Intervals

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024

What makes a good death? A good daughter? In 2009, with her forties & a wave of austerity on the horizon, Marianne Brooker's mother was diagnosed with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. She made a workshop of herself & her surroundings, combining creativity & activism in unlikely ways, but over time her ability to work, to move & to live without pain diminished drastically. 

In Intervals, Brooker charts her care for her mother, following her decision to refuse food & water in a bid to end her suffering. She turns to various sources - from Anne Boyer & Donald Winnicott, to Practical Magic & Coraline - to make sense of this experience & to explore the precarious space between proximity & complicity. 

Blending memoir, polemic & feminist philosophy, Intervals is a deeply moving work that harnesses the political potential of grief to raise essential questions about choice, interdependence, & end-of-life care.

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‘In this compelling and beautifully written book Marianne Brooker anatomizes the rights of the dying & the failures of the state to support rather than penalize those living with disability. Intervals is simultaneously a memoir of individual experience & a powerful reflection on the nature of home, care, death & love that deserves to be read & heard by the widest possible audience.’ — Daisy Hay, author of Dinner with Joseph Johnson  

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Marianne Brooker is based in Bristol, where she works for a charity campaigning on climate & social justice. She has a PhD from Birkbeck & a background in arts research & teaching. She won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for Intervals, her first book.