Paper Cuts: A Memoir

by Stephen Bernard

Overview

With Paper Cuts, Stephen Bernard boldly tests the bounds of what a memoir can achieve. Living through the trauma of childhood abuse and mental illness, he writes to escape and confront, to accuse, and to explain. Each morning when he wakes, Stephen Bernard must literally reconstruct his self: every night he writes himself a letter to be read the next day. The fractured, intensely personal narrative of Paper Cuts follows a single day in his life as he navigates a course through the effects of mania, medication, and memories. The result is painful, unique, and inspiring.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784707040
Publisher:	Penguin Random House UK
Publication date:	12/01/2019
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Stephen Bernard is an English academic at the University of Oxford. He is the editor of The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons and The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe, and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement.

Editorial Reviews

"Jesus - what a book. Chilling, riveting, extraordinary, wonderful - I’m trying to think of the words to describe this book but none of them do it justice." - Roddy Doyle -

"A distinguished and desolating memoir. I have never read such a succinct and unsparing chronicle of the destruction of body and spirit that can be brought about by the violation of a child. It’s the equivalent of a letter from a gulag, except that the events take place in Sussex in the 1980s … The saving grace is the writer’s pleasure in scholarship, and his undaunted eye for the beauty of the world." - Hilary Mantel -

"I'd nominate Paper Cuts by Stephen Bernard [as a book of the year]. It's a literary memoir which is unforgettably fleet, stinging and painful." - Hermione Eyre - Evening Standard **Books of the Year**

"A beautifully written account - both brilliant and appalling - of the psychological consequences of sexual abuse of the author when he was a vulnerable boy by a priest... Rarely have I felt so angry." - Henry Marsh -

"It is an extraordinary book in its unblinking truthfulness, even more so in its refusal to deny the complexities and ambiguity that follow such childhood trauma. This vivisection is just what we need in the discussion and literature of mental illness and its sources." - Hannah Jane Parkinson - Observer

From the Publisher