i read intervals

( I’m making a point to copy and paste instagram posts onto our website in case instagram ever goes boom; so here you go, a post from this week )

I bought Intervals by Marianne Brooker (( @anniebrooker_ )) almost this time last year at the radical bookfair in edinburgh, and I finally got round to reading it. I’m really glad I did. As the news follows along with the legalisation of assisted dying in the UK, i’ve had no real opinions, nothing solid. vague questions about the risks it could bring for vulnerable people — how a change in the law might usher disabled people off to their deaths like, come on, on your way. But this book. Man. Non-fic, Brooker writes about her mum’s decision a few years ago to stop eating and drinking in order to die. she had MS and a quality of life she didn’t want anymore. And so, around the story of what that really meant, in practice but also in the head and heart and gut, Brooker pulls from authors and academics and reports and all these hard and soft things, to make the thing So real. So that there’s one solid story here between everybody’s questions. So that we are there in the final days, pulled closer. so that we might think about what it means to die poor. so that we might think about our own death one day, and what it means to choose one thing in a life where many of us get so little say in what happens. I really had to stop at some points and gather myself. come back a few days later. try a bit more, put it back on the shelf. It was pure force.