Late Fragments by Kate Gross; Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey - review by Samantha Ellis

Samantha Ellis

Writing Therapy

Late Fragments

By

William Collins 256pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

Girl in the Dark

By

Bloomsbury Circus 256pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
 

In ‘On Being Ill’, Virginia Woolf found it ‘strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature’. In her memoir, Late Fragments, written as she was dying of cancer, Kate Gross wonders if this is because, as with childbirth, we erase the memory of illness as soon as it is over: ‘And if it is not over; well, what follows is death, and the grave is hardly conducive to the creative spirit.’ Gross died, at the age of thirty-six, on Christmas Day 2014. Before that, she wrote this wise, luminous book.

It came from the unexpected clarity she found as death closed in. ‘It is so, so easy’, she writes, ‘in the rush of life to neglect your inner world. I know mine was dead for many years, squeezed between work and achieving stuff and my darling little ones.’ She did

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

East of the Wardrobe

Follow Literary Review on Twitter