Book

Ruby is currently working on her first book, Everything Your Mouth Remembers, an essay collection about the body and its unruly desires. In lyrical, incisive and often darkly funny prose, it asks: What are the consequences for women who desire too much, and of the wrong thing? Why is there so often a chasm between what we know and what we do? And what if ‘recovery’ – from mental illness, addiction, grief – looks different to what we’ve been told?

Charting a course from the author’s adolescence to her mid-thirties, the essays in this collection tackle subjects including losing friends to suicide; the concept and politics of ‘giftedness’; living with trichotillomania (hairpulling disorder); the questionable ‘science’ of psychiatric diagnosis; addiction to sex, drugs and food; leaving, yearning for and returning home; and nostalgia for lost pasts and impossible futures.

Whatever the subject, each essay ultimately – as Nikesh Shukla has said of the author’s work – ‘does that brilliant thing of taking small things and then using them to tell us something about the world’.