All of Us Atoms

You tell me we are made of seven billion billion billion atoms. I can feel every one of them as I write this all down. It''s a rush to feel that, like falling in love. Remembering is like falling in love with you, with us, again and again. What makes us who we are? What stories do we inherit - and leave behind? Faced with the prospect of losing her memory, a writer revisits the moments that changed her - from childhood to motherhood, loss and ill-health. Through shifting pronouns and perspectives, moving across place and time, each piece twists the kaleidoscope of existence to make sense of the present through the past. From the opening battle between her brain and her body, a conversation emerges between her collection of selves: the Daughter, the Sister, the Dancer, the Gardener, the Mother, the Girl-Who-Read-Woolf. Reliving her journey of becoming, she unpicks the fabric of fact and experience to stitch a new tapestry of personhood, both real and imaginary, mundane and profound. All of Us Atoms offers a tender portrait of the tension between our drive to make sense of things and the freedom that comes from throwing categories away. It heralds the arrival of a major new literary voice, urging us to reframe and reclaim our own stories and revel in our mutable, messy, multitudinous selves.

Autorentext

Holly Dawson is a writer, editor and teacher. Since 2018, she has been Reader-in-Residence at Charleston, where she gets to indulge her passion for Modernist literature and Virginia Woolf. Her plays, drawing on Bloomsbury diaries and letters, have been performed by actors including Helena Bonham Carter, Miranda Richardson and Jonathan Pryce. Having grown up in Cornwall, she now lives in rural Sussex with far too many hens.

@hollyjdawson | hollyjdawson.com

Klappentext

Faced with the possibility of losing her mind, a young mother urgently sets about recording her life. Using a series of archetypes - mother, daughter, dancer, lover, girl - she explores her childhood and adolescence, her family legacies, the places that made her, the joys and struggles of raising two children on her own, her fears, dreams and most intimate desires.

Her purpose is twofold: to understand how the pieces of a life come to make a whole, and to leave something behind for her two sons. The result is a powerful memoir that serves as a manual to live by - and a brilliant exploration of what gets passed down from one generation to the next.

The action moves primarily between Cornwall in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the East Sussex countryside in the present day. Holly writes beautifully and evocatively about our connection to nature and the land, and its relationship to personal histories.

Zusammenfassung
[A] playful , tender, form-busting memoir . . . There are times when the reader feels almost like an intruder, and yet Dawson's gift for distilling profound feelings allows us to map her experiences on to our own. All of Us Atoms contains multitudes; it's a celebration of the ties that bind us to one another, of the strength of women , and of the power of words to connect us and carry us forwards Observer