Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

In this profound work about illness and family dysfunction, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s experiments with form – overlapping voices, footnotes, fragments, found text and photographs – illustrate the struggle for autonomy and sense of self, and the repressed grief of chronic ill health. Her writing makes visible the often hidden experience of disability, so that the reader becomes both a witness and an actor, piecing together a narrative that challenges and reimagines what a work of autobiography can be.

From the author of Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life comes a collection of prose poems that invites the reader to consider the relationships between internalised beliefs and the development of illness.

In Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, an unnamed young woman in her late twenties navigates unemployment, boredom, chronic illness and online dating. Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s novella-in-fragments is alive to the incongruous performance that constitutes getting by.