This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal

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Instead, I look to the grace of natural processes that prevail in spite of everything – the flowers that grow on a volcano, the skin that grows over a wound, the forgiveness at the heart of love, the generosity of time. 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.

Alongside her recovery, Bright's father is turning the opposite way with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.Bright is in writing everything she is on the podcast: sensitive, funny, insightful, and fiendishly clever. 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.

Spanning 7 years, each chapter explores a year in Bright’s life beginning with her ascent into recovery from alcohol addiction which coincided with her Father’s descent into Alzheimer’s. I walked so hard and so fast in the winter of 2013 that I wore right through a pair of red Doc Martens. 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? It was from a man with a luxuriant moustache I’d been talking to online – he wore loud shirts and had an eccentric way with capital letters that made me think he’d be a good distraction. Back in London there was nothing so elemental to buffer me from the daily grind, but I found other ways to avoid it.

He covers the ten months following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, while also effectively tracing the roots of the war back centuries. the parallel of her father’s illness was so so heartbreaking and there were so many sections that i had to reread to fully grasp the depth of emotion displayed.

Over the course of seven chapters we see Olivia rediscover herself, and begin to thrive in her new life while simultaneously trying to help her parents come to terms with the inevitable. I’d wanted to give myself over to something not in my hands – the risk of the unknown, whether a new person or a new experience. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Deakin was 56 when Waterlog was published but had already worked in, among other trades, advertising (the Coal Board slogan “Come home to a real fire” was his), furniture selling, music promoting and documentary making.

This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal by Octavia Bright is published by Canongate and is out now.