All of Us Atoms « neverimitate

This review was written for and first published by Bookmunch.

“You need to remember […] Time is a dance, not a march. That there are no lines, with beginning and end points, just circles upon circles, within loops, twists, swirls.
This is the Memory: a distillation of those circles.”

All of Us Atoms is a memoir written in original and always engaging format. The prose is both lyrical and staccato. Revelations are piercingly honest yet sometimes partly made up – as is always explained. Memories are stories, often retold by others. Aspects of the author’s life may be condensed within these pages but they offer a window into the influences that shaped her, some nebulous and others wondrously profound.

An early chapter is narrated by the author’s brain, a device that explains why she is writing this book. Having ignored worrying health symptoms for as long as she was able, the author has been diagnosed with issues that will cause her to gradually lose her memory and could cause early death. She is not yet forty and has two young children. She wants to ensure they come to know what she is and was.

The timeline moves back and forth through her life, each chapter focusing on an experience that would prove key to her subsequent development. She offers glimpses of her family, including those who came before.

From the tenements of Glasgow her parents moved to a steel town for a better life. Then the plant was closed down. The men react roughly. Her mother escapes with her two children to Cornwall. Here the author is raised, poor but much loved. She has her mother, an aunt and a grandmother who adore her – so much positivity in her memories of women, unlike most men in her family other than her brother.

The author proved academically bright, was a gifted dancer, a talented musician. Despite all this she struggles with bulimia and depression. She self-harmed as a coping mechanism. This is touched on lightly, as are many negative aspects of her life. The book focuses on how the family got through challenges, especially poverty.

A chapter detailing accepted behaviour around the age of eleven was upsetting to read, involving as it did casual cruelty and abuse involving animals and sea creatures. Later in life the author writes of finding solace in nature, of the wonder she finds in it with her children. The change in attitudes across a generation is notable.

The writing includes a powerful evocation of teenage angst despite the author finding good friends. She then leaves Cornwall for university in London, lives abroad in various countries before returning to England.

Believing she never wanted children, when she has them it is a revelation that they make her more not less.

“I’m never having children. She’s always said that. A child breaks you open, shattering the pieces that make you you. Motherhood, she thought, would raid the cabinet of her is-ness. Better keep it locked, keep her artefacts safe and secret, unshared.

This is what you taught me, my firstborn: that my pieces are your pieces, just as your pieces are mine. That love is tumbling everything out that cabinet and revelling in them, rolling in them, tossing them hand to hand.”

The focus of any memoir will be the subject yet the picture painted here of the author’s personality remains somewhat hazy. What we have are stories woven from snippets, mentions of people and events only some of which are expanded.

There are, at times, what appear to be contradictions, until the reader remembers an individual can be many things all at once, complex and intertwined.

And so it works. The picture is created from layers, sometimes covering what was painted before but still adding texture to the whole. The writing is a thing of beauty and of hope, despite and perhaps partly because of the knowledge of approaching death.

Any Cop?: An elegy to a hard yet valued life. A beautiful gift to those the author loves and has loved.

Jackie Law