The Camera

Art by Elizabeth Murphy.

Octavia Bright’s memoir This Ragged Grace (2023) recalls the seven-year period following Bright’s recovery from alcohol addiction, paralleled by her father’s demise from Alzheimer’s. Her reflections are threaded with delicate readings of figures like Simone Weil, Theodor Adorno, Louise Bourgeois, and Anne Carson. Within these readings, Bright asks the continual question of how care and loving might be practised from within a variety of bodily experiences.

I was already familiar with Bright’s broadcasting work through the podcast, Literary Friction, which she co-hosted with Carrie Plitt, as well as being a presenter on the BBC Radio 4 show Open Book. Bright has a PhD from UCL in Spanish cinema, and her writing has appeared in The White Review, ELLE, The Sunday Times and Somesuch Stories, amongst others. Meeting on the hottest day of the year so far, at the Curve Garden in Dalston, we spoke over raspberry lemonade with lots of ice. Topics like hysteria and self-mythology blended into the problem of subjectivity in academia, and the ethics of depicting those you love in times of vulnerability.

This Ragged Grace begins in Stromboli, where you write that you “first surrendered to the idea of recovery.” Deborah Levy’s description of her books as “living autobiographies” comes to mind, and it made me wonder, what marks the spot for beginning a “living” narrative? What made you start in Stromboli?

It’s a great question. One of the things was because I had such clean, strong memories of being there, and when I sat down to think about the structure of the book, I knew I wanted to start with getting sober rather than in the kind of madness and chaos of addiction. I was thinking, so what is that, then? It is the first AA meeting I went to? Is it the first appointment with the psychiatrist? I realised it was more interesting to think about it as the first moment that I actually internalised the idea.

So, when I was thinking about it along those lines, I was like, right, where can I find a moment when it suddenly felt like an integration somehow? It was that really strong memory of being in Stromboli, and I knew I wanted to write in a way that used symbols and archetypes, and maybe mythological ideas, because in understanding oneself, those sort of hooks to deeper meaning can be really useful. The volcano presented itself as this very useful symbol of what it’s like to live with addiction: a volcano is dormant, and it doesn’t disappear. In fact, it’s actually kind of amazing to be talking about this right now with you, because today is my eleventh sobriety birthday!

I’m honoured to be here for this cyclical moment. I was wondering about some of the intellectual background to another recurring symbol in the book. You wrote your doctorate on hysteria in film, and the hysteria patients who were basically imprisoned in Salpêtrière in the 19th century appear many times in This Ragged Grace. Why hysteria? Why does that particular ‘medical story’, if you like, endure in your own?

A lot about addiction is the uncommunicated bringing itself to the surface somehow. I would never want to be prescriptive about addiction; people think about it in lots of ways. Some people believe in the disease model very strongly, some people don’t find that useful, and they would prefer to think of it in terms of emotional repression.

For me, because I’ve always been interested in psychology, and been in psychoanalytic therapy for an incredibly long time, and also, worked with Lacan and Freud, and Jung in my doctoral research, once I understood myself as an addict I was really curious about where my experience of addiction sat within my psychological makeup. The fact I had been so drawn towards hysteria as a doctoral student was because I was hysterical. In the sense that there was an unspoken reality being communicated through my body and my bodily behaviour. My mind was speaking in a language that cut beneath the conscious. The language of getting blackout drunk, and letting the body take over completely. I also think the academy likes to pretend that your relationship with your material is purely cerebral. I disagree with that, and you’ll have your own view, being in the midst of it, but I think to commit to the study of anything for that intensity and length of time there’s an emotional attachment as well.

Once I understood this, I understood that this image had been driving my research from the very beginning. It’s complicated, because the hysteric as a historic figure still has a lot to teach us, but it is difficult to look at her without the weight of all that patriarchal framing. This Ragged Grace brought that research in very lightly; a way of making a case for that history still having something to teach, if we see the hysteric as the archetype of a person who is in conflict with themselves.

That resonates with me in a lot of ways, especially the sense that the academic voice wants this occluded version of the self. The number of times I have been told off for saying “I think” in an essay, like we are pretending “I” didn’t think of the thing I’m writing…

Yes, completely. It is a complete fallacy that there is no ‘I’ in academic writing. It makes me crazy, because the idea that there can be any objective pronouncement made on culture, or even history, is insane. When I’m feeling ranty about it, I can be like, it’s absolutely bankrupt, but I don’t really believe that. I believe in the importance of intellectual rigour, and of postgraduate research. It’s vital, but I just wish we could be a bit more honest about the fact that there is an I in the room.

