In this episode, we speak to writer Marianne Brooker about her book Intervals. We discuss the politics of care and the precarious economics of social, hospice and funeral care. We talk about the importance of interdependence, and how networks of care link to activism and writing. We think about the right to abundance and life, while considering what it means to die a good death. We chat about intersections of class, gender and disability, and beauty and maximalism as an act of resistance. We imagine writing as reparative magic and consider what it means to write into and with grief, as opposed to pushing against it. We speak about what it means to draw kinship with other writers and thinkers such as Denise Riley, Anne Boyer, Maggie Nelson and Lola Olufemi, among others.
Marianne Brooker is a writer based in Bristol, where she works for a charity campaigning on climate and social justice. She has a PhD from Birkbeck and a background in arts research and teaching. She won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for Intervals, her first book, which was also longlisted for the inaugral Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024.
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References
Time Lived, Without its Flow by Denise Riley
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe