John Niven on brotherhood, writing and loss: ‘You become a PhD in suicide only after it’s affected you’

After losing his brother Gary to suicide, Scottish writer John Niven quickly started to write things down. He tells Fiona Sturges about his new memoir, ‘O Brother’, which retraces Gary’s difficult life and death

John Niven with his brother, Gary (Canongate)

On 3 September 2010, the novelist John Niven was keeping vigil at the bedside of his brother, Gary, alongside his mother, Jeanette, and sister Linda. Four days earlier, Gary had called 999 after trying to take his own life at home. He was taken by ambulance to hospital where he was triaged and put in a room by himself. There he once again attempted suicide. On being found unconscious by staff, he was put in a medical coma.

With no hope of recovery, the time had now come to take him off life support. While Jeanette told Gary she loved him, and Linda held his hand, Niven whispered in his brother’s ear that he was sorry not to have tried harder to help him. Then, when it was all over, he went to the nearest bathroom and pulled out a notebook to write it all down.

“I think writers, and certainly novelists, have to have what Graham Greene called ‘the chip of ice in the heart’,” Niven, 57, tells me. “In the book, I say I’m watching the scene as a son and a brother, but also as a writer who knows he’s going to go down the hall to record it all… I wouldn’t say I felt shame, but I do acknowledge there’s an aspect to being a writer that is not completely savoury.”