Rick Morton, journalist and author of the acclaimed, bestselling memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt, returns with a powerful, moving and highly personal book, charting his rediscovery of love.
In early 2019, Rick was diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – which, as he says, is just a fancy way of saying that one of the people who should have loved him the most during childhood didn’t.
So, over the course of twelve months, he went on a journey to rediscover love. To get better. Not cured, not fixed. Just, better. This is a book about his journey to betterness, his year of living vulnerably. In fact, it’s a book about love. What love is, how we see it, what forms it takes, how we practice it in our lives, what it means to us, and how we really, really can’t live without it, even if, like Rick for many years, we think we can.
As he says: ‘People think they want cars, and they do, to get to jobs and appointments in cities and regions where public transport has failed them. But what gets them into those cars, out of the house, out of bed for God’s sake, is love.’
A dazzling and wide-ranging book about love, trauma and recovery, My Year of Living Vulnerably covers many of the big issues of human existence: love, beauty, death, emotions, loneliness, the importance of touch, religion, evolution, science, engagement with the animal kingdom, the brain, the self – it is an extraordinary achievement.
Read a sample chapter.
