Intervals

Marianne Brooker

Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024
Genre: Non-Fiction
Pages: 200 pages

What makes a good death? A good daughter? In 2009, with her forties and a harsh wave of austerity on the horizon, Marianne Brooker’s mother was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. She made a workshop of herself and her surroundings, combining creativity and activism in inventive ways. But over time, her ability to work, to move and to live without pain diminished drastically. Determined to die in her own home, on her own terms, she stopped eating and drinking in 2019. In Intervals, Brooker reckons with heartbreak, weaving her first and final memories with a study of doulas, living wills and the precarious economics of social, hospice and funeral care. Blending memoir, polemic and feminist philosophy, Brooker joins writers such as Anne Boyer, Maggie Nelson, Donald Winnicott and Lola Olufemi to raise essential questions about choice and interdependence and, ultimately, to imagine care otherwise.

Awards

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024

‘Intervals is an exceptional book, for which every deserved superlative seems cliched, in part because the language of illness, death and bereavement often feels too hollowed out by use to accommodate the magnitude of those experiences.… [W]ritten with such clarity and precision… this angry, loving, sorrowing and profound book is a magnificent starting point for [a] radical imaginative act.’

Alex Clark, Observer

‘Brooker debuts with a searing meditation on end-of-life care that traces her mother’s primary progressive multiple sclerosis from her diagnosis in 2009 to her death 10 years later…. She also constructs an indelible portrait of her tenacious mother, who died after she voluntarily stopped eating and drinking. With breathtaking precision and piercing moral clarity, Brooker delivers a brilliant blend of memoir and cultural critique that’s likely to reshape readers’ ideas about death and dying.’

Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

Marianne Brooker

Marianne Brooker is 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.