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. Frequently repeated words may gain a carapace that resists our scrutiny: take “dignity”, for example, which Marianne Brooker regards with “mild suspicion” as “too clean-cut and classed”, with “none of the chaos that makes us human”.
Brooker’s mother, Jane, had experienced a certain amount of chaos throughout her life – a violent relationship with Marianne’s father, whom she quickly left, serial and often precarious employment in numerous sectors, constant financial insecurity – and had met each situation with a ferocious and transformative energy. When she was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis in 2009, she was characteristically resolute and relentlessly generative; when her teeth fell out, she learned to make her own dentures, and as she became unsteadier, she duct-taped her feet to her tricycle so that she could still ride around the Devon countryside. She gave tarot readings by phone in order to be able to work from home, putting up with the cut taken by the third-party app she used in return for the sense of vocation and service the contact with her regular callers gave her. “Sick and poor,” writes Brooker, “she made a workshop of herself.”
