The House Is Full of Yogis
WILL HODGKINSON
Borough
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Will Hodgkinson 2014
Will Hodgkinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007514632
Ebook Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9780007514618
Version: 2015-02-06
Once upon a time in the 1980s, The Hodgkinsons were just like any other family.
Liz and Neville lived with their sons, Tom and Will, in a semi-detached house in the suburbs of Southwest London. Neville was an award-winning medical correspondent. Liz was a high-earning tabloid journalist. Friends and neighbours turned up to their parties clutching bottles of Mateus Rosé. Then, while recovering from a life-threatening bout of food poisoning, Neville had a Damascene revelation.
Life was never the same again.
Out went drunken dinner parties and Victorian décor schemes. In came hordes of white-clad Yogis meditating in the living room and lectures on the forthcoming apocalypse. Liz took the opportunity to wage all-out war on convention, from denouncing motherhood as a form of slavery to promoting her book Sex Is Not Compulsory on television chat shows, just when Will was discovering girls for the first time.
Will Hodgkinson grew up in a larger-than-life family. His father, Neville, was an award-winning science writer until he received a calling from the Brahma Kumaris in 1983. He currently lives with them on a retreat in Oxfordshire. His mother, Liz, continues to write for the Daily Mail. His brother, Tom, created the Idler. As well as working as the rock and pop critic for The Times, Will decided it was high-time to record his family’s colourful story. Will lives in southeast London with his wife and two children.
Praise for The House is Full of Yogis:
‘A touching account of a family thrust by mid-life crisis into meditation and spiritual awakening … [A] sweet, quirkish gem of a memoir … an affecting, and very funny, evocation of adolescence’
Mick Brown, Telegraph
‘A My Family and Other Middle-Class Animals let loose in the jungle of Thatcher’s suburban Britain. The result is a howlingly entertaining memoir that is raw, affectionate and, unbelievably, true’
Helen Davies, Sunday Times
‘[A] charming, entertaining book’
Melanie Reid, The Times
‘I have been banned from reading in bed as it makes me laugh out loud too much … Punishingly funny, and wonderfully written’
Rachel Johnson, Mail on Sunday
‘Endearing’
Ben East, Observer
‘[Hodgkinson] has a lovely, light style … his set pieces are very funny … He is attentive to the minute social divisions that define the British middle classes … it’s a relief to read a memoir that is so affectionate, so moan-free, so reluctant to apportion blame’
Rachel Cooke, New Statesman
‘An utterly charming, funny and touching memoir’
Sathnam Sanghera, author of Marriage Material
‘A rip-roaringly funny read’
Viv Groskop, Red Magazine
‘Thoughtful, heartfelt and so well drawn … [It] deserves to become as well loved as My Family and Other Animals’
Travis Elborough, author of London Bridge in America
‘I laughed until I levitated’
Jarvis Cocker
For Nev, Mum and Tom
Some names have been changed.
(But most have stayed the same.)
Contents