This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal

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As Octavia moves between London, the island of Stromboli, New York, Cornwall and Margate, each place offers something new but ultimately always delivers the same message: that wherever you go, you take yourself with you. A writer, broadcaster and co-host of the Literary Friction podcast, Bright’s first book – which takes place across seven years – contains deep strata of lived experience as much as it stages her coming-of-age. Ragged Grace plays with form and genre in its exposition of recovery – layering academic ideas and fictional tropes over more straightforward non-fictional narratives. Bright also tells the story of her father’s descent into Alzheimer’s, her care for him clashing with the simultaneous flush of a new love. “We tend to think of grace as to do with smoothness, elegance or the divine, but I’m more interested in the ragged kind,” she writes. “Like perfection or completion, smoothness is a false ideal: friction is where you meet reality.”

Save In Conversation with Wes Streeting MP to your collection. Share In Conversation with Wes Streeting MP with your friends. A truly enlightening read: poetic, courageous and surprising. Beautiful, intelligent prose and such a brave journey into art, family and the deep structures of an addictive personality. On top of that This Ragged Grace is a love letter to the sea and the wisdom we share with it. I loved it’ 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,About two years into this journey, some odd behaviours of her father, with whom she was very close, were explained when he was diagnosed with dementia. As she learned how to accept and discover the changes in and relationship with herself, she also had to learn to navigate the same with her father.

One very small point which may jar some readers and kudos to Bright for mentioning it a few times - it’s evident she grew up with lots of privilege. For example I found myself asking a few times how she was living in a flat by herself and travelling whilst doing a PhD. Anyway very small quibble and Bright mentions it more than once, explaining that this is an important factor in aiding her recovery. I walked so hard and so fast in the winter of 2013 that I wore right through a pair of red Doc Martens.” This frenzied kineticism opens Octavia Bright ’s memoir This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal . An emotive story of convalescence from alcohol addiction starting when she is a doctoral student, it courses across continents and climates like a picaresque, each location offering up new affective terrain and possibilities for living. In Stromboli, the author comes across a grey-haired philosopher married to the postman. In Margate, she discovers the highs of cold water, but there, loneliness is its own dark ocean. As well as beyond and outwards, Bright heeds the words of philosopher Simone Weil that “if we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.” She learns to meditate while walking. An extraordinary, electrifying book about loss, chaos, addiction and death, and the wild work of staying tender in the face of it”Octavia Bright and Carrie Plitt are the hosts of probably my favourite podcast: @litfriction. Equal parts stand-up and English literature masterclass, it's gotta be one of the most nourishing pods on the market.

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? 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. But now it was starting to sink in that, ultimately, if you’re always on the run from reality, you end up absent from your own life. There on the path, it was simple: I didn’t need a volcano, or a man from the internet, or a pair of red sequined shoes. I was content to be there and nowhere else. This was what I’d heard so many people in the meetings describe over the years. The knowledge that it was possible to be at home inside my own mind, not to need to escape it at all. This was peace. It may sound like a small thing, but it was a revelation, and proof that all the work I’d put into my recovery was worth it. But everyone feels better on holiday, and I wasn’t sure peace was something I’d be able to hold on to when I returned to the city and the pressure of my real-life obligations.This book is a companion for anyone navigating the hardships of loss and uncertainty' - Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace Not long after that I stopped dating for a while. I followed the principles I was taught in recovery meetings, which meant learning to sit with my feelings instead of trying to outrun them – whether into people, places or things. At first it was horrible, but slowly I got better at it. Still, it took a few more years of sobriety and plenty of trial and error before I finally understood the meaning of serenity. Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops 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. Bright's style is simultaneously intimate and rich in metaphor: while this is very much her own story, like a true academic she also contextualises it in art and literature. There are echoes Olivia Laing and Deborah Levy: this is a story of self-reflection which resonates with the wider world. It's beautifully written with a distinctive voice, and I kept finding myself highlighting passages to return to.