Negative Capability: A Diary of Surviving

I decided to write down everything that had happened; the only way I could think of coping.

'Michèle Roberts's memoir begins when her latest novel is rejected and, feeling she has lost her identity as writer, she turns to nature, good food and good company to hold herself together.' Hilary Mantel, The Guardian

Following a series of devastating rejections, Michèle Roberts began keeping an account of her life in the hope it might help mend her shattered sense of self. In this intimate and wryly honest journal she reflects on cities and countryside, loss and love, food, friendships, sisterhood, pleasure and memories, her abiding relationship with France and with literature. Over the course of a year a new pattern of being develops, until, finally, she finds a better relationship between inner and outer worlds.