This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal

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Throughout her journey Bright also shares, initially tentatively, her experience in finding love. Despite the huge undertaking of navigating her way through the pre-mourning process, she realises that to close her heart to loss (as a coping mechanism) is to close her heart to love. She accepts the timing is less than ideal- though in retrospect it may be considered kismet. It is the very essence of life and living; an arbitrary and often inconvenient, messy, yet beautiful chain of events we have no control over. KG: The other strand of this book is about your father’s deterioration and death with Alzheimer’s. Why did it feel important to hook this experience onto that of your recovery? Bright’s ability to write so elegantly and nakedly has both floored and inspired me. Peppered with refences to art, sculpture, literature and poetry, I frequently disappeared down a “Google rabbit hole” exploring the references further. Save In Conversation with Jess Phillips MP to your collection. Share In Conversation with Jess Phillips MP with your friends.

Fiercely vulnerable, deeply intimate and yet authoritative, The Archaeology of Loss describes a universal experience with an unflinching and singular gaze. With humour, intelligence and urgency, it is in its very honesty that it offers profound consolation. This book is a companion for anyone navigating the hardships of loss and uncertainty' - Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace Grief is also such a hard topic to cover because how can something so big be put into words in a book, as Bright herself recognises. Again, experiences with grief will differ from person to person, but This Ragged Grace shows an ongoing grief, one that develops, grows, and changes.If you consider yourself a recovering alcoholic, the story you can tell yourself is one of resilience. When I was younger the freedom I wanted was to do with escaping my own mind. Now, I find freedom in knowing it. My recovery continues day by day and I have learned to trust it. I accept the void and most of the time it leaves me alone. When it doesn’t, I try to greet it like an old but distant friend, with curiosity and with grace. ⁣ I kept putting myself in danger, and I couldn't make it stop. It rarely felt like a choice, though, of course, it was. It's only the death drive, my dear, Freud would likely tell me, if I lay my body down on his carpet covered couch. Everybody needs a little oblivion. Besides, what is the fantasy of the knight on a white charger if not an abandonment wish? A desire to be rescued from your own life by a story.

This is one of the truest books I have ever read about addiction. Bright is young when she finds herself facing the unpalatable truth that she is an alcoholic. This is a memoir of recovery over many years. It has a beautiful and tragic counterpoint in that as she begins to put her life together, her father's life begins to fall apart. Dementia is unravelling him as fast as she is discovering who she really is. Although Sarah had devoted her professional life to the study of death and how we grieve, she found that nothing could have prepared her for the reality of illness and the devastation of loss.KG: The writing of your thesis – on hysteria, Spanish cinema and Louise Bourgeois – is included in the book, and feeds its way in. How did you see its relation to this project? Octavia Bright is a writer and broadcaster. She co-hosts Literary Friction, the literary podcast and NTS Radio show, with Carrie Plitt. Recommended by the New York Times, Guardian, BBC Culture, Electric Literature, Sunday Times and others, it has run for ten years and has listeners worldwide. She has also presented programmes for BBC R4 including Open Book, and hosts literary events for bookshops, publishers and festivals – such as Cheltenham Literature Festival and events for The Southbank Centre. Her writing has been published in a number of magazines including the White Review, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE, Wasafiri, Somesuch Stories, and the Sunday Times, amongst others. She has a PhD from UCL where she wrote about hysteria and desire in Spanish cinema. An extraordinary, electrifying book about loss, chaos, addiction and death, and the wild work of staying tender in the face of it” OB: I had to grapple with time because I was grappling with Alzheimer’s, a temporally disorganising illness, but also grappling with recovery, which gives you this whole different way of organising your life. You have a sobriety birthday, you keep time in a different way. One of the quiet threads through the book is als o anti-capitalist, anti-linear time. We all exist in the trap of this impossible system that is in the process of slowly exploding, and the way to stop obsessing about those things is to pay deep attention to someone else in care.

This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright is a powerful memoir that is unafraid to examine the darkness of addiction and the desolation of loss while still having a hopeful and empowering tone. Though short, it is impactful and memorable and as I read I found myself rereading and highlighting passages that particularly spoke to me. such as " ..this idea that as we evolve, somewhere deep within us remains a skeletal trace of what came before that builds up in layers, a sediment of the self. But the point is that it's crucial to our continued survival to let some things sink to the bottom, recede until they are obsolete. " or " If addiction is rooted in the will to forget, recovery is an act of remembering - a slow reconnection with the parts of yourself that slipped out of reach while you hungered for escape. " I would highly recommend this memoir to anyone who enjoys thoughtful and well written prose, as well as those who appreciate bravery and honesty in their storytelling, An intellectually astute and open-hearted account of a life-turned-work-of-art, which draws its reader into conversation with our own attempts at renewal’ London Fashion Week Paris Fashion Week Milan Fashion Week New York Fashion Week News Fashion Wedding Ideas Beauty Hair Trends Life + culture Holiday Inspiration All videos Elle fashion cupboard So that was my trepidation, and I would not have requested this if it hadn’t been praised as it was by Olivia Laing – who does cover some of the same territory in some of her biographical work, particularly, looking at the work of several artists and writers – that story of artistic genius allied with personal chaos.Save On Swearing: Rebecca Roache in Conversation with Robin Ince at Gower St to your collection. Share On Swearing: Rebecca Roache in Conversation with Robin Ince at Gower St with your friends. The woman remains a mystery, the focus often more on her observers. It’s easy to empathise with her quest for strength and stillness, especially as a response to pain, but why must it be witnessed by others? Self-realisation and narcissism here seem inseparable. That narcissism and the narrators’ unreliability creates an unsatisfying detachment in the reader and flattens the novel’s tone, but the characters are always intriguing. Bright so eloquently writes about her attempt to prepare for imminent devastation when ultimately “the sadness arrives anyway”. She describes the physical, animal pain of grief, the ever-changeable emotions during the final liminal stages between life and death, the beautiful last words exchanged and the immediate emotions within the first few days and weeks of loss. She describes beautifully the grace in accepting “The worst had happened and I was still here, not careening toward oblivion but with my feet on the ground, rooted, able to withstand it”. Save Losing The Plot: Derek Owusu in Conversation with Mendez to your collection. Share Losing The Plot: Derek Owusu in Conversation with Mendez with your friends. I kept putting myself in danger, and I couldn't make it stop. It rarely felt like a choice, though, of course, in some ways it was. It's only the death drive, my dear, Freud would likely tell me, if I lay my body down on his carpet-covered couch. Everybody needs a little oblivion. Besides, what is the fantasy of the knight on a white charger if not an abandonment wish? A desire to be rescued from your own life by a story. But if addiction is rooted in the will to forget, recovery is an act of remembering - a slow reconnection with the parts of yourself that slipped out of reach while you hungered for escape.