Firstly this is not a genre of book I would normally read but after seeing so many great reviews for it I had to give it a go. Wow I am so glad I did. What a beautifully written book this was. It was written in the form of essays and I found this book an emotional, read. It really made me aware to be thankful for my health.

For some reason I didn't read this book when it first came to my attention. Then I came across it again and started and could not stop reading. The prose is beautiful. The shock at being so unlucky so many times with illness lasts through the whole book with equal parts hope and steadfast determination. I read a lot of books but few have resonated quite so much with me. I will be recommending far and wide.

'Constellations' is a series of essays about life - from birth to death, sickness to health, spirituality to science. The author writes beautifully and poignantly about her experiences, interspersing poetry and prose. If you enjoyed Maggie O’Farrell’s “I Am, I Am, I Am” you will love this.

This collection of essays by Sinéad Gleeson is superb. I’ll admit shallowness; it was the oh-so-beautiful cover that enticed me in, but I stayed for the words. Gleeson writes crystal clear prose on what it is to be a woman, a mother, to endure pain, illness, disability. She writes about loss and fear, grief and life, art, the church. Her words moved me, nourished me, chimed. Her essays about being a patient and losing self in a hospital are particularly striking, perhaps more now than ever as we face Coronavirus.

“And a fear, familiar as night, creeps in. That the implicit trust we put in the medical world has been misplaced.”

“The hospital is a place of necessary quarantine where control must be abdicated. Inside, there are risks. Of not waking up post-anaesthetic, infections, encounters with MRSA, the hail of germs from sneezing, tissue-less visitors. The overly solicitous chats from the stranger in the next bed.

The air. Can we talk about the air? The coagulation of smells. Other people, cleaning products, distant hot-plated food with no singular tang. The metallic, surgical dregs of something disappearing. Vomit. Inhale. Hand sanitiser. Breathe. Disinfectant. Exhale.”

A masterclass.

This book was simply beautiful. These essays are personal and, at times, difficult to read, but they are moving. Many thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this.

Constellations is a series of essays telling of illness, grief and motherhood throughout the authors life. I did however find parts of it confusing as we flit through different times and whilst I admire her bravery and strength through some incredibly tough times, it’s actually quite a depressing read.

I added this book to my TBR after reading one of the essays in a newspaper article. The one I read was probably the one that had the biggest emotional impact on me as its about the death of a close friend, and it’s incredibly moving. The moment when you get a phone call telling you that someone the same age as you, someone you love, has died is something that never leaves you. I also really connected with all the stories Sinead told about her medical battles over the years as I know what it is to have a lifetime of health struggles and to have to adapt to them. I smiled at the story of when Sinead was in a wheelchair as a teenager and was dreading how the other teens would react to her but the boys just immediately started messing about with her chair and made her feel so normal. I had that exact same experience at age 13 and to this day I think about it whenever I’m feeling self-conscious about my disability. I definitely identified with Sinead’s take on the pain scale, I had a wry smile on my face reading that as it’s so hard to explain to others how pain feels and how bad it is. This is a beautiful collection that takes you through what it is to be a woman and I very much enjoyed it. I recommend it!

Constellations is the latest in a long line of books by Irish women writers that I struggle to review because I can’t get past screaming “you need to read this immediately” at people. Seriously, go read it. NOW!

Dealing with themes of illness, pain, motherhood, and bodies, Gleeson’s essays are personal, political and cultural. Gleeson writes about her own experiences in the wider context of a changing society, with an eye both on the past and the future.

I am in charge of our Senior School library and am looking for a diverse array of new books to furnish their shelves with and inspire our young people to read a wider and more diverse range of books as they move through the senior school. It is hard sometimes to find books that will grab the attention of young people as their time is short and we are competing against technology and online entertainments.
This was a thought-provoking and well-written read that will appeal to young readers across the board. It had a really strong voice and a compelling narrative that I think would capture their attention and draw them in. It kept me engrossed and I think that it's so important that the books that we purchase for both our young people and our staff are appealing to as broad a range of readers as possible - as well as providing them with something a little 'different' that they might not have come across in school libraries before.
This was a really enjoyable read and I will definitely be purchasing a copy for school so that our young people can enjoy it for themselves. A satisfying and well-crafted read that I keep thinking about long after closing its final page - and that definitely makes it a must-buy for me!

Sinead Gleeson’s Constellations has bee called a must-read for Irish women. But even more so, it’s a must read for men, whose understanding of what it’s like to be female was embedded in a misogynistic framework until recently, and is now obscured by the height of battle in the war for full equality. In such a context, Ms Gleeson’s honesty and fairness makes for a clear view.

