This week, Bookshelf trains its spotlight on Trinidad-born writer and psychotherapist Marchelle Farrell, whose debut memoir Uprooting (Canongate Books) won the Nan Shepherd Prize.
A consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist based in the UK, Farrell, also an amateur gardener, says she “spends a lot of time outdoors getting to know her country garden in Somerset and writing about what the garden teaches her about herself.”
Farrell calls the process of writing her memoir a “compulsion” that “grew out of the soil of this English garden into which I found myself locked at the beginning of the pandemic, just months after the sudden upheaval and relocation of our lives here.”
Farrell reveals that when she moved to the UK more than two decades back, she “never dreamed of living in the countryside.”
Yet she found herself “following a strange, strong pull to this land.” Farrell says she wrote the memoir “to make sense of the story of my life unfolding before me, of unplanned but inexorable new paths and horizons and to find the thread of how my story was entangled with those whose lives had come before and had shaped mine.”
Farrell writes to “make sense of things in a world that often seems mad. We are a meaning-making species, and we shape the world around us through the stories we tell ourselves about how it works. In a time of multiple, connected crises that threaten our thriving and survival as a species, we need different stories that help us see the world in another light, to shape it anew.” Read More
Trinidad-born therapist writes her way home with memoir. (n.d.). Www.guardian.co.tt. Retrieved February 18, 2024, from https://www.guardian.co.tt/article/trinidadborn-therapist-writes-her-way-home-with-memoir-6.2.1928005.222403fccd
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