From the author of Hild, a fierce and urgent autobiographical audiobook about a woman facing down a formidable foe.
So Lucky is the sharp, surprising new audiobook by Nicola Griffith—the profoundly personal and emphatically political story of a confident woman forced to confront an unnerving new reality when in the space of a single week her wife leaves her and she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Mara Tagarelli is, professionally, the head of a multimillion-dollar AIDS foundation; personally, she is a committed martial artist. But her life has turned inside out like a sock. She can’t rely on family, her body is letting her down, and friends and colleagues are turning away—they treat her like a victim. She needs to break that narrative: build her own community, learn new strengths, and fight. But what do you do when you find out that the story you’ve been told, the story you’ve told yourself, is not true? How can you fight if you can’t trust your body? Who can you rely on if those around you don’t have your best interests at heart, and the systems designed to help do more harm than good? Mara makes a decision and acts, but her actions unleash monsters aimed squarely at the heart of her new community.
This is fiction from the front lines, incandescent and urgent, a narrative juggernaut that rips through sentiment to expose the savagery of America’s treatment of the disabled and chronically ill. But So Lucky also blazes with hope and a ferocious love of self, of the life that becomes possible when we stop believing lies.
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“A compact, brutal story of losing power and creating community, fast-paced as a punch in the face…So Lucky is beautifully written, with a flexible, efficient precision that embodies the protagonist’s voice and character…It’s also welcome and wonderful to see a book that shows…depictions of women who make bad decisions and wrestle with the consequences, who shed prejudice and learn compassion, who are more than aspirational figureheads.”
— New York Times Book Review
“A narrative that at once informs, confronts, puzzles and engages.”
— Lambda Literary“A fresh and powerful novel and antidote to the sense of victimhood.”
— BooklistBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Nicola Griffith is the award-winning author of several novels and a memoir. A native of Yorkshire, England, she is a one-time self-defense instructor who turned to writing full-time upon being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1993. She lives with her wife, the writer Kelley Eskridge, in Seattle.