In preparing to interview Octavia Bright, I had to remember where I left her book. It wasn’t on my bookshelf, next to Olivia Laing, and Deborah Levy, where I thought it was. It wasn’t in a corner of my bed, where it could have been. Oh god, did I leave it in London? No. It was definitely here, in LA.
I looked everywhere. In my flat, in my car. I texted anyone who might’ve taken it. Eventually I found it, hidden away in an energy healer’s studio in Beachwood Canyon, one line written across the title page.
“Recommended by Bessie Carter. God, I love this book.”
So that’s all you need to know, really. Octavia Bright wrote a book called This Ragged Grace. Bessie recommended it to me. I loved it. I lent it to a wonderful energy healer.
In terms of Octavia herself, she is a London-based writer and broadcaster, the host of one of my favourite reader/writer podcasts, Literary Friction, where I’ve listened to her interview many of the writers I assumed I’d stacked her book with.
Today, we focus specifically on her writing process for This Ragged Grace, a moving memoir about getting sober, losing her father, and the artists she studied along the way.
I really hope you enjoy it. And then I really hope you go and read her book.
Hello Octavia! To begin with, can you tell us a bit about the first seed of This Ragged Grace. Was there a ping where you thought, oh, I should write a book about this?
I’d written an essay for Somesuch Stories about recovery called On Margate Sands (it became a template for part of Chapter 5 of This Ragged Grace, which has the same name) and after it was published, a few editors got in touch with me asking if I’d be interested in extending it into a book.
At the time, I felt strongly that the material was all too fresh and raw, so I said no, but I think it planted the seed that there could be more there to explore. It was my agent who nudged me back towards that idea a few years later, when I was getting tangled up working on a proposal for a book based more directly on my thesis research about hysteria.
Once I thought about it, I realised that the hysteria idea was really a door I had to pass through in order to get to the richer material. Only then was I able to see that it would have to include writing about my father’s illness, too, because my recovery and his decline were two strands that were deeply intertwined.
How did you explain your idea to your agent?
From the start, I knew I wanted it to be a book full of the voices of other writers and artists. Partly because I see it as a bridge out from my academic writing practice, which is all about establishing your position within an intellectual and artistic lineage of other thinkers, and partly because, in each chapter, I wanted to paint a psychological portrait of my mind as it was at the time. And my mind was full of the voices of other thinkers and writers and artists (still is!)
So, when we talked about the tone of the book, I referenced people like Deborah Levy, Maggie Nelson, John Berger, Ellena Savage and Chris Kraus, all writers I hugely admire, who work to bring together intellectual ideas and lived experience, and show how they’re interconnected. Some of my favourite writing is memoir and life writing that is also about big ideas.
You explore these big ideas through paintings, sculptures, films, books, philosophers, and a particularly influential volcano. Could you tell us a bit about these visuals you studied, and the role they play in your memoir?
Most of the first chapter in This Ragged Grace takes place on the volcanic Italian island of Stromboli, which is very special to me, but the volcano has a symbolic function within the narrative too - I think it’s a good metaphor for living with addiction. Volcanoes can be dormant but the lava is always there beneath the surface. As an addict in recovery, you can get sober but that addictive drive doesn’t go away completely. It’s dormant, not ‘cured’.
Another of the recurring symbols in the book is the spiral. That relates to the artist Louise Bourgeois, for whom the spiral was a recurring motif (her words about the spiral are the epigraph to the book), and to the idea of spiralling out of control, but also of winding yourself back in. And it also relates to the double helix of experience moving in opposite directions that was happening to me and my father.
And there are lots more, too many to write about here!
How and where did you write?
My process has always been a little chaotic because I’m very resistant to routine. I get into a certain jive for a while - like writing first thing in the morning, for example - but inevitably I will have to rebel against it, so I’ve learned to accept that rebellion as part of my practice. Ditto procrastination! I’ve never found daily word counts very useful, because it feels too much like a restriction, but once I had the proposal finished I did make a timetable for completion that plotted out each chapter and when I wanted to have it drafted. I didn’t stick to it, but it was a very helpful guide to refer to.
As for where, I wrote most of This Ragged Grace during the pandemic, so the vast majority of it was written either at home or in the park, or sitting outside one of the local cafes when that was allowed.
You begin your story in 2013, seven months after you stop drinking. From there, each chapter is marked by the year of sobriety. Why do you think you wanted to start where you did, and how did this yearly structure help you write?
It was really important to me that the book started with recovery, because I wanted to write about that process rather than focussing on the chaos that came before it. There is a lot of writing already out there that I hugely admire about the mayhem of being caught in addiction, but when I first got sober I was hungry for stories about life lived in recovery rather than ones where sobriety is presented as the happy ending. Because sobriety is really a new beginning, it’s the start of a completely different way of relating to the world, and it’s a complex and evolving experience in its own right.
