Ootlin

Ootlin
Jenni Fagan

Jenni Fagan’s story begins in a Victorian psychiatric hospital. It is there where she is born and it is there where she is first taken into care as a baby, her details noted down by a member of staff and filed away. Decades later, as an adult, when the Freedom of Information Act is passed, Fagan will request this record—this story of her life that was, as she writes in her new memoir Ootlin, authored not by her but by the British state. 

In Ootlin, Fagan is writing to fill empty space. The requested files failed to record her name. An ootlin is an outsider or ‘queer folk who never belonged’ and Fagan describes her younger, missing self as one. She wonders if it was goblins who took her in as a baby, and who called her ootlin in lieu of a name. 

These fairytale beginnings are more Brothers Grimm than Disney. In Ootlin, Fagan describes the cruelty she endured as a child by foster parents and social workers as she moved from temporary bedroom to temporary bedroom. The abuse is harrowing, particularly as Fagan writes as a child experiences, her sentences short and sharp, punctuated with exclamations and questions.

As Fagan ages into a teenager she is a ball of energy: furious, hurt, scared, frequently on drug trips and already a survivor of violence including a suicide attempt, abuse, self-harm, rape and homelessness. While she gets into trouble with Edinburgh’s social workers, police and drug dealers, she is also becoming Jenni Fagan, the author. The lack of stability in the teenager’s material conditions is flowing out of her and onto pages pages of poetry, hidden under mattresses and in dressers beside stashes of drugs. 

Ootlin began as a suicide note twenty years ago. Unsatisfied with the first attempt to sum up her life, Fagan wrote more pages until a book emerged. An introduction and an epilogue frame the resulting memoir and in them Fagan explains her motivation for finally publishing Ootlin: it is because stories are important, they are the structures of our world, and yet not everyone gets to tell their own.

By the end of Ootlin, Jenni is sixteen. She is about to leave care and in two decades time she will be one of Scotland’s most celebrated writers. But there on the page, she has six bin bags after a childhood of nearly thirty homes. In writing Ootlin, Fagan has given her vulnerable, past self the agency that was taken from them by a wholly inadequate system of care. The result is a remarkable story of salvation.

—Katie Goh