Gulp, Swallow

Memoiric essays on who we were and how we have changed What happens when who you are is different to who you imagined you'd be? When her son was three, Brooke Boland was diagnosed with depression. She went back to find where it all started – the panic attacks, the dissociation – in the early days of motherhood. When she found it difficult to read or write. In this wide-ranging collection of essays Boland moves on from the person she was and writes to understand who she is now. She swims with sharks, falls in love with a rabbit, and watches her father fight for his life. She is a newcomer in a small regional town and a mother, but what else? She writes about family and friends, life and mortality, memory and forgetting, and along the way she finds her voice again. This book is for anyone who has felt unmoored. It is about the unremarkable in-between, the way we try to build a home from nothing, the dirty dishes and the loads of washing. The uncertainty and the love. But written in sparkling prose with a sly and wry tone that is illuminating about the everyday as it pitches for a rich and fulfilled life.