Sophie Calon reflects on her father's death and on addiction memoirs

Sophie Calon has written about her father’s decline and death in her memoir Long Going, which came out last summer. On the night of Boxing Day 2021 her father’s body was found near a Cardiff hostel; he was 55 and, Calon writes, alcoholism had been changing the shape of his heart. Calon describes a father who had been an equity partner at a top law firm, raised in Barry and proud of the life he had built, but who lost his family and his job in 2019.

Others thought he “had it all”; drinking made him volatile, and in his final two years he was homeless and often behind bars. Calon saw him for the last time in spring 2019 before she moved to Australia and says she began writing compulsively the morning after she learned of his death.

Reading other addiction memoirs has been part of Calon’s response. She cites Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, Ashley Walters’s Always Winning, Arabella Byrne and Julia Hamilton’s In the Blood, Jesse Thistle’s From the Ashes and Octavia Bright’s This Ragged Grace. She notes alcoholism is often described as a family disease and that many writers recount a moment of clarity that life would be better without alcohol, a conviction that leads them to AA or rehab and to rebuilding “a day at a time,” supported by community and loved ones.

Calon says she was told her father once said he would rather die than go sober.

Key Topics

Culture, Sophie Calon, Long Going, Alcoholism, Cardiff, Amy Liptrot