Author John Niven on his moving family memoir O Brother

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“I think that often happens when you try to shine a light on an unexamined life, on a life that wasn’t examined by the person who lived it. The results of that can often be unexpectedly emotional and profound.
“Especially with suicide.”
That word. The awful, all-consuming totality of it.
In a way this is an old story. Almost biblical, Niven admits. The story of the writer and his brother, the golden boy and the black sheep. 
The novelist and the convict. A Springsteen song, he suggests, in this case transferred from New Jersey to Ayrshire. One that ends in the most heartbreaking way, with a death that leaves a million questions. But an ending in some ways long anticipated. The first line of O Brother reads: “I got the call just after 7am, the call part of me has been expecting for most of my adult life.”
At the end of August 2010, his brother Gary Niven had tried to kill himself. He was in an induced coma in the intensive care unit at North Ayrshire District Hospital at Crosshouse, near Kilmarnock. O Brother tells the story of the next few days and the 40-odd years that had led to this moment. 

It may be the best thing Niven has written. His novels are known for their scabrous, at times shocking humour. That is present and correct here too, but there’s a real horror and, yes, heartbreak here as well. Niven has found the words to say the unsayable.
On the page, at least. This morning, though, he admits he’s not quite sure how to talk about his brother’s story, or even how he feels talking about it. 
“The real answer would be – I’ll let you know,” he says when I ask. He smiles at me. Warm smile. Smart suit. Tired eyes. For the next hour, however, he will speak eloquently about grief and anger and family and pain. And he will talk about love. Because aren’t all stories love stories in the end?
I guess the main question I have, I begin, is why? Why has he chosen to share this personal, painful story? He gives me a long answer full of good and thoughtful reasons, but at the end he sums it up very simply. “I couldn’t see a way of not writing it.”

And the truth is, he says, he was always Gary’s mouthpiece.
“I say in the book that when we were little boys I was so verbal from a very young age I would answer for Gary all the time in family settings. I would answer before he did. And 50-odd years later I’m here speaking for him, still. But he’s not here to do it himself.”

John Niven was born in May 1966. His brother Gary arrived two years later. They grew up in Irvine, a world of Pebble Mill at One and Grattan catalogues – there’s a Proustian     madeleine for any adolescent boy in the 1970s – with their mother Jeanette, father John and little sister Linda. 

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John senior was the manager of the Rivergate Mall in the town. He was born in 1924 and was in his 40s when his children arrived. He had a temper. 
Gary would develop one too. It would set them on a collision course. When John died suddenly in 1993, father and son were not reconciled.
When he was younger John Niven (junior) couldn’t wait to leave Irvine. Now in his 50s, he loves going back.
“The Welsh have an expression, ‘the hiraeth’, which means … It’s not quite homesickness, it’s tinged with nostalgia and the way things were. So, it’s unattainable in that sense. 
“At the time I hated it. I couldn’t wait to get out. But my teenage years I look back on and there were all the boys I hung out with, all of whom I’m still friends with. There’s Basil Pieroni who’s in [the band] Butcher Boy now and Andy O’Hagan who’s obviously an incredibly successful writer and the guys from the Trashcan Sinatras and Graham Fagen the artist. Actually there was a lot of talent in that wee group and we did a lot. We put gigs on and we did fanzines. What I thought at the time was the pits of the earth was a really fertile creative time.”
Still, the teenage John Niven did get out. His brother didn’t. 

As a teenager, Gary was given a nickname. Shades. It suited who he had become. “Gradually the gentleness and the sweetness he had as a wee boy took second place to gallusness, bravado,” Niven suggests. 
“And he was in a very dangerous place, Gary, because he wasn’t a hard man. He wasn’t a Begbie. 
“But he was fearless and small and these are the guys who sometimes get adopted by the gang as the mascot, as the guy who marches at the head, the looney who will do anything, which, when you’re 13, 14, doing daft boy stuff, that’s not such a big thing. But when you’re behaving like that when you’re in your late 30s … that can lead you into some very dangerous scenarios in life, as it did for Gary.
“But even right to the end Gary was capable of being hysterically funny and charming and warm. It’s not quite as simple as Anakin into Darth Vader. Anakin and Darth are both always in there, I think.”
Unlike John, Gary was not studious. It was John who went to university, got himself a career in the music industry, eventually became a novelist. 
His brother stayed at home, became involved with local gangs, ended up in Barlinnie for a spell and generally struggled with life. After the death of his father he suffered from depression. And, like his brother, he was also prone to cluster headaches, which floored both of them. 
But many of Gary’s problems were more basic than that, Niven suggests.
“Linda and I developed life skills to run our own lives. I mean that in a really basic sense; paying the bills and making sure that the trains run on time, if you will.
“Whereas Gary in a very old, old-school west coast of Scotland way was the kind of guy who would have lived with his mum and dad until he

