Paper Cuts: A Memoir

(Paperback)

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A dazzlingly original and hauntingly powerful memoir, Paper Cuts takes us inside the mind of a young Oxford academic whose life has been devastated by severe mental illness. A dazzlingly original memoir, Paper Cuts takes us inside the mind of a young Oxford academic devastated by severe mental illness. 'I have a small line of red dots on the back of my left hand, where the needle goes in. I have had hundreds of ketamine injections, more than anyone else, perhaps. The needle goes in, and the truth comes out. Sometimes I am a child again. Sometimes I have the innocence of a child, but I am not innocent. I know too much. I have known too much.' With Paper Cuts, Stephen Bernard boldly lives through the trauma of childhood abuse and mental illness. He writes to escape and confront, to accuse and explain. Each morning when he wakes, Stephen Bernard must reconstruct his self- every night he writes himself a letter to be read the next day. The fractured, intensely personal narrative of Paper Cuts follows a single day in his life as he navigates a course through the effects of mania, medication and memories. 'Beautifully written. Brilliant' Henry Marsh 'Distinguished and desolating. The saving grace is the writer's undaunted eye for the beauty of the world' Hilary Mantel 'Chilling, riveting, extraordinary, wonderful' Roddy Doyle 'It is an extraordinary book in its unblinking truthfulness' Hannah Jane Parkinson, Observer

Reviews

Jesus - what a book. Chilling, riveting, extraordinary, wonderful - Im trying to think of the words to describe this book but none of them do it justice. -- Roddy Doyle
A distinguished and desolating memoir. I have never read such a succinct and unsparing chronicle of the destruction of body and spirit that can be brought about by the violation of a child. Its the equivalent of a letter from a gulag, except that the events take place in Sussex in the 1980s The saving grace is the writers pleasure in scholarship, and his undaunted eye for the beauty of the world. -- Hilary Mantel
I'd nominate Paper Cuts by Stephen Bernard [as a book of the year]. It's a literary memoir which is unforgettably fleet, stinging and painful. -- Hermione Eyre * Evening Standard **Books of the Year** *
A beautifully written account - both brilliant and appalling - of the psychological consequences of sexual abuse of the author when he was a vulnerable boy by a priest... Rarely have I felt so angry. -- Henry Marsh
It is an extraordinary book in its unblinking truthfulness, even more so in its refusal to deny the complexities and ambiguity that follow such childhood trauma. This vivisection is just what we need in the discussion and literature of mental illness and its sources. -- Hannah Jane Parkinson * Observer *

Author Bio

Stephen Bernard is an English academic at the University of Oxford and formerly a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow and Junior Research Fellow of University College, Oxford. He is the editor of The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons and The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe, and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. Paper Cuts is his first and only experiment in autobiography.