You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol
‘Extraordinarily powerful’ Emma ThompsonThere are a million love stories, and a million stories of addiction. This one is transcendent.Louisa Young met Robert Lockhart when they were both 17. Their stop-start romance lasted decades, in which time he became a celebrated composer and she, an acclaimed novelist.This is both a compelling portrait of a lifelong love affair, and an incredibly affecting guide to how the partner of a 'charismatic, infuriating, adorable, self-sabotaging’ alcoholic can find the strength to survive when the disease rips both their lives apart.
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The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Louisa Young 2018
Cover photographs © Margie Hurwich/Arcangel Images, © Shutterstock.com
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, names, identifying characteristics and details have been changed.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008265175
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008265199
Version: 2018-07-18
For everyone who has found themselves here
Inversion of Intervals:
Major becomes Minor.
Perfect stays Perfect.
Augmented becomes Diminished.
from Robert Lockhart’s
music theory notebook
1969
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: The Book You Hold in Your Hand
Part One 1959–2002
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Two 2003–05
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part Three 2005–07
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Part Four 2007–09
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Part Five 2010–12
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Part Six 2012—
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Appendices
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Louisa Young
About the Publisher
2017
The book you hold in your hand is a memoir by me, Louisa Young, a novelist, about Robert Lockhart, a pianist, composer and alcoholic, with whom I was half in love most of my adult life and totally in love the rest of it. It’s as much about me as about him, and is of necessity a difficult book to write. So why am I writing it? Why expose, so openly, chambers which are only usually displayed via the mirrors and windows with which novelists protect their privacy?
Because his life is a story worth telling.
Because our love story, while idiosyncratic, is universal.
Because alcoholism has such good taste in victims that the world is full of people half or totally in love with alcoholics – charismatic, infuriating, adorable, repellent, self-sabotaging, impossible alcoholics – and this is hard, lonely, baffling, and not talked about enough.
Because although there are a million and a half alcoholics in Britain, many people don’t really know what alcoholism is.
Because alcoholics also love.
Because I don’t want to write a novel about an alcoholic and a woman; I want to write specifically about that alcoholic, Robert, and this woman, me.
Because everything I have ever written has been indirectly about Robert, and the time has come for me to address him directly.
Because the last time I tried to address it directly I told him, and he said, ‘You won’t be able to finish this until I’m dead.’
Because I have realised that for me, quite the opposite: he won’t be properly dead until I’ve finished it.
Four months after he died, I wrote this:
It can’t be surprising that I can’t write now. All I can think about is Robert and death, so that is all I could write about, but I can’t. To write Robert would be to seal him. I, who can rationalise my life into any corner of the room and out again and rewrite my every reality in any version I like, and back, twice before lunch, I cannot pin that man to the specimen paper. I cannot claim to have all of him in view at one time. I cannot slip him into aspic, drown him in Perspex, formalise him – look, there he is in that frame, that’s how he was, that’s him. No, that is
