When James Long inherited the title of 5th Viscount Long of Wraxall in 2017, he found the family coronation robe moth-eaten in a bin liner. It was, he reflects, a fitting summary of the journey from there to here. Born in 1960 and disabled by Thalidomide - the drug prescribed to his mother by a doctor who assured her it was perfectly safe - Jamie grew up in the shadow of one of the twentieth century's most significant medical scandals. His childhood moved between the faded grandeur of a Wiltshire manor, a series of hospital wards, and boarding schools singularly ill-equipped to accommodate him. His mother was brilliant, difficult, and impossible to forget. His father was loyal, emotionally unreachable, and deeply English about both. What followed was not the life anyone had mapped out for him. Jamie moved to London at seventeen, built a successful career as a photographer at the heart of the 1980s fashion and music world, came out as gay during the decade the AIDS crisis would redefine what that meant, and found in Joe, his partner of nearly thirty years, something that quietly resolved what his childhood had left open. A Sweet and Bitter Pill is a memoir about disability, identity, class, love, and the particular resilience that comes not from a comfortable life but from surviving an uncomfortable one - told with honesty, warmth, and a wit that is entirely his own.
