Books › Moments of being
Moments of being
unpublished autobiographical writings
359 pages
A luminous, intimate excavation of memory, grief, and the sensory fragments that forge an artist's soul.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like stepping into the private, sun-dappled, and sometimes deeply shadowed corridors of a brilliant mind. The pace is meandering and associative, mirroring the natural ebb and flow of human memory as it drifts between luminous childhood summers in St. Ives and the suffocating grief of a Victorian London household. The prose is breathtakingly fluid, capturing the exact sensory texture of a moment—the sound of waves, the pattern of a dress—before plunging into profound psychological depths. It is an intimate, elegiac, and remarkably candid experience. This book will deeply resonate with readers who cherish modernist introspection, the delicate unraveling of family secrets, and the profound realization of how our pasts continuously echo into our present.
- Mood
- luminous
- haunted
- intimate
- melancholic
- Tone
- introspective
- elegiac
- candid
- intellectual
- wistful
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- the architecture of memory · grief and profound loss · artistic awakening · Victorian family dynamics · hidden trauma
- The writing
- Luminous, fluid, and deeply impressionistic, the sentences capture the precise, shimmering weight of fleeting memories.
- The arc
- The journey shifts from the sunlit, sensory innocence of early childhood into the shadowed, complex realities of grief, family trauma, and intellectual liberation.
- Who it's for
- Devoured by lovers of modernist literature and introspective readers who appreciate the delicate, psychological excavation of a brilliant mind.
Content notes
- grief
- death of a parent
- childhood sexual abuse
- mental illness references
About the book
cf. Kirkpatrick, 4th ed., A45a.
"Sapphire-blue cloth boards; lettered in gold... White dust-jacket printed in pale brown and black, with portrait of the author by Duncan Grant." -- Kirkpatrick.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Victoria University Library copy has dust jacket.
Description from Open Library.
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