This is why I think auto-fiction is a particularly interesting way of approaching philosophy, and more traditionally ‘academic’ subjects. It’s like a way of admitting that subjectivity has always been in the room.

Totally, yes. One of the things I really wanted to do with this book was bring some of the ‘big ticket’ ideas of my academic research into a place where people who aren’t necessarily interested in pursuing postgraduate degrees might encounter them, in a way that didn’t feel patronising or didactic. I wanted to show that political theory lives, and to break down some of that hierarchy I have found so grinding and tiring. The idea that something has to be difficult in order to have meaning really bothers me. Although I’m not for the life of me saying I’m the first person to do it. Maggie Nelson, and Deborah Levy as well, are so good at taking these ideas and just offering them to their readers in a way that doesn’t feel overly reverent.

That also makes me wonder about this idea — or, more likely, problem — of intellectual seriousness. I have a quote from This Ragged Grace which made me laugh because it resonated: “Why am I always talking about love? I thought. I wanted to be a more serious person, with a brain full of Adorno and Spinoza, worthy of the doctorate I was working towards, but instead all I could think about was love, love, love.” It strikes me that you’re not the only one thinking about romantic love and also feeling guilty for it. Yet for all the Adornos and Spinozas, there are many writers – including you – that do not invalidate love as a medium of perception. Why can’t we stop thinking about love? And why can’t we stop feeling guilty about it?

Such a good question. Because it’s kind of the only thing there is to think about! And I don’t mean romantic love, but in a broader sense: what is there to a life but our personal relationships? Obviously loads, but they are at the heart of it. Why do we feel guilty about it? Patriarchy, misogyny. The idea that women could pursue love as opposed to security was one of the things which blew open the patriarchal systems that our forebears had to live within. If women, and anyone who’s basically not a straight man, are allowed to consider love as a worthwhile driving force that can be both intellectual and emotional, then we might all design our lives very differently. A way of belittling the pursuit of love as feminised allows a patriarchal system to dismiss it as not worthy of rigorous thought.

At one point, you write that “it is very dull to be a broken thing,” and at another, you say you don’t want your story to “become a commodity, a silver coin in the confessional economy that thrives on feminine dysfunction.” How do you toe the line when writing a memoir? Is it easy to slip into fetish?

Yes. It is very easy to self-mythologise, when you end up offering yourself up as a fetish. It was something I was very conscious of, and conscious of the impulse to do it whenever it came up. Usually, because I wanted to make myself sound better than I was, but I didn’t find it that hard to swat it away. But yes, I was very worried about that. It was one of the reasons I didn’t agree to write about recovery for a long time. I had been approached by a few editors in the years previous. There was a time when the industry was very hungry for those kind of stories in a way that did feel fetishizing, because it felt like a flash in the pan, like the lens was turned onto those stories, rather than these publishers actually being interested in making something that would exist outside of a particular cultural moment.

When I came to work on this book, it felt different. Partly because of my agent and publisher, who are both fantastic. Another way I hoped to avoid fetishizing was actually by using epigraphs and adding images and quotations from art and literature, to make a case for the fact that addiction narratives don’t only exist within themselves.

The last thing I will say though, one of the strangest things for me was, after publication, seeing it show up on people’s Instagram’s feeds as an object — with a nice coffee in the sunshine, that sort of thing. It was kind of amazing, because on the one hand, wow, someone is appreciating this thing I made. But it was also very strange, because it was there as a commodity, like the book itself, as a signifier of I don’t know what. I’m not judging. We’ve all done it. But I would see those images and be like, wow, that’s my life.

Following on from that question, I wonder if the ethics around exposure changed at all when depicting those close to you? Your friends and family?

I felt so much more comfortable writing about myself, which is why it ended up being even more internal than I necessarily thought it would. But of course there was the big question of concern when writing about my dad, because he couldn’t really consent to it. By the time I started work on the book, he was really too far gone, I think, to fully understand the implications of anything. But I’d written a piece about him for The Sunday Times when he had just gone into the nursing home, and it was during COVID, and I wrote an article about it. It had political intent, because the government was being monstrous about vulnerable people, and he was still with it enough that he read it when it was published. I was still allowed to visit him occasionally at that point, and when I went, he had it on his table, and got a real kick out of it. I kind of took that as my blessing to continue writing about him.