The frank detailing of her experiences begins with her childhood, during which her bones began to turn to powder and she had to endure tough experiences with doctors, all men, and the embarrassment of a wheelchair on a school trip to London. When being cut out of a body cast, the doctor does not believe that he is cutting her with a rotating blade and tells her she is overreacting. And the aftermath - Twenty-something years on, I have still six ghost scars on my thighs and knees. Vertical lines, pink and fierce, telling a story.

The next essay begins as an amusing take on on her experiences with her hair but expands to broader considerations and, like all her explorations, such as that on blood, it provides personal paths into more general themes and thoughts.

A lyrical recall of a former boyfriend is so poignant and there is a warm remembrance of the woman she feels inspired her to write

Her accounts of pregnancies is justifiably angry. [To be completed]

An autobiographical collection of essays about the experience of being ill and in physical bodily pain.

Emotional, beautifully written memoir. I feel like I personally know Sinead after reading. Deeply personal and I think this will stay with me for a long time.

A beautifully explored and written memoir. Many thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan/Picador for the opportunity to read and review Constellations.

In this group of memoirist essays art and life intersect to create a powerfully moving portrait of cultural and personal change. It feels like this book has been a long time coming and in later essays Sinéad Gleeson refers to its gradual creation as well as obstacles which sharpened its focus. I’ve been familiar with Gleeson’s work as a journalist and a curator since she edited two stunning anthologies of Irish short fiction by women: “The Long Gaze Back” and “The Glass Shore”. So I was already familiar with her stance as a feminist and aesthete, but it wasn’t till reading this gripping and mesmerising book that I understood how her personal history partly informs her conversation with literature and the arts. The essays roughly follow the trajectory of her life from childhood to adulthood and the severely challenging medical issues she’s faced along the way. These health issues presented many heartrending and difficult obstacles, but they also gave Gleeson a unique perspective of the world around her as a woman, citizen, friend, mother and intellectual. She charts how her beliefs and feelings have evolved alongside the society around her. Certainly she’s lived through many personal challenges, but she’s never let them define her. Rather, they’ve inspired a deeper form of engagement with the world and fervent belief that “Art is about interpreting our own experience.”

I read these essays in chronological order and, while they would certainly be just as impactful read in isolation, it’s touching following her journey from a childhood as a devote Catholic visiting Lourdes hoping for a miracle cure to an adult political activist canvassing from door to door to help overturn Ireland’s abortion ban. We see different angles of her experiences with illness such as a rare disorder that caused her bones to deteriorate and later battles with cancer. She also recounts how her past illnesses created complications for her pregnancies. Her many visits to the hospital inform her ontological understanding of the body as a physical and social being. She perceives how “The pregnant body is not solely its owner’s domain. In gestating another person you become public property. The world – doctors, friendly neighbours, women in shop queues – feels entitled to an opinion on it.” Her experiences with doctors and legislation involving the body sharpen her resolve about the importance of individual autonomy and respecting what a person wants and needs.

There are also many very perceptive assessments of the work of numerous visual and performance artists as well as writers. Gleeson poignantly reflects on her personal connection to their themes and subject matter. For instance, she describes how she’s moved by the work of Frida Kahlo as someone whose body was similarly physically restricted through medical procedures. She notes how “Immobility is gasoline for the imagination: in convalescence, the mind craves open spaces, dark alleys, moon landings.” Gleeson seeks out artists who meaningfully frame their experiences in a way that broaden the political conversation and offer moments of personal solace. The essay 'The Adventure Narrative' also honours cavalier women who have set out to explore the world since this is traditionally seen as a masculine activity – as explored in Abi Andrews’ novel “The Word for Woman is Wilderness”. But, aside from noteworthy female explorers and impactful women artists, Gleeson also chronicles the experience of women who have been left out of the history books such as in the essay 'Second Mother' where she memorializes the life of a great woman who inspired her passion for reading.

I was utterly entranced by this book. It’s incredibly brave to write so openly about such personal subject matter. In writing so thoughtfully about her life Gleeson compellingly explores many larger ideas and issues, showing how they connect to a shared sense of culture and society. For all the heartache and struggle these essays cover, this is also a wonderfully optimistic and uplifting book that ought to be treasured.

Beautifully written musings and memoirs. They are poignant, heartbreaking and heartwarming.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

Sinéad Gleeson’s memoir Constellations explores the relationship between our bodies and our identity. In a series of linked essays, she writes powerfully about her own experiences and what they tell us about the embodied lives of all women, particularly Irish women.

Gleeson has been doubly unlucky. As an adolescent she had a form of arthritis which meant painful surgery and using crutches (and sometimes a wheelchair) just at the age when people are most self-conscious about their body, and most eager to join in with friends. Later, just months after marrying, she was diagnosed with leukaemia.

