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The #1 Irish bestseller and winner of Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2019 An Post Irish Book Awards, winner of the 2020 Dalkey Literary Awards, named Best Book of the Year by the Guardian, Observer, Image, Irish Times, New Statesman, and Irish Independent, Sinéad Gleeson’s essays chronicle—in crystalline, tender, powerful prose—life in a body as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood, and love of all kinds.
"I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles."
We treat the body as an afterthought, until it no longer can be. Until the pain or the pleasure is too great. Sinéad Gleeson’s life has been marked by terrible illness, including leukemia and debilitating arthritis. As a child, she bathed in the springs of Lourdes, ever hopeful that her body would cooperate, ever looking forward to the day when she could take her body for granted. But just as she turns inward to explore her own pain, and then the marvel of recovery, and then the arrival of her greatest joys—falling in love, becoming a mother—she turns her gaze outward. She delves into history, art, literature, and music, plotting the intimate experience of life in a women’s body across a wide-ranging map. From Nick Cave to Taylor Swift, Botticelli to Frida Kahlo, Louisa May Alcott to Lucy Grealy, Constellations is an investigation into the different ways of seeing, both uniquely personal and universal in its resonances.
In the tradition of some of our finest life writers, Gleeson explores—in her own spirited, generous voice—the fierceness of being alive. She has written “a book [that] every woman should read” (Eimear McBride).
ASIN : B07T4L8TPD
Publisher : Ecco (March 24, 2020)
Publication date : March 24, 2020
Language : English
File size : 2837 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 218 pages
Reviewer: Elizabeth B.
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Remarkable book
Review: Sinéad Gleason's CONSTELLATIONS is a beautiful book about women's bodies, motherhood, pain, coping with illness. She also gives the reader wonderful insights about Louisa May Alcott, Frieda Kahlo, and other artists. Gleason frames the book around the stars--constellations--thus, riffing on a quote from Maggie Nelson: "Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren't we talking more about that?"
Reviewer: Kate Vane
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Vivid and vital
Review: Sinéad Gleesonâs memoir Constellations explores the relationship between our bodies and our identity. In a series of linked essays, she writes powerfully about her own experiences and what they tell us about the embodied lives of all women, particularly Irish women.Gleeson has been doubly unlucky. As an adolescent she had a form of arthritis which meant painful surgery and using crutches (and sometimes a wheelchair) just at the age when people are most self-conscious about their body, and most eager to join in with friends. Later, just months after marrying, she was diagnosed with leukaemia.I found the essays about illness to be particularly moving. The writing is lyrical and visceral and without self-pity. She captures the loss of autonomy, the battles with professionals to be heard, the detachment from the everyday world, the strange acoustics and enforced intimacies of hospital life.She considers the relationship between women and fertility, linking her own hopes and fears about being able to have children, with the way women are defined by their role as mothers. She broadens this to consider the struggle for Irish women to have legal access to abortion, and the injustices of the past when women were institutionalised for becoming pregnant outside marriage.She explores the other ways women have been confined, contrasting her own experiences of freedom to travel and to be educated with the poverty and limited horizons of her grandmotherâs generation. She argues that the visions for which her grandmother was famous might have been a reaction to this confinement, a way to envisage a bigger, stranger universe.What Constellations brought home to me is how serious illness sets someone apart. It is more than the absence of health, experiences missed, it is a whole other state of being, of loneliness and pain and otherness. Worse, it is a state that many medical professionals (especially if the doctor is a man, and the patient is a woman) still dismiss.Constellations gives a vivid and vital insight into living with illness and how the bodies we inhabit make us who we are.*I received a copy of Constellations from the publisher via Netgalley.
Reviewer: K.Russell
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Astounding, resonant, moving. Vital read.
Review: I never write reviews but this time I feel a driving urge to. Everyone should read this but more so, every woman.Real, heart felt, resonant and insightful and also beautifully written. A humble and beautiful soul, speaks truth and captures an important era for Irish society and women in particular.Inspiring and eloquent, thank you Sinead Gleeson.
