Me, the outsider. Jenni Fagan on care, and a message of hope

We are sitting in the opulence of Edinburgh’s Gleneagles Townhouse, all elegant upholstery, plumped-up cushions and morning rays streaming through a stained glass window. We have met to talk about Ootlin, her much-anticipated account of her childhood. It should be unrelentingly bleak. Fagan was born in a psychiatric hospital and immediately removed from her birth mother. By the time she was seven, she had lived in 14 different homes. While in the care of foster parents, two separate sets of adoptive parents, and children’s homes, she endured neglect, cruelty and sexual violence.

There were times when Fagan wanted to obliterate herself. At 12, she overdosed on paracetamol and angina tablets; as a teenager, she took drugs to numb her pain. Still, she retained a capacity to snatch joy from darkness. In Ootlin, Fagan describes a day when, overwhelmed by her second adoptive mother’s hatred, she decorates the local park with snow angels. “I feel clean and happy for a minute,” Fagan writes, “because this world is really so, so beautiful.”

For all its efforts to dehumanise Fagan, the system could not erase her “shine”. She endured, and look at her now: author, poet, doctor of philosophy, at ease in a grand venue she would once have found intimidating. Yet her story is not a fairytale. Her years in care have left a legacy. She has fibromyalgia, complex-PTSD and Long Covid. “I have seen a therapist for 30 years. And I will always have ill health. We carry our trauma in our bodies,” she says.

Nor has writing Ootlin proved cathartic. “It’s the worst thing I have ever done, it’s horrific, going over and over the worst years of your life,” she says. “And I don’t know what [the book’s publication] will bring. I have watched every woman who has raised her head above the parapet have the media hunt her, hound her, vilify her.” “Does it scare you?” I ask. “It would scare anyone.”

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Fagan is a private person. For as long as I have followed her work - which is ever since her debut novel The Panoptican, a glittering tale of a girl in care, was published in 2012 - she has resisted sharing her own experience. In an ideal world, she’d “live in a cottage by the sea” and never talk about what she went through. So, why is she sharing it now? The answer requires us to step back in time. 

Fagan wrote the first version of Ootlin more than 20 years ago at a time when she was planning to kill herself. Realising the short suicide note she’d penned was a paltry testament, she spent 14 hours a day typing a record of her life. By the time she had finished, her desire for The End had passed. She locked the manuscript away and vowed never to look at it again.

But during the pandemic, she became very ill. By then a mother, and desperate to survive, she asked her God - “the primordial matriarch” - what she could trade for her life. The answer was Ootlin, a book loaded with political value at a time when discrimination against society’s most marginalised is once again on the rise.

Writing Ootlin was also a means of reclaiming herself. For 16 years, she was told a story based on other people’s judgements. Her memoir is suffused with a sense of worthlessness. “I am a thing in a body,” she writes at one point. And “I am, I am … an awful person. I don’t know why anyone wants anything to do with me.”

(Image: Ootlin)

“In care, you have to deal with the projections of those around you,” she tells me. “People are there for all sorts of reasons: maybe their mum had cancer, maybe somebody died, maybe there was poverty, but there is this implicit idea that you are bad, or that something bad is going to come out in you.”

Even as a tiny child, Fagan knew that narrative was false. Once, she cut up the photographs in her care book. “It was a way of saying: ‘I’m not accepting your version’.” And yet it’s hard to learn to believe in yourself when you have been raised in a system that has taught you that you are the problem. “Those messages, that there is something unloveable about you, that you are not worth protecting, are so harmful because you have to have the imagination and the tenacity to reprogramme your brain to say: ‘All of that is wrong’.”

Fagan was born with empathy and a “preternatural determination”. She was also blessed with an affinity for words, which helped her survive what many of her peers did not. Ootlin is a paean to the power of language. There were times when Fagan went hungry. But her appetite for books was fed by a library van which visited the caravan park where she lived between the ages of five and 12.  At night, by the light of her glow-worm, she encountered the Hobbits, and yearned to be Elvish. Later, she sought out cultural mothers and fathers to replace the parents she’d never known: Maya Angelou, Patti Smith; Nick Cave, George Orwell. “Words are actual magic,” she writes in Ootlin. “They take me away to the one place where I belong without apology”.

Books provided stability. “I could pick them up three years later, I could pick them up five years later, the story was a constant,” she says. The same was true of writing. There were times when Fagan stopped speaking, partly due to trauma and partly as an act of protest. “But when I wrote my first poem, I could see my voice, not what anybody else was saying about me, but my own voice, and I could come back later on and it would still be there. I have written pretty much every day since.”

When I ask if she thinks her background forged her as an artist, there’s a flash of steel. “People say: ‘Oh, if you hadn’t had the life you had, you wouldn’t have become the person you are’, and I’m like: ‘Fine. I’m sure I would have been lovely’,” she says. “I’m sure I would have traded it in a heartbeat. It wasn’t my life that made me who I was: it was me.”

