Abandoned for a bogus guru – Lily Dunn’s harrowing family memoir

Sins of My Father begins with an ending. Describing her 61-year-old parent’s final desperate flight from a life of vibrant glitter, creativity and affluence, Lily Dunn reveals the extent to which it was simultaneously riddled with devastating addiction. After alcoholism, drugs, money and sex played their destructive role, her father (who is never given a first name) died incontinent, with shoes that ‘let the rain in’, having subsisted on a diet of vodka and scones and, due to the removal of all his teeth, with a mouth that had ‘turned in on itself, a perpetual downward curve of misery’, a smile reversed.

Many years earlier the six-year-old Lily was seen to ‘forget’ her smile when the godlike paternal figure of her universe abandoned her, along with her mother, brother and the family home in London, to join his own god-figure in a commune in India. Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian mystic, promoted free love and sterilisation for both sexes, encouraging his disciples, known as sannyasins, to think that children were ‘obstructions to the personal development’ of their parents and should be given autonomy from the earliest age. Sex was the commodity that enabled Dunn’s father, ‘serial shagger’, ‘adulterer’ (from the Latin ‘to alter’), to live according to his own direction, indifferent to the casualties strewn in the wreckage of his adulterated life.

Dunn attributes her father’s dysfunction to the bullying and sexual abuse he had experienced, aged seven, at boarding school; but this is also Dunn’s own story. In a symbiotic intertwining of biography and autobiography, we see a child’s obsessive, indeed addictive, desire for loving parental attention perpetually eclipsed by a father’s self-love. As Dunn went from being ‘bold, bright and confident to mute and pale… folded into a shell’, her father returned from India an emaciated stranger, wearing a beaded necklace, with a ‘dreamy’ smile and ‘glazed’ eyes, his identity questioned by his two confused children.