I found the essays about illness to be particularly moving. The writing is lyrical and visceral and without self-pity. She captures the loss of autonomy, the battles with professionals to be heard, the detachment from the everyday world, the strange acoustics and enforced intimacies of hospital life.

She considers the relationship between women and fertility, linking her own hopes and fears about being able to have children, with the way women are defined by their role as mothers. She broadens this to consider the struggle for Irish women to have legal access to abortion, and the injustices of the past when women were institutionalised for becoming pregnant outside marriage.

She explores the other ways women have been confined, contrasting her own experiences of freedom to travel and to be educated with the poverty and limited horizons of her grandmother’s generation. She argues that the visions for which her grandmother was famous might have been a reaction to this confinement, a way to envisage a bigger, stranger universe.

What Constellations brought home to me is how serious illness sets someone apart. It is more than the absence of health, experiences missed, it is a whole other state of being, of loneliness and pain and otherness. Worse, it is a state that many medical professionals (especially if the doctor is a man, and the patient is a woman) still dismiss.

Constellations gives a vivid and vital insight into living with illness and how the bodies we inhabit make us who we are.

Constellations is a book about being human. It is about being a woman in society, in Ireland, and a good deal more. The politics and power of language, pain, illness, health, adventure, and love are illustrated in these beautifully formed essays threading together Gleeson’s personal experiences with that of other writers and artists in exploring the strengths and weaknesses of our wonderful and fragile human form. The texts are confrontation and celebration of these things in a brutal and honest way. There is no apology, no sentiment here and it is all the more powerful and important for that.
Sinéad Gleeson has written a book that encapsulates so much of the human experience, of life as a woman, as many women. It examines the pressure to conform, to have children, to live a ‘good life’ as religion and society dictate. This wonderful book follows a life rich with love and devastated by loss. Overarching themes, however, are of the political nature of women’s bodies and the political nature of illness - the importance of having a voice (and using it) and of having autonomy over your own body and the implications when you don’t.

“Women learn early that absorbing pain is a means of martyrdom making us closer to the bodies of saints as if discomfort equates to religious ecstasy. That there is meaning in suffering, except when there is not.”

A series of essays dismantles the body to it’s component parts, and rebuilds it again, with all our wonky quirky bits as memories of experiences endured - bone, blood, hair, pain, love – things that bind us. Gleeson shares stories of how confronting our bodies can be, to us and other people, and she names the things that need naming. Taking us through history and across disciplines - including the arts, religion and science - Gleeson highlights a history also, of language. Euphemisms and words dressed up are rarely helpful, they leave more questions and uncertainty. Language should help to clarify, for words to give detail – not to be hidden behind.
Constellations is a celebration of life and a celebration of all of those who have gone before us, to save, renew, and extend lives in blood transfusions, chemotherapy treatments, and hip replacements. It scratches the surface of past traditions and beliefs connected to the body and its various component parts, and what happens when they don’t work in the way we expect them to. Constellations shows the reader also, how these things define time – there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and perspective alters with this. It affects us in ways that cannot be anticipated, and it is rarely exclusively physical.
Aged 13 Sinéad Gleeson learned quickly to be embarrassed of her body and its awkwardness, not just because she was now a teenager and attitudes and attention in society shifted as her body did, but at 13 Gleeson also underwent a major operation to replace her hip. A year of recovery, using crutches and absent from school and she became acutely aware of an emotional as well as a physical discomfort.

“I wanted to make myself smaller, to minimize the space I took up. I read that shrews and weasels can shrink their own bones to survive.”

The scars from this, and subsequent operations and injury, remain a physical trace on her body. Gleeson’s scars and implants of metal fixings are her starting point, the title a reference to these. The stars and planets that twinkle in the dark, lighting up the night and fusing time – a reminder of what has passed, of what has been endured, of what she has recovered from. We are, after all made up of stardust.

“Our bodies are records – traces of all they have weathered are held in scars.”

The stories of her pregnancies and hip replacement are told by her body, not to mention the traumatic removal of her body cast where the doctor ignored both her and her mother’s cries to stop when the rotating saw cut through, not just her cast but into her legs.
Chapters on bone, hair and blood, elements we all share, are beautifully constructed essays exploring these elements through time. Gleeson writes eloquently on the significance and power of each of these elements, illustrating her own life threatening conditions. Blood, all the more significant, as Gleeson writes of her diagnosis with leukaemia, her bones and her blood threatening her life and causing great pain.

