The Paris Review (Staff Picks) ' Yrsa Daley-Ward makes the emotional brutality of dealing with family, adolescence, addiction, and sexuality accessible to her readers. She continually incorporates gut-wrenching imagery in her work, and in both bone and The Terrible, she packages heightened emotion into just one or two lines.' Yrsa Daley-Ward discusses her lyrical memoir, 'The Terrible', at Politics and Prose on 6/12/18. In her second book, Daley-Ward combines the haunting lyricism. Yrsa Daley-Ward's poems are works of emotional honesty, often searing when not comforting. For her growing legion of fans, Daley-Ward's words serve as testaments to a rich and complex life that. Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer and poet of mixed West Indian and West African heritage. Born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Yrsa was raised by her devout Seventh Day Adventist grandparents in the small town of Chorley in the North of England. She splits her time between London and New York. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for The Terrible: A Storyteller's Memoir, Daley-Ward, Yrsa at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!
Tags
Katy Wang, Penguin, The Terrible, Yrsa Daley-Ward
The Terrible
By Yrsa Daley-Ward
Penguin, 2018
The Terrible Yrsa Daley-ward
ISBN: 9781846149825
We begin with Yrsa Daley-Ward’s childhood in Chorley, a small Lancashire town that used to hold a chess congress each August. There she lives with her mother, a nurse, and a younger brother called Roo; an older brother, Samson, away in the army, returns intermittently. For a period she moves to her grandparents’ home – they are strict Christians – before returning to live with her mother and brother, where a succession of step-fathers come and go. It is a life in flux.
What is constant in Yrsa’s life, you glean, here and later, is an undertow of anxiety which flares up at certain moments. There is a suggestion of dysfunction, perhaps an eating disorder or depression. Intensity goes up several notches come puberty: an awakening of desire and fear and empowerment, an awareness of her beauty as a girl, and a black girl at that, race as indelible to identity as gender (and the two somehow conjoined, sharing a heart).
After school Yrsa goes on the road as a singer, with an older boyfriend her manager. Then an office job in Manchester, partying at nights. Moving to London, getting by as a party girl, sometime dominatrix. Writing, getting published. In all of this, you glean, there are moments of breakdown yet resilience too. She keeps coming through.
The Terrible Yrsa Daley Ward Review
The Terrible is an episodic, fragmentary memoir marked by scrupulous honesty and cool compassion and vivid portraits of the people in her life, whether family and friends or just people, like Angela, a fellow night club worker. Daley-Ward wields her scalpel and cuts clean, which is not say that there is an absence of blood. In every successful operation, expect blood.
The Terrible Yrsa Daley Ward
The publisher’s description of this terrible but terrific book is here.
The Terrible By Yrsa Daley-ward
There is also a rather fine (albeit too brief) animated book trailer of The Terrible by Katy Wang which can be viewed here.