Constellations
Reflections From Life
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
'I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles.'
How do you tell the story of life that is no one thing? How do you tell the story of a life in a body, as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood? And how do you tell that story when you are not just a woman but a woman in Ireland? In this powerful and daring memoir in essays Sinéad Gleeson does that very thing. In doing so she delves into a range of subjects: art, illness, ghosts, grief and our very ways of seeing. In writing that is in tradition of some of our finest writers such as Olivia Laing, Maggie O’Farrell, Robert Macfarlane, Rebecca Solnit and Maggie Nelson, and yet still in her own spirited, warm voice, Sinéad takes on journey that is both personal and yet universal in its resonance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This stirring collection of personal essays from Irish radio broadcaster Gleeson effortlessly renders pain, both physical and emotional, into prose. Her teenage struggle with chronic arthritis takes place in hospitals, where she undergoes multiple hip surgeries, but also against the backdrop of her Catholic upbringing. On a school trip to Lourdes, a site traditionally ascribed miraculous healing properties, her faith is shaken when she discovers "nothing felt different." Her "troubled orthopaedic history" foreshadowed the leukemia that arrived decades later, "an odd osseous connection," and both complicated pregnancy years after that. "I am an accumulation of all of those sleepless nights and hospital days," she writes, "of the raw keel of boredom and self-consciousness illness is." She draws in references to music, literature, and visual art she feels a deep connection to Frida Kahlo, whose "compromised body conspired against her, denying her not just health but the chance of motherhood" and eloquently explores how "the sick body has its own narrative impulse." While "in illness it is hard to find the right words," Gleeson's strong work shows it is worth the effort to search for them.
