Unveiled Nuns Talking

Loudon, Mary

Biographies & Memoirs

Vintage

Everyone seems to agree that The Church of England is at the cross-roads - few can agree on what the future should hold. This series of interviews with leading and significant clergy provides many suggestions and also presents a portrait of the Anglican faith. The book includes interviews with the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, women deacons on the brink of full "priesthood", gay clergy and academic theologians.

Revelations

Religion & Spirituality

Hamish Hamilton Ltd.

“This is the story of my search for my sister Catherine, after her death. This is the story of schizophrenia, and the terrible things that it does to people.” –Mary Loudon A multi-faceted and extraordinarily honest look at the devastating toll that schizophrenia takes on its victims and on those who care about them, Mary Loudon’s Relative Stranger is riveting, illuminating, and heart-wrenching. It is the author’s fascinating quest to find her sister Catherine, who was lost to her family long before she died, in Catherine’s home, in her last hospital room, her paintings, her letters, her clothes. But perhaps even more compelling is Mary Loudon’s internal journey. In facing the truths about Catherine’s life and death, she asks hard questions about sanity, about family responsibility, about love, and about what it means to say that a life is – or is not – worth living. With intelligence, compassion, and a sharp eye for the funny as well as the sad, Mary Loudon ensures that we question everything we thought we knew about what it means to love, to lose, to live and die, and, most of all, to belong. My sister, Catherine, was a paranoid schizophrenic. Her illness was in place at birth and apparent during her childhood. During her teenage years, it asserted itself suddenly and aggressively. By the time she was in her mid-twenties, it had destroyed her chances of living anything approaching a normal life. . . . Following a severe breakdown, she first went missing, abroad, when she was nineteen and I was five. She was first sectioned when I was six, first sent to prison when I was seven. . . . She last wrote to me a year before her death from cancer, when she was forty-six and I was thirty-two. After Catherine died, I went to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, to see her body, and the hospital room where she had died. It was only there and then that I discovered one of many extraordinary things about my sister. For the last eight years of her life she had lived as a man.

Relative Stranger: A Life After Death

Bond Street Books

When Catherine Loudon died in 2001, the author and journalist Mary Loudon had not seen her sister in over a dozen years. Shocked, feeling an unaccountable sense of loss, Mary began to explore the traces Catherine left behind, trying to discover the truth about her sister – trying to discover who she was. The result of her search is this riveting, moving, and deeply thought-provoking book. Catherine was always an unsettled personality: when still a child she had threatened her family with violence; when she travelled to India as a young woman, her disturbing behaviour led to her father being summoned to return her to England. She refused to join him, but then reappeared, unannounced, at home a year later. Caring and passionate, but also unstable and paranoid, she was finally diagnosed as schizophrenic. As far as her family knew – Catherine kept in contact with them intermittently, and only on her own terms – her life was a cycle of flats, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals. Mary Loudon’s quest for her sister begins when she touches Catherine’s cold hands in the harsh calm of a hospital morgue. She visits Catherine’s overpoweringly cluttered flat, and finds herself struggling to choose which of the piled up paintings and clothes she should take to remember Catherine by. Then, over time, Mary tracks down the men and women who inhabited Catherine’s life and the people she affected: the caring nurses who tended to her in her last weeks; the grocer she knew for almost twenty years; the social worker who clashed with her; the minister and nun she prayed with. Mary Loudon captures each conversation perfectly, with a brilliant ear for spoken language and a telling eye for detail. And though the task seems overwhelming at first, gradually, with each encounter, a more nuanced picture of Catherine emerges. It includes facts that tally with the idolized older sister Mary remembers as well as disturbing revelations, such as Catherine’s self-identification as a man, named Stevie. In this book Mary Loudon unpicks our preconceived definitions of sanity, belonging, and familial responsibility. Over the course of Mary’s search, we cease to define Catherine by her illness; instead she becomes a human being, full of compassion for the world and possessed of a lively, personal wit. Relative Strangerchallenges our most deeply held notions of what makes a life full and valuable – but even though reading it is an education, this is also an undeniably personal and elegiac story, coloured on each page by Catherine’s suffering and the distance that existed between the sisters. A deeply honest family memoir, a compelling detective story, and a test of our prejudices, Relative Stranger is both a vitally important book and an unforgettable one.

