A Flat Place

"That’s right. She writes so extraordinarily, so amazingly about that relationship between the body and the mind, an embodied experience of living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder. And the experience of trying to be a body in place, when you feel really disconnected from that body. For her, she finds comfort in flat places, and the book is a kind of journey through different flat landscapes. I actually found it really hard to read, it was so intensely, powerfully relatable. I had to keep putting it down and picking it back up again. I know I’m not alone in having had that experience. There was almost too much recognition, in that experience of trying to come to terms with one’s own existence. I particularly appreciate how she writes about the problems of trying to make sense of your own past and how to talk about it when it seems inexplicable. She writes with so much nuance about the layering of memory and forgetting, about how landscape holds memory, or refuses it – how ‘landscapes are the sites of so much pain’, but flat landscapes are often seen as empty and that feeds into their exploitation. Most importantly to me, she refuses a narrative of ruin – to landscape or the body. She compares herself to a damaged landscape, but says even if she never ‘recovers’ from that damage, that’s all right – ‘something new has been made’. It’s also one of very few books I’ve read that deal well with the lockdowns of 2020, and the different kinds of entitlement revealed in people’s various responses to them. These are all just amazing books. But picking five was really hard. I pinned it down to memoir, so I didn’t get distracted thinking about poetry or fiction, but there is now—in a way I don’t think there was five years ago—an array of extraordinary books about different forms of chronic illness from different positions. Often they are published with small publishers, some are self-published, lots are not well distributed. So they can remain quite niche publications in some ways. But there’s extraordinary writing out there, and extraordinary writing that is created under great duress as well. So it would be great to see more of those books being more widely read. The Barbellion Prize list is obviously a great resource. The winner from last year, Letty McHugh’s Book of Hours , was absolutely extraordinary. There was another memoir on the shortlist last year which I really loved, Shahd Alshammari’s Head Above Water: Reflections on Illness , which is unusual in talking about chronic illness and disability in the Arab world—she didn’t find any representation of disabled women in Gulf literature before she started writing her own. But, yes, there are many breaking the mould in some way. I’ve just read Canadian writer and academic Karen Engle’s amazing memoir Chronic Conditions , and looking forward to the publication in October of Moving Mountains , edited by Louise Kenward, which is the first anthology of nature writing by disabled and chronically ill writers published in the UK. Definitely. I mean, I hope so. Part of what ties these books together is, unfortunately, the experience of being mistreated by the medical establishment in various ways, for various reasons. I hope that nobody could read any one of these books and think that’s okay, and that we should continue to do things the same way. I hope they slowly shift a paradigm, not just about how we treat individual people and individual symptoms, but in how we think about chronic conditions more broadly."

"Yes, another amazing book by a beautiful writer. Masud brings together her love of flat landscapes—she has written about flat landscapes and literature as an academic—with her experience of confinement by her father while growing up in Pakistan, and her diagnosis of complex PTSD. Flat landscapes become both a memory and a metaphor in this book. With complex PTSD, there is no one event that you can point to and say: that happened to me. It is rather a continuous environment that shapes who you are, an environment of fear. Flat landscapes are the same —there are no peaks. She assesses, in all sorts of cool and interesting ways, this metaphor and how it plays out. It’s also a meditation on post-colonialism, what it means to be a woman of colour living in a post-colonial world. It’s revelatory, and very much more than the sum of its parts. It doesn’t sound, in my description, as amazing as it is in practice, you’ve just got to try it. It’s quite extraordinary."