This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal

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Save #SLACfest presents: 'In Conversation with the Artists’ to your collection. Share #SLACfest presents: 'In Conversation with the Artists’ with your friends. Sarah Tarlow's husband Mark began to suffer from an undiagnosed illness, leaving him incapable of caring for himself. One day, about six years after he first started showing symptoms, Mark waited for Sarah and their children to leave their home before ending his own life. 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. It also reminded me, a little, of Helen McDonald’s Hawk, another book riven by the deep loss of a loved parent, which has things to offer the reader in their own journey’s of loss. Then, in my early teens, I discovered drinking. It was a failsafe shortcut out of myself. The way the first glass silenced any self-consciousness or doubt. The way the second dissolved the edges of things, and filled me with a sense of tremendous wellbeing. The way the third made my head spin on the last Tube home.

The writing style was similar to some of my favourites, Deborah Levy and Joan Didion, and also like Olivia Laing's discussions of loneliness in The Lonely City. Like these other authors there are references to philosophy, psychology, and art among the introspective thoughts and past experiences. 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.” 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... Anna Murphy, Author of Destination Fabulous to your collection. Share In Conversation With... Anna Murphy, Author of Destination Fabulous with your friends.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. 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’ 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.

You won't be disappointed. Bright is in writing everything she is on the podcast: sensitive, funny, insightful, and fiendishly clever. She makes no apologies for being educated to doctorate level, and many of her philosophical touchstones are French writers I've never heard of. 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. This was a beautifully written, yet difficult to read story. I am not usually a reader of non-fiction books but this one really opened my eyes!Share this event Save this event: 2023 MCA Symposium on Alcohol-related Health Harm: Alcohol & Inequalities This book is a companion for anyone navigating the hardships of loss and uncertainty' - Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace 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. I’d been going to AA meetings for a few months by then and was starting to get used to the rhythm of them. You listened to someone describe their drinking, how they quit, and what their life was like now that they were sober. Invariably, it seemed to involve long walks in nature and swimming in the sea. People who went on about the healing properties of exercise always made me suspicious, but whenever I sat in those church basements I tried my best to listen because I wanted to feel better than I did. 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.

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.The seven chapters of the book chronicle Octavia Bright’s journey of recovery, including how she found solace and comfort in words and art. Bright tells the story of how addiction was the result of her running away from life, and how over the seven-year period that includes moving between cities, she learned to navigate changes and find acceptance, repairing her own relationship with herself whilst grieving through her father’s condition. ⁣ I've recently read another book about addiction, Good Morning Destroyer of Men's Souls, and although there are similarities in the narrative, everyone's experiences with addiction are completely different. It is an ongoing recovery process, one filled with hope, or a loss of it, but also renewal as Octavia Bright so masterfully conveys in This Ragged Grace. OB: Yeah, I had hesitations. But I would call myself a recovering academic as well as a recovering alcoholic. And in academic writing the ‘I’ is not present. You are not there, which is bullshit, because you’re always there in anything you write. The longer I interviewed writers, the more I realised the memoir form has such potential. It’s ideal if you’re a writer who doesn't want to be constrained because you can take it anywhere. When life is challenging and peace feels harder to come by, I remember that the path towards it doesn’t lie outside my mind, but within it. I remember those days spent walking between the hedgerows and the sea, and that reality is not such a terrible place to be. A beautifully written and very moving account of addiction all the places in between, and recovery.