All of Us Atoms by Holly Dawson review – what happens when a writer loses her memory?

Holly Dawson was suffering from seizures and having occupation retaining accusation and remembering faces. Brain scans revealed a damaged hippocampus and a tumour, astir apt benign. To amended her memory, doctors asked her to look astatine strings of numbers, and past reel them disconnected backwards – an workout she likens to “Cognitive Crufts”. She ruminates connected the narration betwixt language, representation and time: “three gifts, co-dependent, that make and prolong each other”. Her archetypal book, All of Us Atoms, is simply a memoir successful snapshots, sketching a unsmooth representation of her beingness done a bid of scattered recollections and reflections.

Dawson’s communicative begins successful an unnamed concern town, wherever the closure of the section steelworks had produced a surplus of “angry bored men, making mothers retired of their wives”; her household decamped to a Cornish sportfishing village, wherever she spent the champion portion of her childhood. As a youngster she was “serious and odd” – morbid, obsessed with the past, a small solipsistic. Hers was among the past generations of pupils to entree backstage schooling via the Assisted Places Scheme, soon earlier it was discontinued by the Thatcher government. She aboriginal moved to agrarian East Sussex, wherever she is presently “reader-in-residence” astatine Charleston.

In a beingness marked by alteration and uncertainty, the household portion was the 1 constant. Dawson writes with tenderness astir her younger brother, and credits her grandma with teaching her to “hold existent beingness lightly and imaginative beingness tight”. At the property of 16, she had been connected the verge of joining a prestigious ballet school, but turned it down astatine the past infinitesimal due to the fact that it would mean being distant from her family. Although the admissions process had been agelong and arduous, she couldn’t spell done with it. She has nary regrets. She saw herself, her parent and her member arsenic 3 parts of a azygous entity: “Put them together, and their triangle keeps them safe.”

This each feels precise intimate, and astatine times the scholar has the uncomfortable consciousness of snooping connected idiosyncratic correspondence. The sentimentalism occasionally cloys; an extended metaphor astir however children are a spot similar satsumas is laboured to the constituent of embarrassment. In 1 three-page chapter, Dawson lists the astir beauteous sounds she has ever heard successful a bid of unpunctuated, single-line paragraphs, written wholly successful little case. (“a nipponese plot the breeze done the cherry trees the trickle of beverage into porcelain cups”.)

The communicative dependable changes from 1 section to the next. Early connected successful the book, Dawson’s encephalon addresses her successful the 2nd person, reproaching her for running it into the crushed done deficiency of self-care; later, she’s a third-person character, denoted by notation to her relation – “The Sister”, “The Dancer”, “The Mother”, and truthful on. She adopts a slightly stunted vocabulary for puerility recollections: her assemblage turns “erupty skinny red” and she “gets all sick blistery dizzy volcanoey” during bouts of illness; she writes of her “you-ness”, “is-ness” and “we-hood”, presumably due to the fact that her younger aforesaid doesn’t cognize the grownup words for these concepts.

This reticence astir utilizing “I” successful an autobiographical enactment is intriguing. The blend of second- and third-person voices imbues the narration with an evasive, deflective prime – it’s the literate equivalent of avoiding oculus contact. Dawson mentions successful passing that she tended to presumption the satellite successful gendered presumption (“Men/Bad, Women/Good”), but doesn’t consciousness the request to unpack this. Although her seemingly formative obsession with Virginia Woolf is referenced astatine respective points, we are not told what it was astir Woolf’s enactment that resonated with her. It’s conscionable not that benignant of memoir; the author is much funny successful aestheticising the process of callback itself than imparting information.

All of Us Atoms is champion understood arsenic a benignant of emotion letter. The cardinal taxable is quality interdependence – the idea, hinted astatine successful the book’s title, that our consciousness of aforesaid is mostly shaped by the roles we execute successful our relationships with others. Axiomatic, perhaps, and borderline platitudinous, but it bears repeating. Caring is the lone genuinely important happening we bash successful each signifier of our little clip connected Earth – “This changeless procession of becoming and unbecoming. From each to each a legacy.”