All of Us Atoms
Holly Dawson
Available as Hardback, eBook, Downloadable audio
An urgent and profound excavation of the self, Holly Dawson’s All of Us Atoms is a stunning memoir of the moments of becoming that form a life, heralding the arrival of a major new literary voice
You tell me we are made of seven billion billion billion atoms. I can feel every one of them as I write this all down. It’s a rush to feel that, like falling in love. Remembering is like falling in love with you, with us, again and again.
What makes us who we are? What stories do we inherit – and leave behind?
Faced with the prospect of losing her memory, a writer revisits the moments that changed her – from childhood to motherhood, loss and ill-health. Through shifting pronouns and perspectives, moving across place and time, each piece twists the kaleidoscope of existence to make sense of the present through the past. From the opening battle between her brain and her body, a conversation emerges between her collection of selves: the Daughter, the Sister, the Dancer, the Gardener, the Mother, the Girl-Who-Read-Woolf. Reliving her journey of becoming, she unpicks the fabric of fact and experience to stitch a new tapestry of personhood, both real and imaginary, mundane and profound.
All of Us Atoms offers a tender portrait of the tension between our drive to make sense of things and the freedom that comes from throwing categories away. It heralds the arrival of a major new literary voice, urging us to reframe and reclaim our own stories and revel in our mutable, messy, multitudinous selves.
“[A] playful , tender, form-busting memoir … All of Us Atoms contains multitudes; it’s a celebration of the ties that bind us to one another, of the strength of women , and of the power of words to connect us and carry us forwards”
observer
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“A fragmented, elegantly constructed memoir that grapples with memory and selfhood. [ … ] The playful, impressionistic approach gives the effect of memory freshly caught, shimmering on the page. It is life writing at its best”
times Literary Supplement
“Raw, brave and compelling – the sentences fizz with brilliance and beauty. To read Holly’s writing is to live it. She’s a genius, an alchemist, an artist-warrior”
Helena Bonham Carter
“Holly Dawson’s All of Us Atoms is an extraordinary memoir, a blazing, incandescent love song to memory, to her children and, in all its sublime and intoxicating and tragic raiments, to life itself. This debut shook me to the core”
Lily King
“[An] intimate, abstract memoir that riffs on human interdependence”
guardian
Holly Dawson
Holly Dawson is a writer, editor and teacher. Since 2018, she has been Reader-in-Residence at Charleston, where she gets to indulge her passion for Modernist literature and Virginia Woolf. Her plays, drawing on Bloomsbury diaries and letters, have been performed by actors including Helena Bonham Carter, Miranda Richardson and Jonathan Pryce. Having grown up in Cornwall, she now lives in rural Sussex with far too many hens.
@hollyjdawson | hollyjdawson.com
