Non-Fiction Essays Memoir English Language

Constellations

Sinéad Gleeson

2019 Picador

There is something about pain, and groups of words are never going to capture exactly what it is … Pain is like a fingerprint; it is that unique, in the same way that art is unique and writing is unique. If you said to someone, ‘You have to write 14 essays about the body and you’re going to call it Constellations,’ they’re not going to write what I wrote. So even though we’re failing to communicate pain, we’re all still attempting to find a way through it and making it manifest.

Sinéad Gleeson

Constellations

Sinéad Gleeson

2019 Picador

There is something about pain, and groups of words are never going to capture exactly what it is … Pain is like a fingerprint; it is that unique, in the same way that art is unique and writing is unique. If you said to someone, ‘You have to write 14 essays about the body and you’re going to call it Constellations,’ they’re not going to write what I wrote. So even though we’re failing to communicate pain, we’re all still attempting to find a way through it and making it manifest.

Sinéad Gleeson

Description

How do you tell the story of a life in a body, as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood? How do you tell that story when you are not just a woman but a woman in Ireland? In these powerful and daring essays Sinéad Gleeson does that very thing. All of life is within these pages, from birth to first love, pregnancy to motherhood, terrifying sickness, old age and loss to death itself. Throughout this wide-ranging collection she also turns her restless eye outwards delving into work, art and our very ways of seeing. In the tradition of some of our finest life writers, and yet still in her own spirited, generous voice, Sinéad takes us on a journey that is both uniquely personal and yet universal in its resonance. Here is the fierce joy and pain of being alive.

 
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