This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal

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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.

A beautifully written and very moving account of addiction all the places in between, and recovery. Octavia Bright is a writer and broadcaster. She co-hosts Literary Friction, the literary podcast and NTS Radio show, with Carrie Plitt. Recommended by the New York Times, Guardian, BBC Culture, Electric Literature, Sunday Times and others, it has run for ten years and has listeners worldwide. She has also presented programmes for BBC R4 including Open Book, and hosts literary events for bookshops, publishers and festivals – such as Cheltenham Literature Festival and events for The Southbank Centre. Her writing has been published in a number of magazines including the White Review, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE, Wasafiri, Somesuch Stories, and the Sunday Times, amongst others. She has a PhD from UCL where she wrote about hysteria and desire in Spanish cinema. 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. Hotjar sets this cookie to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether it was the first time Hotjar saw this user.When life is challenging and peace feels harder to come by, I remember that the path towards it doesn’t lie outside my mind, but within it. I remember those days spent walking between the hedgerows and the sea, and that reality is not such a terrible place to be. OB: I had to grapple with time because I was grappling with Alzheimer’s, a temporally disorganising illness, but also grappling with recovery, which gives you this whole different way of organising your life. You have a sobriety birthday, you keep time in a different way. One of the quiet threads through the book is als o anti-capitalist, anti-linear time. We all exist in the trap of this impossible system that is in the process of slowly exploding, and the way to stop obsessing about those things is to pay deep attention to someone else in care. 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’ Bright’s ability to write so elegantly and nakedly has both floored and inspired me. Peppered with refences to art, sculpture, literature and poetry, I frequently disappeared down a “Google rabbit hole” exploring the references further.

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. 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. 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” This was a book I requested as an ARC with some trepidation. That is, because I always wonder, a little, what it is that might make me want to read some kind of ‘misery memoir’ where a journey into darkness and probably some degradation looks to be part of the journey.

OB: I realised recovery is more interesting than addiction. That’s not to say that I haven’t really enjoyed reading about addiction, but recovery always comes at the end, like the wedding in a romcom. But as we all know, that’s the fantasy and the really hard stuff follows. The experience of being trapped in an addictive relationship to any substance is ultimately very monotonous, from a psychological point of view, even if you’re wearing cool clothes and surrounded by avant-garde people. When I first got sober I was susceptible to glamorising what I was leaving behind, and was anxious that recovery couldn’t be interesting and exciting too. I was hungry for stories about recovery, but I couldn’t really find them. After I had a motorbike accident, he suggested I go to AA – to him, it no longer looked like escape I was chasing, but oblivion. The thing is, sometimes oblivion feels good. There’s a reason it’s the name of a rollercoaster – there can be a deep pleasure in letting go. There is something gratifying in self-abandon and the adrenaline rush of risk. And there’s nothing wrong with chasing a little oblivion from time to time. The trouble comes when it goes from being the exception to the rule. So when I learnt Bright had a book out I had to get hold of it. And so did half of Wellington judging by how long the reserves list was. 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”. I can be at your place in 20 minutes,' said the message on my phone. My pulse raced at the sight of it. Around me, the 30 or so strangers I sat among were saying the serenity prayer in unison, but that night I wasn’t interested in serenity.

This memoir covers seven years in the author's life. During these seven years, her world turned upside down in many ways and by the end of this time, everyone's world had turned upside down as COVID raced around the world. It's a beautiful book and although it might not seem like it on the surface, an uplifting one as well. We all go through really terrible times in our lives and we have to learn how to accept what is, draw on our strengths, and move through them, finding inspiration and courage from wherever we can. Her descriptions of her life while drunk were sometimes harrowing, and her father's slow decline was heartbreaking, but her discovery of inner resources and strengths that she did not know she had was powerful and beautifully communicated. I would definitely read more by this author. Kitty Grady: Your epigraph by Louise Bourgeois describes a spiral. Why did you open with this metaphor? 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. 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. An intimate, raw, empathetic story of loss, recovery, love and human fragility. This Ragged Grace is a beautifully-written and intricately-observed masterpiece of a memoir”

OB: I didn’t because it feels like they happened to someone else. When you make a big change like getting sober there is a disruption to a continuous sense of identity. I found it more exposing to write the later chapters because they are so much more who I am now, even if there’s nothing that extreme in them. My wild, addict self – she was fun to write. That’s the difficult thing with writing about dysfunction – those moments of extreme behaviour are often electrifying, both as a reader and a writer. I knew I would love this book because a) Dolly Alderton recommended it b) the Sunday Times Culture magazine recommended it and c) I recently started listening to the Literary Friction podcast (may or may not have been another Dolly recommendation…) and love it. 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. 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.”