How the Scottish care system failed me in every conceivable way

This is one of those books that may change you when you read it, so be warned –although Jenni Fagan herself warns you in the first lines: ‘Twenty years ago I began writing this memoir as a suicide note.’

Ootlin is about how the care system in Scotland failed the author in every conceivable way. Fagan is only in her forties, so this is not terribly long ago. She has dug up every file, every archive on herself as a baby in care – there are thousands of pages, ‘most redacted in black lest they validate something that would allow me to sue to the social work department’. ‘I’ve never met an abuser who owned what they did, or a system that wanted to be accountable,’ she says, and then asks us to bear witness, which we must.

Of course there are a great many books about growing up in terrible circumstances: Douglas Stuart’s novel Shuggie Bain, recently, and Kerry Hudson’s sensational memoir Lowborn; there’s a lot, in the period and the setting, reminiscent of Train-spotting too. But Ootlin is different. It does not talk about how the lack of a stable upbringing creates a difficult situation for adults to overcome and cope with. This is about how it will change a baby into a wild and mythic creature.

An ootlin in Scots means foreigner or stranger, from the land of Faerie – ‘queer folk who were out and never had any desire to be in’; and that is how Fagan sees herself. She is a creature who does not even have a name; born in an institution to a mother unable to care for her, she has ‘27 variations of names or spelling, and three dates of birth they rotated on my early files’.