Book

Ruby is currently working on her first book: an essay collection tackling subjects including ambiguous loss, living with trichotillomania (hairpulling disorder), the questionable ‘science’ of psychiatric diagnosis, addiction in all its guises, and nostalgia for invented pasts and stolen futures.

In lyrical, incisive, and often darkly funny prose, the essays ask: What are the consequences for women who desire too much, and of the wrong thing? Why is there such a chasm between what we know and what we do? And what if the stories we’re told about recovery – whether from mental illness, addiction, or grief – are just ‘charming, empty fictions’?

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’.