Intervals

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024What makes a good death? A good daughter? In 2009, with her forties & a wave of austerity on the horizon, Marianne Brooker's mother was diagnosed with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. She made a workshop of herself & her surroundings, combining creativity & activism in unlikely ways, but over time her ability to work, to move & to live without pain diminished drastically. In Intervals, Brooker charts her care for her mother, following her decision to refuse food & water in a bid to end her suffering. She turns to various sources - from Anne Boyer & Donald Winnicott, to Practical Magic & Coraline - to make sense of this experience & to explore the precarious space between proximity & complicity. Blending memoir, polemic & feminist philosophy, Intervals is a deeply moving work that harnesses the political potential of grief to raise essential questions about choice, interdependence, & end-of-life care.°°°‘In this compelling and beautifully written book Marianne Brooker anatomizes the rights of the dying & the failures of the state to support rather than penalize those living with disability. Intervals is simultaneously a memoir of individual experience & a powerful reflection on the nature of home, care, death & love that deserves to be read & heard by the widest possible audience.’ — Daisy Hay, author of Dinner with Joseph Johnson °°° Marianne Brooker is based in Bristol, where she works for a charity campaigning on climate & social justice. She has a PhD from Birkbeck & a background in arts research & teaching. She won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for Intervals, her first book. What makes a good death? A good daughter? In 2009, with her forties and a harsh wave of austerity on the horizon, Marianne Brooker's mother was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. She made a workshop of herself and her surroundings, combining creativity and activism in inventive ways. But over time, her ability to work, to move and to live without pain diminished drastically. Determined to die in her own home, on her own terms, she stopped eating and drinking in 2019. In Intervals, Brooker reckons with heartbreak, weaving her first and final memories with a study of doulas, living wills and the precarious economics of social, hospice and funeral care. Blending memoir, polemic and feminist philosophy, Brooker joins writers such as Anne Boyer, Maggie Nelson, Donald Winnicott and Lola Olufemi to raise essential questions about choice and interdependence and, ultimately, to imagine care otherwise.