This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal

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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. The first two thirds are based largely on Bright’s recovery, exploring the themes of addiction because of the desire to escape self and reality via an endless search for oblivion and the concept of loneliness versus solitude. The toolbox of skills, experiences and coping strategies she acquires during this time will later prove invaluable. Save Patricia Cornwell in conversation with Chris Whitaker at Piccadilly to your collection. Share Patricia Cornwell in conversation with Chris Whitaker at Piccadilly with your friends. An extraordinary, electrifying book about loss, chaos, addiction and death, and the wild work of staying tender in the face of it’

Sarah Tarlow's husband Mark began to suffer from an undiagnosed illness, leaving him incapable of caring for himself. One day, about six years after he first started showing symptoms, Mark waited for Sarah and their children to leave their home before ending his own life. 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. About two years into this journey, some odd behaviours of her father, with whom she was very close, were explained when he was diagnosed with dementia. As she learned how to accept and discover the changes in and relationship with herself, she also had to learn to navigate the same with her father. 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.”

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Instead, I was lost to the possibilities suggested by that text. 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. And I wanted to be distracted: I was newly sober and itching for another way to get out of my head. Octavia Bright was 27 when she found herself in a psychiatrist’s office being told she was an alcoholic. She writes: “I knew I drank habitually, but I felt that things hadn’t got messy enough to warrant the exaggerated language he was using: alcoholism, Alcoholics Anonymous.” Adding: “I felt judged, though I later came to see the judgment was my own.” Share this event Save this event: LONDON UK Book Launch and Signing: Avi Yemini’s ‘A Rebel From The Start’ Nina Stibbe, author of Love, Nina Bracingly candid . . . Digs away at our collective fantasy that in dying or caring for the dying we are at our best. In reality, in either role we are often withdrawn, in pain, resentful, bad-tempered: our worst . . . addictively unsentimental

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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. The woman remains a mystery, the focus often more on her observers. 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? Self-realisation and narcissism here seem inseparable. That narcissism and the narrators’ unreliability creates an unsatisfying detachment in the reader and flattens the novel’s tone, but the characters are always intriguing. Octavia Bright and Carrie Plitt are the hosts of probably my favourite podcast: @litfriction. Equal parts stand-up and English literature masterclass, it's gotta be one of the most nourishing pods on the market.

I think where I really began to be increasingly drawn in, was in her account of something which happens to us all – unless we die very young – that turn, where the child whom at some level still exists in all of us, however adult we are, becomes the parent to a parent moving inexorably towards their own dying days. And this is starkly so when a parent develops dementia. It is not just the failure of the body, it is a sense of someone losing themselves, being lost to us. London Fashion Week Paris Fashion Week Milan Fashion Week New York Fashion Week News Fashion Wedding Ideas Beauty Hair Trends Life + culture Holiday Inspiration All videos Elle fashion cupboard Save (Table)set the Scene: In Conversation with Juana Pepa to your collection. Share (Table)set the Scene: In Conversation with Juana Pepa with your friends. Fiercely vulnerable, deeply intimate and yet authoritative, The Archaeology of Loss describes a universal experience with an unflinching and singular gaze. With humour, intelligence and urgency, it is in its very honesty that it offers profound consolation.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. But now it was starting to sink in that, ultimately, if you’re always on the run from reality, you end up absent from your own life. There on the path, it was simple: I didn’t need a volcano, or a man from the internet, or a pair of red sequined shoes. I was content to be there and nowhere else. This was what I’d heard so many people in the meetings describe over the years. The knowledge that it was possible to be at home inside my own mind, not to need to escape it at all. This was peace. It may sound like a small thing, but it was a revelation, and proof that all the work I’d put into my recovery was worth it. But everyone feels better on holiday, and I wasn’t sure peace was something I’d be able to hold on to when I returned to the city and the pressure of my real-life obligations. 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’ KG: The other strand of this book is about your father’s deterioration and death with Alzheimer’s. Why did it feel important to hook this experience onto that of your recovery? Save In Conversation with Wes Streeting MP to your collection. Share In Conversation with Wes Streeting MP with your friends.

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. Bright so eloquently writes about her attempt to prepare for imminent devastation when ultimately “the sadness arrives anyway”. She describes the physical, animal pain of grief, the ever-changeable emotions during the final liminal stages between life and death, the beautiful last words exchanged and the immediate emotions within the first few days and weeks of loss. She describes beautifully the grace in accepting “The worst had happened and I was still here, not careening toward oblivion but with my feet on the ground, rooted, able to withstand it”.

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Then, in my early teens, I discovered drinking. It was a failsafe shortcut out of myself. The way the first glass silenced any self-consciousness or doubt. The way the second dissolved the edges of things, and filled me with a sense of tremendous wellbeing. The way the third made my head spin on the last Tube home. As Octavia moves between London, the island of Stromboli, New York, Cornwall and Margate, each place offers something new but ultimately always delivers the same message: that wherever you go, you take yourself with you. For me, it is the final third of the book where the personal salience is introduced. After initially managing his illness, deterioration begins in bursts of progression and stasis heralding Bright’s passage through grief prior, during and after her Father’s death. The Times Scrupulously honest . . . 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. Share this event Save this event: Woodberry Recovery - The Way Course, Steps to Recovery from addictions