Negative Space

Praise for Negative Space: 

‘Immediate and wholly convincing... She is uncommonly good at writing about being embodied.’ Brian Dillon, The Irish Times

‘There are few books that capture so gracefully and so truthfully the way in which art and life weave and bleed together. Negative Space is a beautiful, profound, unique book.’ Writer and artist Sara Baume

‘Original, intense, and always compelling – this is a highly accomplished debut.’ Author Kevin Barry

‘I adored Negative Space. It is a personal Ways Of Seeing for twenty-first-century women. Leach beautifully articulates what it is to be a writer, what it is to be heartbroken, what it is to be betrayed and ultimately what it is to be human.’ Author Edel Coffey

‘In this extraordinary book, Cristín Leach sketches a vivid sequence of vignettes that build towards a meditative portrait of art, voice, loss and growth. Press your ear to this book, and you will hear the tumultuous soundscape of a life, in all its joys and sorrows and wonderings.’ Poet and writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa

'...an unflinching self-exploration of a woman at various major life stages, not to mention a refreshing portrait of a very modern Irish marriage breakdown, divorce and family break-up.’ Tanya Sweeney, Irish Independent

‘In recent years there has been a flourishing of Irish women who have written very different testimonies to the experience of womanhood in Ireland. This forms an elegant counterpart.’ Sinead O’Shea, RTE.ie Book of the Week

‘This book is a memento of pain, a chronicle of loss... a refreshed perspective on what it means to be free.’ Anne Cunningham, Sunday Independent

'A masterclass in memoir.' Author Nuala O'Connor

'Negative Space has been compared to John Berger’s seminal Ways of Seeing because of its—strongly female and embodied—emphasis on the art of looking at art, but Aftermath, by Rachel Cusk, seems equally relevant as a book with an insistently female way of anatomising the end of a marriage. While Cusk’s baroquely personal version of events weaponises words, however, Leach has a sparer, simpler, elliptical style...  a book about exposing life events feels private and slightly mysterious. In this it is suggestive of Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat or Ian Maleny’s Minor Monuments - works in which each writer seems to be trying to account for the very affect of privacy, of intimacy, of loneliness. Brian Dillon is a relevant influence, but so is Deborah Levy. A longer essay would go right into the aesthetics of post-divorce feminine experience in the culture industry, but that is a whole other complex of hunches and thoughts I will spare you for now, saying only of Negative Space: rich and strange.' Niamh Campbell, The Stinging Fly

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