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    Constellations: Reflections from Life
    Constellations: Reflections from Life
    Constellations: Reflections from Life
    Ebook231 pages3 hours

    Constellations: Reflections from Life

    By Sinéad Gleeson

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The #1 Irish bestseller and winner of Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2019 An Post Irish Book Awards, winner of the 2020 Dalkey Literary Awards, named Best Book of the Year by the Guardian, Observer, Image, Irish Times, New Statesman, and Irish Independent, Sinéad Gleeson’s essays chronicle—in crystalline, tender, powerful prose—life in a body as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood, and love of all kinds.

    "I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles."

    We treat the body as an afterthought, until it no longer can be. Until the pain or the pleasure is too great. Sinéad Gleeson’s life has been marked by terrible illness, including leukemia and debilitating arthritis. As a child, she bathed in the springs of Lourdes, ever hopeful that her body would cooperate, ever looking forward to the day when she could take her body for granted. But just as she turns inward to explore her own pain, and then the marvel of recovery, and then the arrival of her greatest joys—falling in love, becoming a mother—she turns her gaze outward. She delves into history, art, literature, and music, plotting the intimate experience of life in a women’s body across a wide-ranging map. From Nick Cave to Taylor Swift, Botticelli to Frida Kahlo, Louisa May Alcott to Lucy Grealy, Constellations is an investigation into the different ways of seeing, both uniquely personal and universal in its resonances.

    In the tradition of some of our finest life writers, Gleeson explores—in her own spirited, generous voice—the fierceness of being alive. She has written “a book [that] every woman should read” (Eimear McBride).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 24, 2020
    ISBN9780358213352
    Author

    Sinéad Gleeson

    Sinéad Gleeson is a writer of essays, criticism and fiction. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Winter Papers and Gorse, and a story of hers was in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories. She is the editor of three short story anthologies, including The Long Gaze Back: an Anthology of Irish Women Writers and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland, both of which won Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Book Awards. Sinéad has worked as an arts critic and broadcaster and has presented The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1. She lives in Dublin.

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    • 5/5
      This book is fully of essays that are so well written. I think every Irish woman should read this.
    • 4/5
      Sinéad Gleeson’s memoir Constellations explores the relationship between our bodies and our identity. In a series of linked essays, she writes powerfully about her own experiences and what they tell us about the embodied lives of all women, particularly Irish women.Gleeson has been doubly unlucky. As an adolescent she had a form of arthritis which meant painful surgery and using crutches (and sometimes a wheelchair) just at the age when people are most self-conscious about their body, and most eager to join in with friends. Later, just months after marrying, she was diagnosed with leukaemia.I found the essays about illness to be particularly moving. The writing is lyrical and visceral and without self-pity. She captures the loss of autonomy, the battles with professionals to be heard, the detachment from the everyday world, the strange acoustics and enforced intimacies of hospital life.She considers the relationship between women and fertility, linking her own hopes and fears about being able to have children, with the way women are defined by their role as mothers. She broadens this to consider the struggle for Irish women to have legal access to abortion, and the injustices of the past when women were institutionalised for becoming pregnant outside marriage.She explores the other ways women have been confined, contrasting her own experiences of freedom to travel and to be educated with the poverty and limited horizons of her grandmother’s generation. She argues that the visions for which her grandmother was famous might have been a reaction to this confinement, a way to envisage a bigger, stranger universe.What Constellations brought home to me is how serious illness sets someone apart. It is more than the absence of health, experiences missed, it is a whole other state of being, of loneliness and pain and otherness. Worse, it is a state that many medical professionals (especially if the doctor is a man, and the patient is a woman) still dismiss.Constellations gives a vivid and vital insight into living with illness and how the bodies we inhabit make us who we are.*I received a copy of Constellations from the publisher via Netgalley.Read more of my reviews on my blog katevane.com/blog

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    Constellations - Sinéad Gleeson

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