This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal

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The vast, heavy mass of it rumbling away, puffing out plumes of grey smoke and, at night, orange sparks of lava. That is, because I always wonder, a little, what it is that might make me want to read some kind of ‘misery memoir’ where a journey into darkness and probably some degradation looks to be part of the journey. OB: I had to grapple with time because I was grappling with Alzheimer’s, a temporally disorganising illness, but also grappling with recovery, which gives you this whole different way of organising your life. 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. Looking back over this time, each of the seven chapters explores the feelings and experiences of the corresponding year of recovery, tracing the shift in emotion and understanding that comes with the deepening connection to this new way of life.

Generous, compelling, poignant and ultimately, life affirming; Bright has managed to capture the complexity of being human. She would sit in the British Library looking at photographs of women captioned with words like delirium, malingering and melancholia. Though he reveals his personal stake in the war – his sister was in Zaporizhzhia when Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded; his cousin was killed on the front line near Bakhmut – he keeps an academic’s distance.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.

Share Alan Johnson in Conversation with Derek Laud:From Postman to Home Secretary with your friends. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). She narrates a story of her recovery from addiction and her father's parallel descent into dementia. At university I studied Spanish and enjoyed the different version of myself I became when I spoke it – throaty and confident, like a character in an Almodóvar film.This Ragged Grace tells the story of Octavia's journey through recovery from alcohol addiction, and the parallel story of her father's descent into Alzheimer's. 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. Only a few weeks into that first summer of my newly sober life, I went with a close friend to Stromboli, an Italian island paradise that’s also an active volcano. 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. Early school report cards lamented my tendency to daydream – the classic ‘Octavia shows great potential if only she’d apply herself’.

Peppered with refences to art, sculpture, literature and poetry, I frequently disappeared down a “Google rabbit hole” exploring the references further. This latter quote is particularly poignant given that alongside her own story of recovery the author is describing the slow but irreversible decline of her father as his Alzheimer's disease progresses. The toolbox of skills, experiences and coping strategies she acquires during this time will later prove invaluable.

Octavia's honesty, and the process of reflection and growing self awareness through art, meditation, therapy, love and grief are really moving and inspiring. I followed the principles I was taught in recovery meetings, which meant learning to sit with my feelings instead of trying to outrun them – whether into people, places or things. The way the second dissolved the edges of things, and filled me with a sense of tremendous wellbeing. Fiercely vulnerable, deeply intimate and yet authoritative, The Archaeology of Loss describes a universal experience with an unflinching and singular gaze. Threaded through with tantalizing glimpses of the world of archaeology, Tarlow’s book is a raw, courageous examination of a sad ending to an uneasy relationship.