Kathryn Crowcroft on her debut book Tongue
Kathryn Crowcroft reflects on her debut book Tongue (October 2026), a hybrid work of lyrical non-fiction that explores how the organ has been cast as both sacred and sinful across centuries.
In 2016 I completed a doctoral thesis on a medieval tradition of writing called ‘The Sins of the Tongue’ (peccatum linguae). I focussed on a key idea in these texts: lying (mendacium) can cause psychological and physical ill health for both speaker and listener. This was the time of Brexit and the first Trump presidency. The idea resonated. I explored how the concept persisted from ancient sources well into the twenty-first century and exerted an untold influence on early medicine, theology, literature and many other aspects of culture. This was well beyond the remit of my thesis, so I began writing down instances of the relationship between lying and illness, broadly conceived, in another notebook. This second document came with me to the library each day. The work also prompted a sobering reflection on the omissions and dishonesties in my family, and the various kinds of disillusionment that might have stemmed from them. The seeds of this book began there – a shadow document representing the final year of my doctorate, when the boundaries between the professional and personal elements of my research seemed to dissolve.
The main way my mother and I communicated during that year was by text message, as we tried to reconcile our differing interpretations of the past and piece together a more graceful future. The relationship between the researcher and mother in the book thus acts as a filament among the historical material, illuminating and threading together different aspects of the tongue.
Ten years later, Tongue is an archive of an ambivalent organ, and a personal archive of my ambivalence in the face of difficult ethical questions: how do we respect another’s choices, when those choices impact us negatively? How do we discuss and heal from physical violence without reprising it? How do we accept the choices of women when they refuse to be ‘perfect victims’, recognising that their choices were, in truth, limited? The book does not answer these questions so much as bring them to the fore, accepting that multiple realities may be allowed to co-exist.
The sources in the book are by no means exhaustive and many more books about the tongue could be written from other sociocultural and personal standpoints. For me, its form evolved naturally as a nodal essay with each cell connected, piecing together the long-lost flesh of the unspoken words between a mother and daughter. In this way, I hoped that the book could demonstrate the material nature of language – the physical realities that speech and silence can create – while remaining attentive to its slipperiness and suppleness. In so doing, I wanted the book to embody the tongue itself.
Kathryn Crowcroft
9 July 2026
