In the wake of a profound personal tragedy, one woman has discovered a powerful source of understanding and hope within the pages of addiction memoirs. For author Sophie Calon, these stories have become a vital lens through which to process loss and find a sense of shared experience.
A Sudden Loss Rooted in Long-Term Struggle
On Boxing Day 2021, Sophie Calon's world shifted irrevocably. Her father, aged 55, was found deceased near a hostel in Cardiff. His death, while sudden in its finality, was the culmination of a long battle with alcoholism, a disease that had been physically altering his heart for years.
His passing occurred less than a mile from his former office, where he had been an equity partner at a top law firm. This starkly contrasted with his final two years, during which he was homeless and frequently in prison, having lost both his family and his job in 2019. Raised in Barry in a working-class family, he had built a beautiful life in a leafy neighbourhood, a life others admired. Yet, beneath the surface, drinking fostered volatility, ultimately dismantling everything.
Calon saw her father for the last time in the spring of 2019 before moving to Australia, a decision prompted by the unbearable distress of his addiction. From then, she followed his deteriorating circumstances through photographs in news articles and police missing-person appeals, left to wonder where her caring, clever father had gone.
Finding Words and Windows Through Writing
In her grief, Calon turned to writing, beginning compulsively the morning after she received the news. This impulse was rooted in a childhood lesson from her father, who, when she was five, encouraged her to write about her brother's first epileptic seizure in 1999. He taught her that finding words could help confront unthinkable events.
This practice led to her memoir, Long Going, published in the summer of 2023 by Honno Welsh Women's Press. The book, which chronicles her life with the 'lightning-strike man' who raised her, has resonated deeply with readers, many describing it as surprisingly uplifting. For Calon, the act of writing it has been personally liberating.
Her own relationship with alcohol is now one of vigilance. As a new parent, she counts herself among the sober-curious, acutely aware of what is at stake given her family history.
The Mirror and The Window: Learning from Other Stories
In June, while on a writing course at Tŷ Newydd with author Amy Liptrot, Calon encountered a powerful idea. Liptrot, whose memoir The Outrun details her recovery from alcoholism in Orkney, suggested that memoirs can act as windows into different worlds or mirrors of our own. The film adaptation of Liptrot's book, starring Saoirse Ronan, was released in 2024.
Inspired, Calon began seeking out other addiction narratives she had previously overlooked. She found a profound connection in Always Winning by Top Boy star Ashley Walters. Raised in Peckham with a father in and out of prison, Walters himself served time in a young offender institution at 20 before turning his life around. His candid audiobook account of confronting his alcoholism and breaking cycles through rehab offered Calon painful but recognisable reflections of her father's arrogance and the eggshells trodden by loved ones.
She also found resonance in In the Blood, co-written by Arabella Byrne and her mother, Julia Hamilton, which powerfully illustrates alcoholism as a family disease. At a joint event in Blackwell's, Oxford, with Byrne's mother in the audience and Calon's baby daughter on her lap, she felt a tangible sense of breaking generational cycles.
Other impactful works include Jesse Thistle's From the Ashes, a gritty account of addiction and homelessness, and Octavia Bright's This Ragged Grace, which elegantly ties a journey to sobriety with a father's Alzheimer's diagnosis.
The Unanswered Question and the Moment of Clarity
Through these readings, Calon inevitably searched for explanations for her father's fate. While acknowledging some things remain unknowable, a common thread emerged. Each writer describes a pivotal moment of clarity, an inner conviction that life would be better without alcohol. This internal catalyst, rather than external pressure, consistently leads individuals to AA or rehab, where ego is exchanged for community and destructive patterns for healthy habits.
Tragically, Calon was told her father once said he would rather die than go sober. "Some things can't be explained," she reflects. He had so much to live for, including the potential to be a grandfather.
To honour his memory and pass on his lesson about finding words, Calon is marking what would have been his birthday with events in Chester (where he attended law college), at the homeless shelter that fed him one Christmas, and in Bristol with the charity Nacoa (the National Association for Children of Alcoholics). Her journey underscores the vital role these shared narratives play in opening windows of understanding, offering mirrors of recognition, and helping to face the unthinkable, one word at a time.
