This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal

Product Information

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’ 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. 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. Share this event Save this event: 2023 MCA Symposium on Alcohol-related Health Harm: Alcohol & Inequalities People talk about ‘being present’ as if it’s a simple thing to do, but when the inside of your head is a hostile environment it is excruciatingly hard to actually be where you are. If you live with anxiety or depression, to be in the moment means facing the slings and arrows thrown by an inner voice hell-bent on dragging you down.

Save (Table)set the Scene: In Conversation with Juana Pepa to your collection. Share (Table)set the Scene: In Conversation with Juana Pepa with your friends. 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?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. " 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. I knew I would love this book because a) Dolly Alderton recommended it b) the Sunday Times Culture magazine recommended it and c) I recently started listening to the Literary Friction podcast (may or may not have been another Dolly recommendation…) and love it. The first two thirds are based largely on Bright’s recovery, exploring the themes of addiction because of the desire to escape self and reality via an endless search for oblivion and the concept of loneliness versus solitude. The toolbox of skills, experiences and coping strategies she acquires during this time will later prove invaluable.

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. An extraordinary, electrifying book about loss, chaos, addiction and death, and the wild work of staying tender in the face of it” 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.

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. 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 can be at your place in 20 minutes,' said the message on my phone. My pulse raced at the sight of it. Around me, the 30 or so strangers I sat among were saying the serenity prayer in unison, but that night I wasn’t interested in serenity. This memoir covers seven years in the author's life. During these seven years, her world turned upside down in many ways and by the end of this time, everyone's world had turned upside down as COVID raced around the world. It's a beautiful book and although it might not seem like it on the surface, an uplifting one as well. We all go through really terrible times in our lives and we have to learn how to accept what is, draw on our strengths, and move through them, finding inspiration and courage from wherever we can. Her descriptions of her life while drunk were sometimes harrowing, and her father's slow decline was heartbreaking, but her discovery of inner resources and strengths that she did not know she had was powerful and beautifully communicated. I would definitely read more by this author. 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!

For as long as I can remember, I have preferred the intensity of experiences considered worth writing about – great loves, dangerous adventures, big ideas – to the monotony of my negative thoughts, critical and bullying, a relentless commentary on whatever I thought or did. I can’t say when they started but I don’t recall a time without them. There was no singular trauma that set things off, but I was a sensitive child, thin-skinned, and absorbed the world around me without a filter. It often felt as if my mind was determined to self-sabotage. The predictable beats of daily life offered no protection, so I sought out experiences or feelings I could get lost in. Heartbreaking, honest and well written. It's not an easy read as it's like being punched at time but it's a testimony of how you can face a very harsh life and win. 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. 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.

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’ 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. 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”. 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.