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 – both fiction and nonfiction – have tended to explore the potential transfiguration of the thing we tend to call ‘trauma’.

In 2021 I wrote a psychoanalytic study of the possible connection between early trauma and a passionate love of movies: Post-Traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image: Something to Watch Over Me (Routledge, 2021). You can listen to a 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: