Book Review Essay: The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison,Family and Philosophy by Andy West

This is a well-crafted, powerful and engaging memoir about a childhood spent navigating ‘inherited guilt’ and the author's later experience of teaching philosophy in prison. The book is full of care, intelligence and sadness. Andy West has achieved something unusually vivid, blending his observations of prison life with accounts of conversations he recalls with prisoners who came to his philosophy classes, and his own memories of a life haunted by the brushes his family members had with imprisonment. He is plagued by guilt and shame, and too much self-control. ‘The executioner’ – a key protagonist – stalks him throughout. We get to know this character like we get to know the other characters in the book; except the others can be funny. Only the executioner is deadly serious. Maybe some of us recognise him: he loiters inside the head; threatening to take everything away from us in an act of revenge for imagined, or heritable, wrongs. Throughout the book, the author travels from prison to prison, teaching different groups, as individuals come and go. We find out why they don't turn up, from time to time, as well as why they do: they all ‘crave a moment when they can lose themselves’. Meanwhile, Andy contemplates the losses in his own life.

So much in this book is familiar to the prison-wise and yet is freshly portrayed. The material goes deep, emotionally and intellectually, but without undue weight. The book's sentences are clipped and tense: not a word is wasted. We are just present in the classroom, on the wing, or in a park outside. Or we are stunned by a stark observation. Marcel Proust announces, in the first of many epigrams: ‘Ideas are substitutes for griefs’. The reader has the room to pause and absorb: not all the space for thought and feeling is taken up by the writer, despite his open presence in the narrative. He is a thinker, taking in the experiences and reflections of those he teaches, offering up other thinkers in case they illuminate something. Sometimes they don't: not every author, or idea, has to ‘work’. We encounter Homer, Locke, Freud, Schopenhauer, Kafka, Levi, Dostoyevsky … The author creates scenes in which meaning is disputed, grasped and then lost again. He recalls his own memories as he travels in and out of the classes: slights, disappointments, violence, fear. The chapters each address specific themes, synthesising the personal, the observed and the pedagogical: identity, freedom, time, shame, hope, kindness, race, home, madness, forgetting, forgiveness, trust, change, salvation … there is plenty of thinking going on in the prison even during lockdown:

‘Lockdowns always scupper portraits,’ he said. ‘Easier to draw stuff that doesn't depend on other people.’ (p. 246)

We see throughout how reading can move us, especially when barely formulated thoughts and feelings find expression in the text. A mixed-race woman who became a drug worker in prison following her recovery says:

I was reading something from Martin Luther King and I broke down crying. It was the speech where he says that one day he dreams of black and white living together in harmony. All my life, one part of me had been hating the other. I wasn't living in harmony with myself. That's what had kept me imprisoned. I just cried and cried.’ (p. 199)

This is literature helping us to ‘speak humanly’ (Nussbaum, 1990: 53). We see how the minds of authors can ‘lead to discovery and the formation or expansion of identity’ and can thereby transform us (Liebling, 2021: 111). The author realises in this exchange that although his history has intimately acquainted him with shame, he has not had to contend with the racialised forms of it confronting so many people in prison. The to’ing and fro’ing between the classes and his own ‘bare’ and self-deprecating life is poignant, charged, honest. Nothing is idealised. This is how things go on: people making meaning in the direst of states; or finding humour in the absurd. His uncle did this all the time when he was growing up. For example:

Nan sighed. Frank loved telling jail stories and she hated hearing them. She took her false teeth out of the jar on the coffee table and put them in her mouth. That was her way of rising above it.

‘We’re bouncing this ball to each other, and then …’ Frank edged to the corner of the sofa and drew his hands apart, ‘there's this bees’ nest on the wall. It's been there the last few days apparently. Everyone was staying well away. So, Vinnie gives me a look. But I reckon we should keep playing for a bit first cos the day was so nice.’

My nan picked up the remote and turned up the volume on a shopping channel. It was showcasing anti-ageing eyeshadow.

‘The screws were about to call time, rounding everyone up. Vinnie sees the screw put the whistle to his mouth and kicks the ball at the nest You should have seen it, Andy. The sky went black. Bees fucking everywhere.’

Nan switched off the TV, groaned and shuffled out of the room.

‘They nicked us for that,’ he said. ‘Three more days inside, we had to do. They didn't know what to charge us with, so they just put “aggravating bees” on the bit of paper.’

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Why did you hit the bees’ nest?’