Relative Stranger: A Sister's Story

Anchor Canada

UNVEILED NUNS TALKING

RANDOM HOUSE UK

Unveiled: Nuns Talking

TEMPLEGATE PUB.

‘A truthful, exciting, agonising adult love triangle. An emotional labyrinth, with monsters, great risks – and survival.’ Laline Paull, author of The Bees
For Lucy, marriage to Mark provided an anchor after several years of drifting casually across countries, into jobs and out of relationships.
Now forty-two, her anchor is working loose. Bewildered by the demands of motherhood and dissatisfied by her work, she has also grown understandably resentful of her husband: Mark has serious difficulties of his own and whilst harsh self-reliance has kept him sane, it has alienated his wife.
When Lucy falls in love with Angus, a pianist in his sixties, her shock is extreme. Adamant that she will not deceive her husband, she instead asks his advice. Mark’s reaction, however, is startlingly unorthodox, leaving Lucy to steer an impossible course between duty and desire, adventure and security. As her marriage falters and Angus presses for commitment, she is forced to choose between family and self, with lifelong consequences for everyone. 
Infused with her trademark precision, clarity and dark humour, Mary Loudon’s searing, highly-charged novel My House is Falling Down is a fearless exploration of what infidelity means when no one is lying, and how brutal honesty may yet prove the biggest taboo in our relationships.

My House Is Falling Down

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Picador

Recalling Jeanette Walls's A Glass Castle, Relative Stranger is an emotionally honest, gripping memoir of one woman’s attempt to piece together a humane portrait of her dead sister and the struggle of mental illness. After learning that her older sister Catherine, who had vanished long ago, had been inhabiting the identity” of a man called Stevie,” Mary Loudon plunges into a kind of post-mortem investigation to understand who her sister was. Interviewing doctors, nurses, social services representatives, nuns, cafe owners, grocers and ministers, Loudon paints an explicit, clear account of how schizophrenia affected a promising young life while exploring the assumptions people make about mental illness. Relative Stranger stands as an honest and uncompromising challenge to the ways in which we think about one another and what it means to love, to lose, to die and above all to belong.

Relative Stranger: Piecing Together a Life Plagued by Madness

Arts & Literature

Canongate U.S.

"On the twenty seventh of January 2001, while I was skiing fast down a mountain in France, my sister, Catherine, was dying slowly in England; in a hospital I didn't know she had been admitted to, from a cancer I didn't know she had, under an identity I had no idea existed." "Relative Stranger" is the heart-rending story of Mary Loudon's search for her dead sister, whom she had not seen for the last twelve years of her life. It examines our assumptions about familial responsibility, challenging everything we believe about what it means to love, to lose, to die and, above all, to belong. It will leave no reader unaffected.

Relative Stranger

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Canongate

Smart, affecting, and self-critically probing: a balm for anyone who has lost a loved one long before death.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Loudon’s book is a moving and loving testament to a messy, complicated life. A-Entertainment WeeklyRelative Stranger is the powerful, uncompromising memoir of Mary Loudon’s search to understand the facts about the deeply troubling final years of her dead sister, Catherine. Mary, the youngest in a happy, upper-middle-class London family, had not seen Catherine for what would be the last twelve years of Catherine’s life. After discovering that Catherine had been inhabiting the identity” of a man called Stevie, Mary plunges into a postmortem investigation, interviewing doctors, nurses, social-services representatives, nuns, café owners, grocers, and ministers who knew Catherine. Loudon paints a portrait that lays bare the pain of schizophrenia as well as its vexing complexities. In the vein of Jeanette Walls’s best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle, Relative Stranger is an honest account of how schizophrenia affected a promising young life while exploring the assumptions people make about mental illness and what it means to love, to lose, to die, and, above all, to belong.

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