Even though it was probably the more ethically complicated relationship to write about, he also felt like the least fraught person to include because I was very certain he wouldn’t mind. For others, I decided I would write it, and see how much they came into the picture. There are other writers for whom the act of writing is more important than living in a way. And for me, living is more important than writing, and my relationships are more important than any sort of sacrifice to the material.

You’ve already spoken about your father’s protracted illness with Alzheimer’s, which forms a huge part of the book. I found your description of grieving for him in a liminal way, in the anticipation of tragedy, really moving. But in grappling with sobriety, you were also having to form a hopeful idea of the future. Why was it important that these stories, these futures really, were told together?

When I first began thinking about the idea of writing about recovery, I realised that my understanding of it was anchored by the fact that I loved someone who had a terminal illness, and those stories couldn’t be separated because my recovery started around the same time as he started to show symptoms of dementia. Addiction, which for argument’s sake we can call an illness, is similar to dementia in that they both creep in, and cause behavioural disturbances in ways that are very easy to dismiss as something else. Denial is also a really big part of the picture, because no one wants to feel that their mind is out of their control.

I saw all of these parallels, and saw the anticipatory grief thing as again something that people who are very close to addicts feel, something that my friends and family had also probably felt about me. Again, it was about bringing the addiction story out of a locked box, where it only shows that one part of a life. I wanted to write about the fullness of life, the enormous changes in one period of a life, and recovery is something which has to be pursued alongside all of the other stuff that comes at you, regardless of whether you want it or not, whether or not you choose it.

There’s a political sense to that, right? Thinking about the climate crisis, or the rise of the far-right, there’s this sense that one can never fully shake or reconcile with an anticipatory, future grieving.

Yes, totally. And again, it’s about having a conscious relationship with denial, right? Denial is a crucial psychological phenomenon, which does us a lot of damage if we get stuck in it. If we employ our denial so successfully that we pretend the climate crisis isn’t happening at all, it’s very damaging. To admit to dealing with this overwhelming feeling of future dread is also admitting to present dread. Both addiction and the experience of loving my father through his illness were things that taught me so much about how to live with denial and not rage against the fact of it. What I learned from writing this book is to have a more empathetic relationship towards denial, actually. Activating someone else’s denial in a political sense can shut them into that position, and that is very unhelpful for where we are.

There are so many put-the-book-down moments in This Ragged Grace. But I also found a kind of whimsy and humour in your descriptions. A train you take in Cornwall is “a little caterpillar,” there’s lots of delicious food. In another way, I found that Wormtongue, the name you give your internal, criticising voice, had a dark humour: it reminded me of Crow in Ted Hughes’ poems. Does whimsy, or dark humour, have a place in your voice as a writer?

Interesting. Dark humour? Definitely. Whimsy is a word that makes me bristle a little, but I don’t think you’re wrong to call it that. I think it’s actually my own internalised intellectual snobbery. Because it is whimsical to describe a train as a caterpillar, right? But humour, especially when dealing with life and death, a lot of it is really funny, and with humour you can detonate a lot of difficult feelings. Wormtongue is sarcastic and undermining, but it’s tragic-comic. When you really reckon with the self-sabotaging forces within yourself, I think it’s helpful to be able to laugh at them, though not at the expense of taking them seriously.

But to return to the whimsy thing, it was important to me that the book had delightful things in it, because it’s about difficult, heavy things, and actually I wanted it to be full of hope. That wasn’t necessarily a conscious thing going into the writing, but as I started, I realised I didn’t want to write it in a really pared-back style. And I wanted the body to be in there, because addiction is an incredibly bodily experience, but I still had a body that experienced delight regularly, through things like food, but also taking in and being excited by colours and flowers and sensations. So that’s probably where it comes in.

And, finally, a little question: what should we be reading this summer?

I recently read Miranda July’s novel, All Fours, which is absolutely amazing. I wonder if I was 22, what I would feel about it, because it’s about an experience of a woman in her mid-40s, very different from the stage you’re at now. The way she writes sex is extraordinary, really vital and kind of free. I would also say Helen Garner. Anything by Helen Garner, but her diaries especially for anyone who is a writer or wanting to write. What else? Motherhood by Sheila Heti I’m reading again. Oh! Another great summer read is The Pisces by Melissa Broder. It’s so good. And can I do one more? Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin. There you go!

This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Remembering and Forgetting is published in paperback by Canongate, released June 2024.

By Rosa Appignanesi.