I now had to hunt for the right clause, the right tense, whereas once they were all there, at my command, without having to think. The filing cabinets in my brain, the ones that contained the building blocks of sentences were scrambled. The fourth woman in this memoir is Blain’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Odessa.īlain was ‘determined’ to write about her experience despite knowing that ‘t is order that has been disarrayed’: Throughout the sadness, shock and upheaval, Blain was completing the final edits on what was to become Between a Wolf and a Dog a novel that charts, among other things, the final day in the life of a mother who is dying of brain cancer. Astoundingly, Scott’s tumour was also in the language centre of her brain. Two weeks before that, Blain’s beloved friend and mentor, the writer and activist Rosie Scott, had been delivered the very same diagnosis. Just a fortnight before Blain’s diagnosis her mother had been settled into a nursing home. Her revered mother, the writer and broadcaster Anne Deveson, was suffering from the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease, eventually succumbing to a catastrophic loss of language. But she had been under considerable stress. It is also a love letter to three of those women, to her life partner Andrew Taylor and to her own writing life.īlain had noticed a slippage in her linguistic ability even before her diagnosis of glioblastoma multiforme. Her valedictory memoir is a celebration of the lives of four women, their relationships with each other and with language and writing. The way in which we express ourselves is inextricably linked to who we are and how others see us.’ Blain expresses herself with a decided absence of sentimentality or self-pity. ‘Language’, Blain insists, ‘is at the core of our being.

The Museum of Words, as its subtitle – ‘a memoir of language, writing, and mortality’ – signals, is less about dying than it is about the beauty, complexity and necessity of language. She died thirteen months later, in December 2016. Blain knew that, at best, she ‘wouldn’t last more than a couple of years’.

Georgia Blain began to write The Museum of Words shortly after undergoing surgery for removal of an aggressive, malignant tumour from the language centre in her brain. ‘…words, words, words on the page, as though I could somehow build a fortress to encase myself, a word structure so robust that I wouldn’t crumble’.

The Museum of Words by Georgia Blain