Writing

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

James Baldwin

I have written on a broad range of topics over the past two decades, but all my books and essays have tended to explore the unforeseen transformations of people who find themselves starting to feel in ways that allow them, often for the first time, to think.

My most recent book explores the connection between cinephilia and relational trauma and is entitled Post-Traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image: Something to Watch Over Me (Routledge, 2022). You can listen to a recent conversation I had about this book with Noreen Giffney, Stephen Frosh, and students from the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, here:

This book grew out of some of the half-formed ideas that hovered in the margins of an earlier book I wrote about the French author Marie NDiaye: Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013)

Post-Traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image also offers a theoretical context for a piece of fantastical fiction I wrote a decade ago, entitled Mameluke Bath (Open Books, 2013). That novel explored, among other things, the anti-heroine’s journey through psychotherapy and other weird adventures, towards an unforeseen metamorphosis of sorts. You can listen to me talking to Hannah Eaton about that book, in the context of David Lynch’s 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, here.