The Critic Magazine

Woman About Town

All in the family

TO THE BOOKSHOP LIBRERIA IN SHOREDITCH, to celebrate the launch of Tracy King’s memoir Learning to Think. It’s a record of an extraordinary life — it opens with a scene of young Tracy being exorcised, after her perfectly reasonable trauma and grief following the sudden death of her father was mistaken for demonic possession. To the economic precarity of her upbringing was added emotional precarity: it’s a circumstance that would have sunk many.

But more importantly, it’s an extraordinary piece of writing. Partly because she grew up with so much uncertainty (and partly

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