A beautifully written and very moving account of addiction all the places in between, and recovery.

Share this event Save this event: Woodberry Recovery - The Way Course, Steps to Recovery from addictions Save Lou Stoppard in conversation with Mary Stephenson to your collection. Share Lou Stoppard in conversation with Mary Stephenson with your friends. 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. 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. " Hotjar sets this cookie to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether it was the first time Hotjar saw this user.

Advance Praise

You won't be disappointed. Bright is in writing everything she is on the podcast: sensitive, funny, insightful, and fiendishly clever. She makes no apologies for being educated to doctorate level, and many of her philosophical touchstones are French writers I've never heard of. KG: You also get in touch with geological time – the book starts and ends at the volcanic island of Stromboli. Share this event Save this event: How To Stop People Pleasing And Put Yourself First with Michele Paradise Throughout her journey Bright also shares, initially tentatively, her experience in finding love. Despite the huge undertaking of navigating her way through the pre-mourning process, she realises that to close her heart to loss (as a coping mechanism) is to close her heart to love. She accepts the timing is less than ideal- though in retrospect it may be considered kismet. It is the very essence of life and living; an arbitrary and often inconvenient, messy, yet beautiful chain of events we have no control over. 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.

Regular listeners of Literary Friction, the podcast that Bright co-hosts, will be familiar with her intelligent yet deeply felt style. A lover of art as well as literature, she uses the works of Louise Bourgeois and Sigmund Freud to trace her story of healing, which takes place in New York City, Cornwall, Margate and on the Italian island of Stromboli. The parts about her father, who just before his diagnosis had forgotten his friends’ names but recalled the lyrics of the hot cross bun song, are anchored in west London, where Bright grew up. As a discrete section, her portrayal of his death, during the Covid-19 pandemic, is immensely poignant. It becomes even more so following Bright’s vivid descriptions of her reclamation of life. “My father died and I kept on living,” she writes, “astonished by how simple it was to do.” 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. KG: I was reading Maggie Nelson ’s recent book On Freedom before this, and your story seems to echo her description of the liberation of the addict versus the freedom of recovery. This Ragged Grace is a courageous work, filled with a deep tenderness and generosity and authenticity, the voice of Octavia Bright stays with me, it is honest, intricate, raw and real. This Ragged Grace is so beautiful, so bold and so Bright”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. Save On Swearing: Rebecca Roache in Conversation with Robin Ince at Gower St to your collection. Share On Swearing: Rebecca Roache in Conversation with Robin Ince at Gower St with your friends. Save Daisy Collingridge in conversation with Sandy Powell to your collection. Share Daisy Collingridge in conversation with Sandy Powell with your friends. I've recently read another book about addiction, Good Morning Destroyer of Men's Souls, and although there are similarities in the narrative, everyone's experiences with addiction are completely different. 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. 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.