'In late 2015, Georgia Blain was diagnosed with a tumour sitting right in the language centre of her brain. Prior to this, Georgia’s only warning had been a niggling sense that her speech was slightly awry. She ignored it, and on a bright spring day, as she was mowing the lawn, she collapsed on a bed of blossoms, blood frothing at her mouth.
'Waking up to find herself in the back of an ambulance being rushed to hospital, she tries to answer questions, but is unable to speak. After the shock of a bleak prognosis and a long, gruelling treatment schedule, she immediately turns to writing to rebuild her language and herself.
'At the same time, her mother, Anne Deveson, moves into a nursing home with Alzheimer's; weeks earlier, her best friend and mentor had been diagnosed with the same brain tumour. All three of them are writers, with language at the core of their being.
'The Museum of Words is a meditation on writing, reading, first words and last words, picking up thread after thread as it builds on each story to become a much larger narrative. This idiosyncratic and deeply personal memoir is a writer’s take on how language shapes us, and how often we take it for granted — until we are in danger of losing it.' (Publication Summary)
Dedication: For my mother, Anne, my dear friend Rosie, and the loves of my life, Andrew and Odessa
'Personal archives are useful writing fodder, but grief memoirs that incorporate objects (“material grief memoirs”) also act as grief archives. In this essay, I posit that material grief memoirs are imaginative archives, which bring artifacts of loss into conversation. I acknowledge arguments against theoretical archives but ultimately assert the material grief memoir form’s generative potential. I examine three grief memoirs: The Museum of Words (2017) by Georgia Blain, Words for Lucy (2022) by Marion Halligan, and Small (2021) by Claire Lynch, to argue that reading grief memoir as grief archive facilitates deeper discussions on convergences of identity, loss, and materiality.' (Publication abstract)
'Georgia Blain began to write The Museum of Words shortly after undergoing surgery for removal of an aggressive, malignant tumour from the language centre in her brain. The tumour was incurable. Blain knew that, at best, she ‘wouldn’t last more than a couple of years’. She died thirteen months later, in December 2016. The Museum of Words, as its subtitle – ‘a memoir of language, writing, and mortality’ – signals, is less about dying than it is about the beauty, complexity and necessity of language. ‘Language’, Blain insists, ‘is at the core of our being. The way in which we express ourselves is inextricably linked to who we are and how others see us.’ Blain expresses herself with a decided absence of sentimentality or self-pity. Her valedictory memoir is a celebration of the lives of four women, their relationships with each other and with language and writing. It is also a love letter to three of those women, to her life partner Andrew Taylor and to her own writing life.' (Introduction)
'Georgia Blain’s fiction has always observed the effects of disruption on the domestic lives of her urban middle-class characters. Her novels and short stories often have drawn on her experiences. But, as a writer of cool restraint, she was aware that tragedy and coincidence were piling up in her life with a clumsy lack of credibility.
Towards the end of The Museum of Words, she summarises the “plot line” of her memoir as if it were a novel being assessed by her editor:
The central character has just put her mother in a home with Alzheimer’s, her mentor and best friend has terminal brain cancer, she has written a book about terminal brain cancer, and now she has it too … Maybe a little too much?' (Introduction)
'Georgia Blain’s fiction has always observed the effects of disruption on the domestic lives of her urban middle-class characters. Her novels and short stories often have drawn on her experiences. But, as a writer of cool restraint, she was aware that tragedy and coincidence were piling up in her life with a clumsy lack of credibility.
Towards the end of The Museum of Words, she summarises the “plot line” of her memoir as if it were a novel being assessed by her editor:
The central character has just put her mother in a home with Alzheimer’s, her mentor and best friend has terminal brain cancer, she has written a book about terminal brain cancer, and now she has it too … Maybe a little too much?' (Introduction)
'Georgia Blain began to write The Museum of Words shortly after undergoing surgery for removal of an aggressive, malignant tumour from the language centre in her brain. The tumour was incurable. Blain knew that, at best, she ‘wouldn’t last more than a couple of years’. She died thirteen months later, in December 2016. The Museum of Words, as its subtitle – ‘a memoir of language, writing, and mortality’ – signals, is less about dying than it is about the beauty, complexity and necessity of language. ‘Language’, Blain insists, ‘is at the core of our being. The way in which we express ourselves is inextricably linked to who we are and how others see us.’ Blain expresses herself with a decided absence of sentimentality or self-pity. Her valedictory memoir is a celebration of the lives of four women, their relationships with each other and with language and writing. It is also a love letter to three of those women, to her life partner Andrew Taylor and to her own writing life.' (Introduction)
'Personal archives are useful writing fodder, but grief memoirs that incorporate objects (“material grief memoirs”) also act as grief archives. In this essay, I posit that material grief memoirs are imaginative archives, which bring artifacts of loss into conversation. I acknowledge arguments against theoretical archives but ultimately assert the material grief memoir form’s generative potential. I examine three grief memoirs: The Museum of Words (2017) by Georgia Blain, Words for Lucy (2022) by Marion Halligan, and Small (2021) by Claire Lynch, to argue that reading grief memoir as grief archive facilitates deeper discussions on convergences of identity, loss, and materiality.' (Publication abstract)
