Surviving Maggie by John Fingleton, HarperCollins, $29.99.
Surviving his drunken mother, Maggie, ultimately meant that Harold Fingleton was destroyed, in this despairingly bleak tale of history repeating.
What Harold, the author’s father, achieved was to halt the descent into a third generation, protecting his five children to a greater degree from his own alcoholism, although “Dealing with the dreadful expectation of these on-again, off-again phases [of binge drinking] became a dominant feature of our lives, especially during our teenage years”.
This desperately sad account by John Fingleton, the brother of Swimming Upstream author and film producer Tony, makes for painful reading.
It finishes where Tony’s book began and John’s intention was to write his “side” of the well documented family history.
Their father’s silent acceptance of savage beatings, near starvation, years in a state orphanage and teenage spells in prison took its toll, and the feisty boy scrapper turned mentor role model to teen tearaways lost in the battle of survival versus destruction in his final years.
John puts his finger on the unenviable truth: “His resolve weakened after 19 years of defying his urge to drink.
The cause of his breakdown remains a mystery; it could have been one of so many things.”
Told so starkly, this is an agonising read, but endurance, loyalty and love shine through.
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