“This may not be war, but there are two sides. The well and the unwell; doctors and patients…
…This malfunctioning version of me was a new treasonous place. I did not know it, I did not speak its language. The sick body has its own narrative impulse. A scar is an opening, an invitation to ask: ‘what happened?’ So we tell its story. Or try not to…”

Survival is key, both physically and emotionally as Gleeson endures, not just illness and injury as her body lets her down, but medical abuse and pain at the hands of the doctors served to treat her. The excerpts about medical abuse and medical ignorance are pertinent and powerful. Reflecting on her own relationships with medics and experience of being a patient important conversations are opened up - the imbalance of power, the role we are ascribed to in getting sick, our lack of voice. These are important, indeed crucial conversations that must be had between medics and clinicians and their patients. For further medical abuse and neglect to change these are key dialogues to be had. Gleeson highlights an observation of how those invested in their own treatment are often viewed as “transgressive” – this will resonate with many who have complex illnesses, illnesses that are not yet understood or not yet diagnosed - patients who arguably have more knowledge and understanding than their GP’s tasked with treating them. Learning a new language to navigate the departments and medical professions to get the treatment they need is not always celebrated as an engaged and proactive patient. The experience of illness is a political act.
And yet, there are also acts of great warmth experienced in hospitals. Writing of one consultation with a nurse:

“Her voice is matter of fact and professional but there is kindness too, almost imperceptible. Patients are so attuned to these small gestures that we notice. They matter.”

This is a book of humanity and humility. Pain and illness will affect us all, if it hasn’t already. It is a great leveler and yet is perhaps least talked about, the burden that comes with it silencing us with shame. Having experienced this at an early age Sinéad Gleeson breaks its power through naming and sharing. She writes clearly and elegantly about what it is like and how others impact and affect us in these, our most vulnerable times. She reflects on the life and work of Frida Kahlo who painted “in absence of words for pain felt” as “the physical experience resists words, refuses to reside within letters. They fall short.” Gleeson gifts us with her own words.

“Pain is a reminder of existence, bordering on the Cartesian. Sentio ergo sum: I feel, therefore I am. Some translations suggest Patior ergo sum: I hurt/suffer, therefore I am.”

Poets and writers and artists who dwell on illness and imperfect bodies, examine the experience and the physical presence.

“Hospitals are not unlike galleries. Interactive spaces; a large installation of sound and colour, evoking emotion and working on the senses…[while similarities continue] between the work and approach…of physicians and surgeons, and painters and sculptors.”

Constellations explores the foundations of life and what it is to be human, and yet it feels revolutionary. When one in five of us are disabled and many more will experience failings in our physical health at one point or another, this is an inevitable and uncomfortable truth. There will be few people that go unaffected by profound and life impacting conditions. Those of us who experience these conditions experience also the burden of shame and stigma. This keeps us quiet and serves only to exacerbate distress. It is frightening to us and to others around us when human frailty is exposed. It is only with its naming that understanding and acceptance will come, in time. This is not the experience of the few but the many. At a time when disability, chronic illness and the burden on society has become so political, and such a commonly referenced headline, this is the antidote. Being vulnerable, as we all are, is key to our survival, but it can be the most challenging thing to endure.

Constellations takes us through our life cycle, from birth to death and the many steps in between. Touchingly Gleeson dedicates the last essay in the book to her Godmother, Terry, an incredible woman who spent her latter years fluctuating in and out of this world. Living with dementia, Terry is portrayed as a woman of importance and meaning throughout, her memory sustained by this essay and Gleeson’s love for her, even when her own memory was not in her grasp. We are shown a way of leaving this world where compassion and love endures, of having scented oils on our pillow, candles and daises by the bed, while being read to, cream rubbed into hands. The power of touch, the importance of thought and kindness, even when – especially when – our world is coming to an end, when we cannot be sure if a person has already left us, before their body has died.

In the discovery of Gleeson’s diagnosis of leukaemia, in an attempt to quell the fear and distress of her parents, she proclaimed:

“I am not going to die. I’m going to write a book.”

And she did. And it is beautiful.

“To commit to writing, or art, is to commit to living.”

These are words I hold close, this is a woman I would like to know. She has done what she promised, not died but written a book. Constellations is a gift for humankind as we navigate our physical frailties, and the things we cannot choose. It’s author tells us there are other choices that we can make and this book shows us that is possible.

I love the authors voice throughout- she writes beautifully which makes this an easy read even though it is deep and thought provoking. A fantastic collection that will resonate with any woman, indeed any human being. All of life is within its pages.

A really exceptional, important book. Astonishgly brave and beautifully written, Devastating in places but always hopeful.

Wow, what a beautifully written book, it has made me smile, cry and feel privileged to get a glimpse into Sinead Gleesons world. In the beginning I devoured it and sped through the book, towards the end I slowed down as I didn’t want it to end. Highly recommended!