I didn’t intend for the structure to be chronological but it quickly became clear that it was the best way to tell this particular story. Partly because addiction recovery gives you another way to chart time - you celebrate in days, then months, then years, and it can become this new metronome beat to your life - and partly because my father’s Alzheimer’s meant he was unravelling in time in the opposite direction. And because both addiction and dementia are diseases that disorganise time, it was important for there to be a solid temporal anchor holding everything together.
Your book often references your old journals, whether in Stromboli or Margate, London or New York. What tactic did you use to translate your old notes into a manuscript form?
The journals were fundamental and also something I had to learn to let go of at a certain point. They were incredible prompts for memory, and probably the most useful thing they did was enable me to be faithful to the timeline of everything that happened, and to be accurate about how things felt at the time. But the flipside is that journal writing is very different from something crafted, and it can be hard to make space for new ways of putting something when you have a version of it in front of you. So they are a blessing but can also be a bit of a curse, I think.
What did you really enjoy about this process?
So much! In the early chapters I loved finding ways to put into words my time on the island of Stromboli and in New York, both places that are very important to me. I wanted to recreate for the reader the feeling of being there but also the mental state I was in at the time, which was a beautiful kind of time travel.
Then, in the later chapters when my father’s health gets much worse, even though I was writing about very painful things, it made me feel close to him to go there. And it gave me somewhere to put my political fury about the way the pandemic was handled. It was very important to me to write accurately about what that was like for my father and my family, because it was a brutal experience shared by so many others around the world, and I feel strongly that those stories need to be in the public record. So while ‘enjoy’ is probably not the right word to describe that feeling, there was something satisfying in writing those passages.
Probably my favourite part of writing was figuring out the different patterns and symbols that I wanted to work with, and how they fit together with the various lived experiences I was writing about. Symbols and patterns are everywhere if you look for them.
Did you have a moment where you knew it was something really special? Like you’d written something really good?
My feelings about whether something I’ve written is good or not are very fickle, so I tend not to rely on them too much. I am pretty hard on myself in general. Any moments of elation probably came when I felt that I’d managed to faithfully reproduce a scene or a feeling on the page, vivid and true. That always brings me a feeling of satisfaction. And then, as I got closer to the end of the draft, when I grew more confident that the strands I was hoping to be able to weave back in were actually going to work. Probably the most elation I felt was when I realised I knew how the book should end. When I wrote the epilogue it felt like I was being guided by the rhythm of everything that came before and all I had to do was follow the beat - that was a really good feeling.
What question do you think you were trying to answer?
I really love this question. Probably it wasn’t just a single thing, but a spiral of different, interrelated ones. Throughout my father’s illness, I felt the presence of this shared territory between us, in the liminal experience of an altered reality created by a mind that is no longer functioning as it should. So I wanted to explore that, to go deeper into it. It felt like a double helix that I wanted to take apart and understand. Which I think was also what I was doing in my thesis, when I was trying to understand everything that fell under the label ‘hysteria’, another experience where the mind goes out of bounds.
One of my favourite passages in your book is when you describe a certain type of vulnerability as “skinless and strong.” What do you think interested you there?
I was interested in exploring different kinds of vulnerability. In active addiction, a person is extremely vulnerable because they are not in control of themselves, but it’s a risky kind of vulnerability, leaving them exposed in ways they are probably in denial about. Then, in recovery, you experience a totally different kind of vulnerability, which comes with learning how to navigate the world without whatever substance you were using to make everything less painful or difficult to navigate. You feel very naked. But the difference is that in recovery it’s a deliberate nakedness because it’s a choice you make every day, and there is so much strength in that. So it was a way of reframing the feeling of skinless-ness, of total quivering exposure, as something that requires great strength, and is also crucial to recovery.
What do you say to other writers working on highly personal pieces?
Don’t let anyone push you to reveal more than you want to. You might want to push yourself to go further than you initially thought, and it’s good to test your own boundaries as you go, but it has to come from you. Memoir is a beautifully elastic form and there are many different ways to write from life - read widely, and that will help you work out how you want to explore your own material. Be fair and tell the truth and watch out for the impulse to self-mythologise.
Looking back, what was really hard?
So much! Probably the biggest challenge was getting the structure right. I struggle with planning, and I am also not very well situated in linear time so, even though I had my journals at my elbow, I found it really hard to make sense of the order in which things happened. Luckily I could enlist the help of my partner and a very brilliant old friend, who are both much better at understanding whether 2014 or 2016 came first than I am!
What did you have to learn?
Patience. It’s not my strong suit. I had to learn to trust the process. That, for me, writing is full of rupture and frustration as well as joy and flow and excitement. And if I go to the page each day just looking for flow (like a flow junkie - an addict through and through) then I’ll be terribly disappointed. So I had to learn to make room for the grunt work and the self-doubt and the days when nothing comes at all. Which is familiar territory from my previous life as an academic and from every single thing I’ve ever worked on, but still I seem to need to learn it afresh each time.
And lastly…
What have you been reading?
And what have you been watching?
True Detective Season 4
RRR
Anatomy of a Fall
Face/Off (it never gets old)
Thank you, Octavia, both for this interview and for your wonderful book!
This is an incredible interview, thank you for sharing!
Love this