This is an incredibly moving, earnest, and tender book. Chris and his father, Ronnie, are alike in so many ways, and Chris has carried his family’s values throughout his career. I was impressed by Chris’s drive and commitment to ensuring that his work brings him fulfillment and does good in the world. He is frank about his depression and body dysmorphia, and his family’s experiences caring for Ronnie, who developed vascular dementia. As soon as I finished this book, I went and bought the audio because I knew I’d want to hear him reading his own story. Highly recommended. ( )

In I Love the Bones of You: My Father and the Making of Me, Christopher Eccleston explores his relationship with his father, his working-class background, and his own struggle with mental illness. The book is part memoir, part family history, but he never indulges in gloating and frankly discusses his own feelings of shortcoming and his struggles.

Describing his family’s background, Eccleston writes, “Little Hulton had never been a place where people turned one another. In the end, lack of opportunity and austerity in a decade, the ’80s, where others were making an obscene display of their wealth eroded natural working-class pride” (pg. 25-26). He continues, “I’d grown up surrounded by and embedded among the anger of the working classes, not just my father, but in general. Anger was not a rarity in lives like mine; it had a constant existence” (pg. 69). Growing up in such an environment, Eccleston approached acting from a perceived disadvantage. He writes, “My attitude to my body was only emphasized when I encountered acting. In my mind, actors were thin, aesthetes, sensitive, poetic. I thought I looked like a brickie or a farm labourer, and certainly never thought of myself as lacking sensitivity. In effect, I saw myself the way I’d been told the working classes were by the ‘great’ institutions of society. People who physically looked like me and came from my background could not be actors. I really felt the only way I could progress was by physically looking a certain way. My answer to that was to make myself something completely different” (pg. 99). This contributed to a lifetime of mental health struggles. It also informed his choices in film roles. Eccleston writes, “Challenging the institutionally sanctioned smothering of working-class hope has been the driving force of my life. It is very clear to me that my mum and dad were handed a rudimentary education on purpose, kept in their place because they were intended for the factory and/or the cannon” (pg. 193). He chose parts that would reflect the working-class as they are, rather than how the middle-class and wealthy perceived them.

Eccleston devotes a large part of his memoir to an examination of gender roles. Describing life in Northern England, he writes, “As happens a lot, and especially in those days, the wife becomes a mother to the husband. Again, a mistake, but that was the social model, particularly for the working classes. This was the heyday of the patriarchy, when there was little or no expectation of equality in the home, but I twigged that our domestic set-up wasn’t right” (pg. 97). He explains how his father struggled to show emotion and how it affected his own emotionality. Even his frank discussion of his mental health challenges expectations for masculinity. Describing his breakdown during his divorce, Eccleston writes, “During that period, I got into a physical, physiological, emotional and psychologically convinced state that, although I wasn’t planning to kill myself, I was going to die” (pg. 128). He reflects on this period, hoping it will help others who are similarly struggling.

I Love the Bones of You is a powerful memoir that will hopefully help expose how opportunities for the working-class continue to be limited or, if they were once available, are now closed off again. It will resonate not only with the working-class in England, but also with readers throughout the English-speaking world, including minimum-wage workers struggling to make ends meet in the United States, who are similarly told by those in power that their hopes and dreams don’t matter. Eccleston’s memoir gives voice to how that suffering affects their health, mental and physical. Yes, fans of his film and television roles will find some inside information here, but the book is so much more than that. It demonstrates the continued damage of class and patriarchy in a way that’s accessible to readers of all backgrounds. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3323033.html

This was the last book I finished in 2019, and the best of the Doctor Who biographies and autobiographies that I read last year (the others were by or about John Leeson, Mary Tamm (v1, v2), Robert Holmes, Matthew Waterhouse, Peter Davison and Andrew Cartmel). There's actually not all that much in it about Eccleston's performance as the Ninth Doctor. He devotes a short chapter to it, praising Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffatt, Euros Lyn and Billie Piper, and I guess letting his silence speak for the rest. He bookends that chapter with the experience of watching his own stories with his own young children, fifteen years on, which I found a very effective device to tell what the show now means to him. I'm looking forward to seeing him at Gallfrey One next month.

The guts of the book are about Eccleston's own somewhat tortured soul, and its roots in the life experience of his father, a factory worker whose talents were suffocated by the class-ridden social structures of mid-twentieth century Salford. He goes into moving detail about his own experiences of mental illness and particularly anorexia; it's tough but fascinating to read. He is disarmingly frank about his own failures and successes as an actor; always of course in the context of a profession which is rigged in favour of thin people with posh accents - he forced himself to become thin but could never be posh. Another moving passage describes his relationship with Trevor Hicks, who he portrayed in Hillsborough; the two became friends to the point that Eccleston was Hicks' best man at his wedding. But the most gut-wrenching sections are the passages about his father's gradual descent into dementia, and the consequent slow death of normal family life. The timing of the various incidents is a bit confusing - few dates are given, and we jump around quite a lot in the thirty years of his career; but reading between the lines it looks like his father's sharpest decline coincided with the 2004-05 filming of Doctor Who.

This is not a fluffy book, but it's a very thoughtful one, angry in places and always passionate. ( )