got married and then somebody would have done all that for him.
“Because for some people the admin, the drudgery of trying to run your life – you’ve got the house insurance and the mortgage and the gas and the electricity and the tax man and all the stuff you have to deal with – is just unmanageable. They don’t pick that up. Why didn’t he pick that up? I think part of it was cultural. He was the kind of guy who back in the old days would have handed his pay packet to the wife and got his pocket money and that was his total involvement with running the house.
“And all of this is muddied. When you examine chaotic lives there is always chaos and complications. His health problems, the drug use. It all becomes of a piece. It reaches critical mass at a certain point.”
Of course, O Brother is John Niven’s story too. The studious boy who went to university then dropped out to tour with a band, went back to study and got a job in the music industry, flew high, partied hard, made a mess of things in his personal life, left his job to write a novel and then really struggled.  
To begin with, the writing wasn’t working. He had no money. And he hits rock bottom at the moment when Gary seems to be getting off the floor. Gary’s got a job, he’s got a girlfriend. They get engaged, buy a house. He’s on the up as his brother goes under. 
Life likes a good plot twist.
“That is something I only noticed when I stood back to write the book,” Niven admits. “He was at his peak and I was in my trough.”
There’s a question that I have to ask about this time in your life, I say. Why did you keep trying to be a writer when it didn’t seem to be working? Why not go and be a teacher or something?
“I think I would have been a really bad teacher because I’m incredibly selfish and self-involved. My partner at the time, Helen … I said to her if I don’t have a hit book by the time I’m 40 I’ll go become a teacher and I think she laughed for five minutes. Or a lawyer. That was my other idea. Again, she just laughed her head off. 
“There’s not a day goes by when I’m in my study working that I almost don’t kiss the floor and thank God this worked out because I really wasn’t fit for much else.”
Niven’s first published novel Kill Your Friends was the success he had long sought. Another eight novels would follow. As for Gary, the relationship faltered. He found himself alone again and things began to get worse.
“He did find a girl who ran his life for a bit and once that broke down it took probably three or four year before the wheels were all off the wagon,” Niven says
And one night in 2010 it became too much for him.

Niven is often hard on himself in the book, I think. Perhaps that is inevitable when such a traumatic life event happens. “It’s a facet of suicide,” he suggests. “My solution to a lot of things is how much is this going to cost. And it’s not about that.
“I keep thinking, ‘You should have just put him on a retainer.’ And Linda rightly said it wouldn’t have been enough. One month it would have had to be double that because of some mad fanny story. It would just have been long-form extortion. I recognise the truth of that, but now and again you think maybe it would have worked.
“Being a sort of self-made middle-class person who went to university and read the Guardian you think that everything is sort of fixable. It doesn’t work like that for a lot of people. 
“Their lives are too chaotic for that to apply. Once I got across his cluster headaches – we did start to get those treated and it was getting better – I decide in my very pompous way that now we’ve fixed the physical stuff, we’ll fix the metaphysical. 
“‘What is it you want to do with your life?’ I remember saying that to him in a restaurant and he stumbled. I think what he wanted was to be left alone to play his Xbox and smoke weed, but he knew that wasn’t going to fly so he said something like, ‘a foreman on a building site’. And what he was saying was, ‘just f*** off, John’.”
Suicide, Niven admits, “is a subject you become a PhD in after the event. I say this in the book late on. The red lights were flashing right across the panel and I didn’t have the information to see it at the time.
“He was single, he had recently broken up a relationship, he was unemployed, he had a history of drug and alcohol abuse, he was in debt. All these things are red flags.”
How do we even talk about such things? I don’t know what to ask Niven about this part of the story. How to begin to phrase it? 
In the book he reveals that when he and Linda went to Gary’s house they found a noose hanging in the garage. How do you even process the horror of that?

But Gary didn’t use that noose. He phoned 999, was taken to hospital and it was only there that he tried to kill himself. 
Well maybe. Or maybe not.
“Inevitably, because of the nature of suicide and the power of its half-life this must remain speculation,” his older brother admits. But, he says: “I don’t think he meant to actually kill himself in that room. 
“Had he wanted to do it he had a proper noose at home. And yet he phoned 999.
“But he was a short-fuse guy. And when he was told he couldn’t get oxygen or he couldn’t see the doctor, Gary was a ‘F*** you, I’ll show you’ sort of guy.  And in my heart I think he didn’t think for a minute it would work as efficiently as it did.”
Years later the Ayrshire and Arran Health Board would plead guilty to breaching health and safety legislation by leaving Gary unattended. But that was long after the fact.
On Friday, September 3, 2010 Gary Niven dies when he is taken off the ventilator. He is just 42.
“The thing that haunts survivors is – what exactly happened on that last night? Because the people are always alone, unless they leave a note and even then you’re not really going to get the answers. So you keep replaying it and try to fill it in,” Niven admits.
“It’s a bit like every time you open Macbeth you think maybe it will work out this time. Maybe Duncan is going to come and they’ll have a few drinks and it’s all good. That’s the nature of tragedy. The inexorable denial of hope.”
But writers can change the story. At the end of O Brother John Niven writes a chapter in the voice of his brother. It’s powerful, beautiful, consoling, I tell him, but it slightly troubled me too. 
“Inherent in what I do at the end is to wish some peace upon him,” Niven suggests. 
“If I’m guilty of that, I’ll have to take that on the chin. I guess I primarily think of myself as a novelist and one of the things you do is try to inhabit other people’s skin and having written 300-plus pages of this non-fiction memoir I felt the only way to conclude that was to do it in that manner. I completely get why some people might think this is too far.”
And there is another reason, he tells me a few minutes later.
“The seismic event of Gary’s life, the ground zero, was Dad dying suddenly when they were at war. The regret, the unspoken love of that was what powered Gary through the second act of his life. 
“That’s why the ending felt necessary to me. I want to give them that on the page. Forget all the drugs, all the doctors, all the self-harm, the prison. 
“If they could just have had 30 seconds to both say I’m sorry I think it would all have been different. Certainly better. They were at loggerheads and then he died and Gary never got the chance.
“That was the central defining event of Gary’s life and I had to wish that degree of peace upon him.”
It’s an act of kindness, then, John? 
“Yes it is.” 

O Brother, by John Niven, is published by Canongate, £18.99, on Thursday. 

John Niven will be appearing at the Portobello Bookshop on Monday, Waterstones, Argyle Street, Glasgow, on Tuesday, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Wednesday, St Boswells Mainstreet Trading Company on Thursday and Tidelands Book Fest, Irvine, on Friday.