All of Us Atoms

You tell me we are made of seven billion billion billion atoms. I can feel every one of them as I write this all down. It’s a rush to feel that, like falling in love. Remembering is like falling in love with you, with us, again and again.

What makes us who we are? What stories do we inherit – and leave behind? Faced with the prospect of losing her memory, a writer revisits the moments that changed her – from childhood to motherhood, loss and ill-health. Through shifting pronouns and perspectives, moving across place and time, each piece twists the kaleidoscope of existence to make sense of the present through the past. From the opening battle between her brain and her body, a conversation emerges between her collection of selves: the Daughter, the Sister, the Dancer, the Gardener, the Mother, the Girl-Who-Read-Woolf. Reliving her journey of becoming, she unpicks the fabric of fact and experience to stitch a new tapestry of personhood, both real and imaginary, mundane and profound.

All of Us Atoms offers a tender portrait of the tension between our drive to make sense of things and the freedom that comes from throwing categories away. It heralds the arrival of a major new literary voice, urging us to reframe and reclaim our own stories and revel in our mutable, messy, multitudinous selves.