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

A series of scattered recollections form the basis for this intimate, abstract memoir that riffs on human interdependenceHolly Dawson was suffering from seizures and having trouble retaining information and remembering faces. Brain scans revealed a damaged hippocampus and a tumour, probably benign. To improve her memory, doctors asked her to look at strings of numbers, and then reel them off backwards – an exercise she likens to “Cognitive Crufts”. She ruminates on the relationship between language, memory and time: “three gifts, co-dependent, that create and sustain each other”. Her first book, All of Us Atoms, is a memoir in snapshots, sketching a rough portrait of her life through a series of scattered recollections and reflections.Dawson’s story begins in an unnamed industrial town, where the closure of the local steelworks had produced a surplus of “angry bored men, making mothers out of their wives”; her family decamped to a Cornish fishing village, where she spent the best part of her childhood. As a youngster she was “serious and odd” – morbid, obsessed with the past, a little solipsistic. Hers was among the last generations of pupils to access private schooling via the Assisted Places Scheme, shortly before it was discontinued by the Thatcher government. She later moved to rural East Sussex, where she is currently “reader-in-residence” at Charleston. Continue reading...

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