‘Because it made an already sweet day even sweeter.’ (West, 2022: 56)

He wonders why he does this work: is his role collusive? Drawing on philosopher Susan Neiman, he reflects, ‘We must live as much for the is as for the ought. If I am to stay aloft, I will have to find a way to work in prison whilst also wanting to tear it down’. His brother wonders more overtly why Andy does this work, worrying that the damage he has inflicted by his own life makes Andy damage himself further. Perhaps it's no surprise that there's a scorpion in the chapter on trust. He laments:

I wish I could knock down this building and build something more imaginative; a place that aimed to heal rather than merely contain people; where trusting and trustworthiness were nurtured; where the deprivation was not so extreme that people had to become ‘manipulative’ to meet their basic needs; where security were able to discriminate between people who are and aren't genuinely dangerous, instead of jadedly assuming that everyone is a scorpion in waiting. (West, 2022: 123)

Nobody wants to get stung. The frog, killed by the scorpion's bite in the fable used in this lesson, ‘should have asked more questions’. The scorpion says, ‘I couldn't help it. It's my nature.’

There are profoundly personal moments in the book, always approached with an ‘overwhelming emotional clarity’ the author attributes to the pandemic-induced lockdown conditions in which he wrote it. Between the beautifully described philosophical conversations taking place in the classroom, we learn that Andy's own crime-free life is his mother's ‘salvation’. It's a different form of imprisonment. He reflects tenderly: ‘Throughout the twenty years since I decided to end contact with my dad, there is always a point in the day when I try to save him’.

His relationship with his brother is particularly movingly described. He relates the impact on children of parental, sibling, family imprisonment:

I went back to school. I sat in my place, opened my workbook and picked up a pencil. A feeling of emptiness came over me. My brother was in prison; how could any of this matter? My teacher told me to write the date at the top of the page. I looked at him and snapped the tip of my pencil against the edge of the table. I didn't tell anyone that my brother was in prison. I wanted to scream out loud, ‘None of this is real. Stop pretending it is’. (West, 2022: 158)

His reality ‘came apart’. Only a generous gesture from a teacher ‘made me feel like there were teachers who understood that my reality wasn't the same as the one school expected me to live in’. Later, in a taster class, a philosophy teacher posed the question, ‘How do we know this is not just a dream? How do we know any of this is real?’ ‘It was such a relief to hear him ask that question’, West observes. Out of his own struggle with pain and deception, philosophy developed meaning:

In the pages of those books I saw there were people who understood how complex life was. Philosophers seemed to dwell in a place beyond severe either/ors, where nuance was the norm, conversation could carry on and the mind could stretch out. I thought that if I kept doing philosophy I could become uncondemned. (p. 159)

Many prisoners will respond in a similar, life-enhancing, way to exposure to philosophical ideas. Some find their way there without teachers. Teachers bring something else, including, who knows how often, wounds of their own. Like Andy West, they want to ‘share the satisfaction of being understood’; offer ‘access to a second headspace, one of imagination and possibility’, paradoxically, to open the way to play and lightheartedness.

The author is clearly skilled at intense reflection, at posing himself questions and at identifying the core of his narrative in the writing of it. At a well-attended launch for the book, organised by Picador at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in October 2021, the author said:

The subject of the book is shame. How it is handed down. How we learn to live despite it. That was the electro-magnetic force that pulled it together.

That electromagnetic force lives in the book.

Responding to a question from the audience about his brother, he said:

I was much more conscious of his shame than he was.

What a painful, tantalising thought. As he said to his audience, the thinking project is not ‘done’. Many of its central questions remain open. The personal and family reflections, as well as the classroom deliberations, bring to life the larger questions of how and why we punish. Is there a just or appropriate way of dealing with offenders? Does our current system have to be so disturbing and inadequate, for those who work in it as well as for offenders and their families? Along the way, we learn important sociological facts about prison life in between the philosophical conversations: ‘Sometimes teachers and officers react against each other like a pair of dysfunctional parents: the more severe and cynical security are, the more indulgent and romantic teachers become’. These painful internal dynamics of prison life are so relevant to the broader questions of whether punishment can ever be intelligible, or just. This reader hopes that Andy West continues to write, teach philosophy, and consider these questions, well into the future.

I have argued elsewhere that ‘philosophical dialogue encourages the cultivation of moral perception and sensitivity’ and that ‘philosophy helps us to think, to know, and to live’ (Liebling, 2021; and see the full issue on philosophy in prison). It is by no means all comfortable or always welcome. But at its best, it invites ‘moral imagination’ (Nussbaum, 1990: 45) in ways that can shape lives, both in and out of prison. It has ‘educational and existential value’ (Coxhead et al., 2021: 89). There is growing empirical evidence of the positive effects of teaching philosophy and literature in prison (e.g. Liebling 2021; Szifris, 2021) where there are always deep questions at stake. Some of these questions get a meaningful airing in this book, as they clearly did in the classroom. I will be recommending this book, and the teaching of philosophy, to friends, students and scholars alike.