Why Darren McGarvey wants out of the prison of his own persona

The National

12 hours ago

Given recent publicity, you might think this is a quote from Darren McGarvey's new book Trauma Industrial Complex – but not so. It's a tweet I sent in July 2021 in ­response to headlines that Prince Harry was to write another 'intimate and heartfelt memoir of his life'. At the time, the comment threw up a response from the Scottish rapper. 'Only if you are a one-trick pony,' he replied, perhaps a tad defensively.
'Confessional is just one facet. Every day I see healing from the identification people get hearing others share. You're right – it can be commodified sometimes cynically. But when done well for the right reasons, it's as legitimate and profound as any other meaningful writing. People are entitled to their privacy. Their stoicism. But that's not everyone's bag.'
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Remembering this exchange, I was ­interested to discover that McGarvey's third book focuses on the dangers of ­over-disclosure. In essence, the book is a ­sustained reflection on McGarvey's ­experiences of going public and the consequences of becoming trapped in the story and the persona which shot him to fame. McGarvey has discovered he might be an unreliable narrator. He's tired of ­being ­described as honest and brave and ­authentic. He doesn't want to be led out onto stages again and again to tell pat, ­pre­-packaged stories about his past.
I don't love the title. A riff on Dwight D Eisenhower's famous reference to the ­'military industrial complex' which ­criticised the unhealthy relationship ­between the defence industry and politics in the United States. For McGarvey, the 'Trauma Industrial Complex is the system in which the very real and urgent issue of mass unacknowledged untreated trauma is commodified, medicalised and repackaged for profit, validation and influence'.
Like McGarvey, I worry our confessional culture is giving folk perverse incentives to expose more and more of themselves in public, as if confession is inevitably good for the soul. I'm not so sure. Learning to be honest with yourself is one thing. Telling Twitter, another. But then, I don't have a lifestyle built on telling strangers about my private life. And that must ­alter your perspective a bit, particularly if, like McGarvey, you've now reached the ­conclusion that you can't afford to live with one of the very things which made you a success in the first place.
It sounds like a paradox, but I've often thought confessions can be excellent ways of avoiding responsibility. One of my ­earliest memories of hearing McGarvey on the radio was listening to an interview he was doing with Shereen Nanjiani. He told the interviewer he'd done things in his past which he wasn't proud of. People had been hurt along the way, he said.
Nanjiani immediately responded to this admission by congratulating McGarvey on how brave and inspiring and ­searingly honest he was being. We progressed, without intermission, from an admission of badness into a patronising round of ­applause. The moment is emblematic of how McGarvey has often been treated by the media since Poverty Safari won the Orwell Prize in 2018.
This dramatic mood shift wasn't ­McGarvey's fault. I suppose he could have piped up and forced the ­interviewer to challenge her vacuous transition from a recognition of wrongdoing to the ­transformation of that wrongdoing into the latest gritty and authentic confession – but why should he? It isn't his fault if people code him in this perverse way.
In one striking story from the new book, McGarvey is confronted with a ­challenging question from a therapist ­during a more recent stint in rehab.
'You tell stories to protect yourself. Why is that?' he is asked.
Over the years, it has been something I've noticed about him too. In December 2023, McGarvey published a startling post on Twitter. In it, he disclosed that he had 'been dealing with longstanding debt for over three years' but was finally free of its burden. In characteristic form, this was written as a triumph over adversity – but with a sting. The 'debt' in question was unpaid income tax.
This could have been a ­dangerous ­moment for our young hero, but ­confession did its magic work once again. If one of the more hostile tabloids had got hold of the story first, you could have ­expected to read headlines along the lines of 'social justice warrior doesn't pay his taxes' – 'socialist boasts of big pig pay cheques but doesn't pay HMRC its due' – but instead, various social ­media ­correspondents ­suggested it was ­'inspiring' to hear that this particular new occupant of the higher tax bracket had finally given the ­exchequer ­everything it was due.
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McGarvey's account of this debt in the book is given glancing reference – 'my ­financial illiteracy' – but nothing more is said. It takes real chutzpah to ­successfully rechart not paying your ­income tax on time into yet another inspiring ­redemption arc. I don't recommend anyone else try it, but for McGarvey, it worked ­because, as he says, he's good at telling stories.
THIS book isn't primarily an attack on those who have been sceptical about ­McGarvey, but on the image of him held by his most uncritical fans. 'I was ­affirmed, validated and applauded until I literally could not function under the weight of my own bullshit,' he says.
The metaphors he uses are striking. ­McGarvey characterises the persona he has developed for himself as 'a prison', feeling like 'an artist might do if they awakened one morning to find ­themselves trapped in their own drawing'.
He speaks of his fears of 'conditional acceptance from a tribe that loves me only as long as I play my assigned role' – that role being the one with the unhappy childhood, addiction and good old-fashioned poverty that self-loathing, socially-conscious middle classes can gawp at in awed but remote fascination.
In another passage, he says he feels 'like an animal caged in a zoo; aware I could overpower my handlers and flee if opportunity presented itself, though what I'd do, or where I'd go after, are ­unknowns yet too frightening to face'.
As that final clause suggests, what is less obvious is whether McGarvey is really prepared to live with the consequences of breaking free of his handlers.
In the book, he claims that his recent August Fringe run was 'already sold out' and concludes with a zen-like depiction of himself, reconsecrated to living a smaller and more sincere life, less in thrall to the need for external recognition and online validation, content to be setting up for recovery support sessions, putting on the kettle in draughty halls, setting out plastic chairs.
His obvious agitation about waning ­interest in his output on social media ­suggests that he may not be quite as ­reconciled to the consequences of ripping the painting out of the frame as the concluding chapters suggest.
I don't blame him. Writing and publishing this book must have been a terrifying experience. It is one of the most ­unstinting repudiations of a public self I've ever read, and if McGarvey is concerned about reactions to it, I can understand why, because this book assertively rejects key parts of his public appeal, activity and authority claims over the last five years.
If it is taken seriously, it should have consequences, but I imagine an ­irritatingly large number of people will still say they find it brave, authentic and challenging – while ignoring the elements of it which are truly courageous, sincere and difficult.
McGarvey writes with a combination of well-earned pride about his achievements and a degree of bitterness about how uninterested people are when he tries to escape his genre. 'Any time I've ever floated the idea of producing a piece of work that was not about my poverty, addiction, or some adjacent topic, it's been met with resistance or disinterest,' he says.
'I find myself continually drawn back to the same story. My audience, in many ways, won't let me move on from it. Or, at least, that's how it feels sometimes. Any work I produce which is not anchored in my own suffering in some way draws tangibly less interest from both audiences and, in some cases, commissioners – a problem when your whole career is based on you being the product.
'Without it,' he frets, 'people may lose interest in anything else I have to say.'
But as other creative spirits have discovered, killing off the character who made them famous often has the consequence that people aren't interested in you at all any more. McGarvey is clearly conscious of this risk.
And there's the big anxious, ­unanswered question underpinning this book. Without Loki, without the ­misery memoir appeal and the no-mean-city ­reminiscences, does anyone care what Darren McGarvey has to say?
'Will I ever just be accepted as a ­professional in my own right, like everyone else?' Time will tell, I suppose.