Sinead Gleeson’s uneven collection of reflective essays is also in need of structure. It’s a mishmash of genres: memoir, meditations, poetry, cultural critique, biography and medical material. Some of her personal stories of pain, illness and death are unforgettable.

...a collection of hard-won, highly-wrought, fiercely dazzling essays about life in one woman’s body.

Most striking, perhaps, given the amount of suffering [Gleeson] has endured, is this absence of self-pity. Pain is a reason to look outwards, to find expressions of her experience in the work of artists who have given a voice to physical trauma.

Alongside the essays on blood and ghosts there are pieces on hair, love, loss, motherhood, abortion and hospitals. Collectively, they give us a sketch of Gleeson’s life, while never claiming the definitiveness of an autobiography. What’s offered is something elliptical and fragmentary.

[Gleeson's] relationship with her body is both intimate and mundane, and she writes about pain with an absorbing intensity, telling stories of condescending doctors, creating metaphors that push the sanitized pain scale to its limits and, most passionately, describing artists who have rendered their pain into something more.

This stirring collection of personal essays from Irish radio broadcaster Gleeson effortlessly renders pain, both physical and emotional, into prose.