Cleaning Up - Tania Glyde

Serpents Tail $32.95

Cultural commentators often sneer at bourgeois depression and, in many cases, it's perhaps fair to question whether, compared to a Peckham teen, a posh Sloane has any real reason to feel depressed. Tania Glyde, however, provides a formidable validation of middle-class misery, taking us on a harrowing trail through her problematic existence, focusing in particular on her "23-year love affair with alcohol". One is forced to suspend disbelief as Glyde describes first tragic childhood abuse, then cocaine-fuelled cuckoldry at sordid Notting Hill orgies, before recounting in sometimes graphic detail her heavy involvement with booze and heroin, her brutal relationships with bruising City types, and a near-fatal overdose.

The strength of the book lies in Glyde's unflinchingly honest depiction of her personal struggle with, and ultimate victory over, her various addictions. The present tense she uses throughout is irritating at first, but successfully flings the reader into her alcoholic mêlée, and her story, though brutal, is well written, and will be frightening close to home for some.

Unfortunately, this touchingly candid narrative is too often punctured by space-filling faux-analysis of the UK's general alcoholic malaise and the British press's lecherous obsessions. Glyde is right to highlight the population's Heat-style fixations, but it's an obvious point and is contradicted by the way the (commendably) graphic detail she employs elsewhere encourages her readers to indulge their own voyeuristic tendencies. Her questioning of the value of psychotherapy also jars. Glyde may not have liked her weekly therapy trips, but she perhaps forgets that her book is itself one long session in the analyst's chair.

However, to linger too long on these discrepancies would be unfair because, at its best Cleaning Up is an absorbing personal account which deals honestly with serious substance abuse, sexual addiction and familial trauma, three topics which are too often sensationalised. It just could have done without the sweepingly slapdash sociological assertions.

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