In one of the most talked-about televisual moments of the year, Kristin Scott Thomas, playing a successful businesswoman, tells Phoebe Waller-Bridge aka Fleabag: “Women are born with pain built in. It’s our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives.”
This is the territory Constellations, Sinéad Gleeson’s first essay collection, inhabits. As a woman diagnosed with monoarticular arthritis and then leukaemia, Gleeson has endured more physical pain than most. That she has done so predominantly in Ireland, where the female body is still fiercely contested, is what makes her book shine so brightly.
Gleeson’s writing sparkles from the get-go; she also has a gift for making her own, highly specific experience universal. In Blue Hills and Chalk Bones, she describes how the synovial fluid in her left hip began to “evaporate like rain” and “the bones ground together, literally turning to dust.” This physical erosion, at the age of 13, left her limping and self-conscious.
“I read that shrews and weasels can shrink their own bones to survive,” she writes – a stunning line that will resonate with any woman who ever wished herself invisible.
Though Constellations is, effectively, a memoir, Gleeson looks outwards towards the world; insatiably curious, she scrutinises the body anatomically, politically, philosophically and as it relates to art and literature.
In Hair (again, that Fleabag vibe) she moves from her fraught relationship with her own “mousy” locks to the way hair is used to define women racially, sexually and religiously. Her cultural allusions are eclectic – from PJ Harvey to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Franko B – but they are always interesting, always relevant. It never feels as if she’s showing off.
