How does memory work? Some years after losing both his parents – his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was on the cusp ofadulthood – Brian Dillon suffered a breakdown that forced him to confront this fundamental question.

IN THE DARK ROOM tells the story of Dillon's encounters with the family photographs and familiar objects in which memory resides; with the childhood home whose ordinary rooms and portals give shape to his recollections; and with his own recalcitrant body, which – through hypochondria and psychosomatic disease – conspired with his mind to structure the empty time of grief and to produce nagging metaphors of his mother's chronic illness. Dillon draws on centuries of literature, phil-osophy and visual art to help him interpret the relics of his parents and of his childhood, and to discern the shape of the remembering mind.

IN THE DARK ROOM is as brave as it is brilliant, an arresting debut a writer of enormous originality, intensity and ambition.

 

BRIAN DILLON was born in Dublin 1969. He writes on literature and visual art for publications including the TLS, Independent, New Statesman, Irish Times, Dublin Review. Frieze, Art Review, Moderm Painters and Cabinet. In the Dark Rom is his first book.