Description

In August 2014, Tom Lee and his parents drove out to visit Severalls Hospital, a former in-patient psychiatric hospital. Closed since the 1990s, as part of a nationwide shuttering of psychiatric institutions, the buildings now stand derelict and overgrown. But in the recent past, the name ‘Severalls’ resounded with dread and fear, entering local lexicon as a place where the strange, deranged and dangerous were ‘kept away’. Among those strange, deranged and dangerous people were Tom’s own parents.

The Bullet is a memoir of their time in Severalls, and the breakdowns and difficulties that led them there – often against their will. It is also Tom’s own story of his struggle with his fragmenting mental health – a hereditary bullet he believed he’d dodged – and the extraordinary physical crises that precipitated them. Deeply moving, clear-sighted and enormously poignant, The Bullet is a window onto the treatment of mental health disorders in the UK, and a searing analysis of living with a fracturing mind.

Publisher Review

With quiet insight and perfectly judged prose, Tom Lee sets fires in the brain that burn long after you close the book — Meg Rosoff Tom Lee reckons with mental illness, with family, with masculinity in lucid prose of breathtaking honesty. But in The Bullet he performs a wider service too, analysing the ways in which Britain’s infrastructure of care has been effectively demolished over the course of decades. It is a story that moves the reader to empathy and anger both — Erica Wagner Extraordinary, informative and searingly personal… A memoir that is full of wisdom and beauty, both artful and necessary. An important contribution to our understanding of mental illness and the myths that surround it — Lily Dunn A haunting and moving blend of family memoir and medical history. Tom Lee is an enthralling storyteller and this is an outstanding book — Chris Power A family history, an institutional history, a personal history: the war with your own mind that is mental illness, explored with a writer’s skill and painstaking clarity, so that anyone who has ever drifted into it or near it will recognise Tom Lee’s account, and be grateful that states so internal and isolating can, after all, be communicated — Francis Spufford It’s a rare book that can convey such distressingly wordless psychic states in such luminous and vivid prose. But Lee goes further, casting these deeply intimate stories of self and family in the shadow of the history and sorry decline of Britain’s mental health services. And he manages to make all this as compulsively readable as it is intellectually satisfying — Josh Cohen Deeply personal, but never self-pitying, this is a frank, and quietly overwhelming book. It left a sort of aftermath when I’d read it — Cynan Jones A bold, brave and clear-headed account of the affliction of crushing anxiety. Tom Lee writes with great humanity; I felt – and lived – every word of it — Benjamin Myers