Gscene News Archive

This is a curious book, full of stories of ‘survivors’, people who have been through truly dreadful things in their lives, their stories boiled down into shortish stories all with a common theme. That hope is as cheap as despair, and no matter how bad, wretched or awful your life might become (and it will come darling) that there is the possibility of transformation from the pain and that you can, if careful with yourself, use adversity to bloom. You can learn to build your wings on the way down.

My grandfather would have loved this book, he liked stories plummeting to the depths of life’s experience, he said that you needed the shit in life, to dig in and fertilize your fields, and then lay fallow for a while before you could grow, bloom and harvest again. This book is not full of such easy to digest homilies but it is full of personal testimony from folk who have lived through gut wrenching life changes and learned, changed and eventual recovered themselves from it.

It’s a tad ‘spiritual’ for my taste but for folk in a spiritual crises this could be a loadstone, or a lighthouse. It’s not a cheery read but it does leave you feeling a real sense of the strength dormant within all of us. Some of the stories are inspirational, others depressing but all real life and true.

The best selling author, also a journalist who having had his own HIV crisis, facing death and living fully past it has collected these stories to assist other people, to help them keep going, and find, in his words ‘the healing that lies on the other side.’

As Churchill said,
‘If you’re in hell, keep going."

Hay House publishing: £9.99
www.hayhouse.co.uk