The writer’s debut book This Ragged Grace is a powerful tale of recovery from alcohol addiction, spanning continents and climates. Here, she talks about why “recovery is more interesting than addiction”
Octavia Bright: It was strange. I found the epigraph after I’d written a few chapters. I felt like there were spirals everywhere, but I hadn’t realised it came from Bourgeois. It was a spiral. It would unwind and then wind back in again when things seemed fine, and then unwind further. It’s also what recovery feels like, just in the other direction. There’s also a parallel in Alzheimer’s –KG: The narrative of the book starts seven months after your last drink.
OB: I was initially planning a book closely mapped onto my thesis, but I was getting stuck in these intellectual spirals. My agent gently asked if I’d return to my more personal writing and I wrote what became the first chapter. I had no idea all this work about hysteria from my thesis would find its way in. When I went walking, I had this profound moment of: ‘I am the wandering womb’.
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. My wild, addict self – she was fun to write. That’s the difficult thing with writing about dysfunction – those moments of extreme behaviour are often electrifying, both as a reader and a writer.before this, and your story seems to echo her description of the liberation of the addict versus the freedom of recovery.
experience pain. It’s important to take writing about pain out of this strange box. Although my father’s KG: From the instantaneous drive of the addict to the long work of recovery and the chronic illness of Alzheimer’s, the book also oscillates between different ideas of time.
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