Fagan concedes a childhood spent under many roofs made her hyper-aware of people’s differences. “I was always being observed. I would witness that and I would make my own observations,” she says. “Partially, that’s for your safety. You move into a household and you watch adults very acutely, asking: ‘Am I going to be safe here?’ You learn to look at the nuances of how [people] hold themselves and how they are when other people are there, and how they are when other people aren’t there.”

Her anthropological gaze brings me to the title of the book. Ootlin is the Scots word for “outsider”, but it has accrued layers of meaning. Author Jessie Kesson, who spent much of her childhood in an orphanage, said it referred to “the queer folk who were out and never had any desire to be in”. Fagan says she doesn’t aspire to Ootlin status; it’s just who she is.

“I never belonged to any demographic. I have existed in lots of different ones, but I was always an outsider. Now, I am a 45-year-old woman who has an extraordinary history and legacy, who never focuses on fame or money and insists on the purity of her art.”

Fagan’s Ootlin qualities extend to her refusal to be co-opted as a figurehead for campaigning for a better care system. She is happy to work behind the scenes and is involved in mentoring. But she is “not great” with organisations and governments.

“I also feel like you don’t owe the care system anything,” she says. “You don’t have to be wheeled out and tell 200 government members your terrible story, and collect your £50. This was not a system which benefited you. When you’re 10 years down the line and can’t function and haven’t been able to leave your house for years or whatever, the person likely to have been getting you through it is you.”

(Image: Jenni Fagan)

There was little support for Fagan when she left care. At 16, she went to the dole office to apply for benefits to cover her rent for homeless accommodation. “I was called in by this very cold woman,” she tells me. “The woman said: ‘Where are your parents?’ I said: ‘I don’t have parents’ and she said: ‘That’s not our problem’.”

Though she has no doubt social services were aware of at least some of the abuse she experienced, no-one has ever been held accountable. It took her 24 years to get hold of her files which had been heavily redacted. A social worker warned her she might find them “difficult to read”. “I was like: ‘I was there. I found it difficult to live through’.”

When Fagan asked the social worker why she was moved so often, especially in her first five years, she was told practices back then were “experimental”. “[They] were experimenting with the idea that, if children weren’t going to have a long-term attachment, then it might be better just for them not to get attached at all.”

This sounds like a recipe for dissociation, and there were years when Fagan didn’t cry. One care worker told her it was “almost too late”; that she would get to a point where she couldn’t make it back emotionally. She chose to keep connecting with her humanity “but the flipside of that is you feel the most unbelievable pain”.

Over the last few years, there has been a focus in Scotland on the damage done by past failings, through the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry and the National Confidential Forum, and on improving the system, through the Independent Care Review and The Promise. And yet “looked after” children continue to suffer trauma and die in devastating numbers.

At the time she was writing Ootlin, Fagan was also taking legal proceedings through the Redress Scheme Scotland which allows survivors of historic child abuse in care to seek compensation. She embarked on the process because she thought it might be useful to demonstrate that responding to authority in the supposedly “right way” could lead to being heard and to receiving an apology.

Instead, she found it so retraumatising she walked away. “It’s a token gesture whereby, mostly, they will demoralise those who go into it, leave them hanging for years and years, offer them a couple of thousand pounds and make them sign something that says they will never sue the government,” she says.

Fagan has nothing but praise for the new generation of young people within the care system working as advocates and campaigners, but she believes there are others whose voices are still not being heard. “I have seen the care system rebranded my whole life,” she says. “I have seen the names used to describe people in the care system rebranded. What I haven’t seen change is the care system.”

And yet, for all this, Ootlin is not despairing. Indeed, the book is Fagan’s attempt to show the next generation it does not have to accept the plotline it has been given: that it can write its own story.

“The next generation is being told it’s almost too late: they are never going to be able to afford a good home, that the climate crisis is completely uncontainable,” she says. “There is an unprecedented level of fearmongering in the media and that creates a sense of helplessness.

“But when people suggest you can’t change the story, it’s like: ‘Says who?’ We live in a world we think is 13.9bn years old made up of atoms and particles. I mean it’s a fricking miracle we are here at all. Why are we so limiting in what we think we can achieve? All this: ‘Oh you, couldn’t give a person a chance in that job.’ Why? Life is short: be beautiful, be bold, be nice to people, make it better.”

Ootlin is her contribution to changing things. And she’s giving it at great cost to herself. She is sending it out like a lighthouse to save others from being dashed against the rocks.

This interview took place last year shortly before Ootlin was scheduled to be published, but its publication was delayed due to unforeseen circumstances. It is now due out on Thursday, August 22. Fagan will be appearing at Edinburgh Book Festival on the same date.