Such teachings may seem irreconcilable to us. But trying to plumb God’s wisdom with human reason is like looking at a tapestry from the back. We see no pattern, no meaning. But one day, when we’re with the Lord, we’ll see his plan in all its beauty. Will you pass the apple sauce, Jonathan?”
My father looked satisfied with this argument and went back to concentrating on his food. I didn’t say another word, but inwardly I seethed. A few years ago such flimsy reasoning would have seemed to me the epitome of wisdom. But now I felt the scales falling from my eyes. I hadn’t yet altogether lost my faith in God. But my faith in my father was shattered.
Back at school, keeping my doubts behind a locked door in my mind was increasingly consuming all my strength. As my final year wore on, I was more and more exhausted. Could it really be true that everything I’d ever believed — and the whole moral worldview that went with it — was a lie? If I couldn’t trust a word my parents said, what could I be sure of?
The terms of Pascal’s Wager no longer looked so appealing to me. Sure, if all your heavenly bananas lined up, you’d hit the eternal jackpot. But, if they didn’t, and you spent all your days crossing your fingers, hoping to cash out at the exit by handing over the crumpled ticket of belief — well, in the loss column would go everything, including your single chance to create a life based on freedom, courage, dignity, intellectual honesty. After all, what would it profit you if, in attempting to win your soul, you lost the whole world?
This is an extract from Original Sins by Matt Rowland Hill, published by Chatto & Windus at £16.99 (Church Times Bookshop £15.29); 978-1-78474-382-6.