Samantha Ellis
Writing Therapy
Late Fragments
By Kate Gross
William Collins 256pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Girl in the Dark
By Anna Lyndsey
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.
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'We may not be able to shield ourselves from irrational passions such as hatred, anger, envy, mockery and pride, or from the buffetings of circumstance, but we can rise above them by obtaining insight into their nature and their causes.'
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