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elizabstevensx's review
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.5
I read this in two parts. The first backstage at EIF listening to Bluebeard’s Castle, reimagined as a love story between a man and his wife with dementia. Then I got distracted and struggled for a while to continue so I put it down for almost 7 months, during which time I lost my Nanny. Despite finding quite a lot of the intellectual, reflective poetry style of this quite superfluous and I found the privilege of the writer quite hard to relate to at times, since losing my Nanny I was very moved by the forced state of being present in those times of love and loss and was really touched by the last two chapters.
emilyinparis's review
4.25
‘it left me wondering about the tenderness of that stage of life, when one is adult but often not entirely, and when destructive habits are just starting to lose the glittering sheen of youthful folly’
‘I like 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’
‘Every story you tell about yourself is an attempt to organise the messy experience of living’
‘It’s not my city so I’m oblivious to its problems and I move through it protected by the selective vision of the tourist’
‘The grammar of play isn’t so different from the grammar of addiction: a syntax built out of pleasure and denial, fear and fantasy, expressed mostly in the present tense’
‘let in a little of the dawn glow and I saw myself clearly for the first time: an accident victim in a stranger’s blood-and-iodine-streaked sheets a long way from home’
‘I hesitated to include this story here, where it might become a commodity, a silver coin in the confessional economy that thrives on tales of feminine dysfunction’
‘Really, all we ever have is an impression of who we are, made up of our hopes and beliefs about ourselves, our denials and repressions, our habits and obsessions, and the versions we see reflected back by those around us’
‘I discovered that when you’ve lost something as abstract as a sense of yourself, it’s useful to have physical proof of its restoration’
‘I felt like an empty vessel gradually filling up with the smell of the grasses and the sound of the waves and the feeling of my feet as they crunched sharp pebbles beneath them’
‘the gossipy waves’
‘There was something compulsive about it, that need for affirmation. As though without it I didn’t believe I was worth anything at all’
‘but I never knew grief was such a physical thing, I never knew that it tears through the body like acid’
‘As I climbed the concrete stairs to J’s third-floor flat I realised in a panic that I couldn’t picture his face. The sense I had of him was still abstract, a dynamic warmth instead of anything tangible like the specific ratio of his features’
‘So much of grieving feels primitive like that. It collapsed the space between my adult identity and the time when I wasn’t expected to hide my overwhelming emotions’
‘Tenacity is just as important as desire if you want to build a love that lasts. And we were building something’
‘I’ve forgotten the thousand words I had to say to you, he said the next time I rang. I still wonder what they might have been’
‘There are no tidy endings, only days that follow other days, that stack up into months, then years, and so on’
‘the nursing home’s bay window, which framed my father as though he were a mannequin in a shop window display. For sale: one tired, confused, genteel bag of bones’
‘It astonished me that after living through blues so dense they could have been made of rock, great chunks of lapis lazuli, there might follow lighter ones, translucent blues you can see right through, pale blues that dazzle’
sammybook's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
gemmamestroni's review
dark
reflective
sad
4.0
Bright has a talent for noticing patterns and symbolism in her experiences and the world around her. She draws some compelling parallels between her experiences of addiction, what it does to the mind and to the self, and her experience of watching her father's decline into dementia. Her writing is quite lyrical, which at times gives you these concise bombs of insight, but at other times felt a little tortured and verbose. Overall I enjoyed this memoir, and found that her writing was at its best when things were paired back, raw and honest.
adawada's review
Despite loving Octavia’s podcast and her eloquent language, I really struggled to get into this book. The only moments that held my attention were the mentions of her father’s developing disease, anything else I just wasn’t able to focus on so I decided to finish at page 110.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Injury/Injury detail, Blood, Grief, Terminal illness, and Car accident
girlglitch's review against another edition
5.0
Honest and heartbreaking, This Ragged Grace is one of those memoirs that really resonates.
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.
This Ragged Grace is an unflinching memoir of growth and grief, recovery and reckoning.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*
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.
This Ragged Grace is an unflinching memoir of growth and grief, recovery and reckoning.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*