Pathemata: Or, The Story of My Mouth

'Full of warmth, wisdom and weirdness' JENNY MUSTARD

This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer.

Pathemata recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss – the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.

Praise for Maggie Nelson

‘I remember where I was when I read each of Maggie Nelson’s books in the same way I remember a place where I heard important news’ ANNE ENRIGHT

‘Always brilliant’ GEOFF DYER

‘Among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation’ OLIVIA LAING