Where the World Begins

A deeply personal, devastating and exhilarating memoir about the re-emergence of memory after sexual violence, an exploration of the self and the body and rebuilding a life after trauma

At twenty-three, Rosie Price was making a life and a career in London, when a long-buried memory returned to her. The memory was one of rape: a night, four years ago, which leaves her entirely derailed.

Feeling alienated from her body, Rosie no longer feels solid but made of pixels, like a character in a computer game - the boundaries between the world and the self suddenly amorphous, vulnerable to breach. As the great gaping holes of missing memories disruptively return, they also call into question the life she has lived in the intervening years.

What followed was a crisis. In time, it becomes Rosie’s project to repair this great rupture: to reassemble herself, sometimes with tenderness, other times with brutality, using story as a mode of recovery. She reads, she writes, she begins to practice yoga and boxing - and to interrogate the idea that the body and the self can be securely contained. A question takes shape: Where do I end, and where does the world begin?

Where the World Begins seeks answers to that question. Not only in Rosie’s own history, but also in the work of writers and thinkers who have wrestled with it for decades, charting a worldview transformed and the porous boundaries between us all.