Reviewer: Long
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Boring
Review: I just canât get into this book, itâs so dull and boring. I tried so hard to empathize with the writer to just go through her struggles, but I only made it to page 38 in 4 days because Iâd fall asleep on it every single night.I might come back to it once Iâm in a different mood, but right now I just wanna read something exciting or full of adventure.This book didnât not captivate me at all unfortunately.
Reviewer: Red Dot Ãna
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Glorious Read
Review: Just buy this book. Itâs wonderful.
Reviewer: David Keymer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A REMARKABLE --REVELATORY EVEN-- COLLECTION OF ESSAYS
Review: âThe body is an afterthought.â Thatâs the first sentence in the first essay in this remarkable, revelatory even, book. The essay is entitled âBlue Hills and Chalk Bonesâ and itâs about living in a refractory body, whose parts seem always to go wrong. Itâs about living in near constant pain. (When she was young, she missed the first three months of school four years in a row. One year, all 365 days, she was on crutches. By the time she was a teen, she was ashamed of all the scars her body had amassed.) In the second essay, âHair,â we learn that she had a particularly aggressive form of leukemia when a young adult, and after that, went through transgressive body invasions during her two pregnancies. Thatâs one of themes of this remarkable book: how the health of our body conditions our emotional and mental wellbeing. The other theme is what it means to be a woman in a world made more for men than women and much worse growing up in Ireland before the turn of the century, where it was still virtually impossible to get an abortion and women were treated in all respects as second class citizens and beings.Gleason doesnât obsess about her illnesses. She uses them to tell us things. This isnât a self-pity book or even a self-help one. Rather, itâs an unflinching, not really sentimental at all look at oneâs own self and psyche, to see how itâs affected by oneâs sex and the state of oneâs body. Think a poetâs version of Susan Sontag writing on illness, but this time, from inside looking out, not outside looking in. Along the way, Gleason gleans lessons and inspiration from other authors âLucy Grealy of Autobiography of a Face, poets, artists, writers. The result is a book rich in personal insight and a treasure trove of references outside Gleesonâs own story. I thumbed down the pages of the essays I most admired. When I was done, I found I âd thumbed down easily three-quarters of them. Sure, a few pieces didnât appeal to me, either because they didnât seem to fit well or because I thought they lacked the clinical poetry I found in the best of her pieces, where her passion was filtered through the prism of observation, then filtered again through reflection.Thereâs no reason not to buy this fine book. Itâs a paperback, thus doesnât cost much. Itâs a collection of essays so you can read one, then take a break and go back to it when you feel like reading more with no loss of continuity. The truth be told, you will appreciate it more if you take time between essays because what she writes deserves reflecting.
Reviewer: E.Scott
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Constellations, by Sinead Gleeson. 5/5. âThe lines between body and womb have become blurred, a vessel inside a vessel. The physical body - the visible collection of bones and skin we present to the world - does not fully belong to its owner if the womb within it contains an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy. There are all kinds of people ready to queue up and remind a woman of that.â This book is obscenely beautiful. Gleeson explores the fragility of our bodies, and how illness and injury can change a personâs life course in a matter of seconds. She explores her own journey and diagnosis, and reflects on other unwell women and their life trajectories. It is a book that is brimming full of grief, longing, confusion and ultimately, hope. Split between memoir and a collection of essays, it explores our reactions to loss and frailty, whilst also highlighting the human need for adventure and achievement. I particularly liked the part about the female pilots who challenged societal expectations of women, and Gleesonâs gorgeous pros when describing the complexity of human emotions, such as grief.
Reviewer: FINSEY
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Interesting and well written
Reviewer: Perfect perch
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: A good read
Reviewer: Bea
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I loved the juxtaposition of poetry side by side with the mechanics of the body. I often love books but fail to recall specific fragments from them, but from this I do. I buy it for friends birthdays; I love it.
Reviewer: D. M. Hardcastle
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Wonderful. Has stayed with me. Fantastic writing, gives you so much. Donât want to say too much and spoil the joy of discovering it for yourself.