In the French writer Colette’s exquisite short story The Rainy Moon, the narrator describes a soirée with a small group of beloved friends. Their conversation is deep and insightful. The narrator is left with a sense of the sublime: awe mixed with a melancholic unsettling. Profound questions have been raised. The narrator’s ground is left shifting, not as solid as she thought.
Reading Laura Kennedy’s brilliant first book, Some of our Parts – a series of interlinking personal essays that coalesce beautifully into philosophical memoir – I get a similar feeling of wonder and discomfort. This probing book stretches you beyond what you think you know. With exceptional linguistic skill, Kennedy extrapolates from the microcosm of her own experiences into macrocosmic cultural analyses of the labels we live by. She makes us ponder: Who am I? And who are you?
Laura Kennedy: Some of our Parts
Writer, philosopher, and friend of the show Laura Kennedy is here to discuss her first book, Some of Our Parts. It’s a memoir and a thought-provoking exploration of identity, told through the labels that shape our lives. Laura’s have included ‘feminist’ ‘Irish’ ‘neurodiverse’ and ‘poor’ - she argues that they only tell one part of a more nuanced story. In this conversation with Róisín Ingle, Kennedy discusses the labels she has worn throughout her life - both by choice and otherwise. Reflecting on her upbringing in Limerick, her mental health struggles, and her career as a beauty editor and writer, she dissects the labels she has acquired, rejected, or lost along the way.
Feminist, depressive, working-class, poor, one half of a mixed-race marriage, Limerick native, Irish, an emigrant, a beauty journalist, a philosopher – these are some of the personal identities Kennedy artfully examines. Two great heroes of her life become well-developed characters: her hardworking single mother, Emma, who died 10 years ago while Kennedy was in her mid-20s; and the author’s black British husband, J, who very early in their relationship found himself supporting Kennedy through the devastation of Emma’s loss. Through the transmogrifying power of these people’s love, the author grows beyond self- and society-imposed restrictions.
In Kennedy’s thoughtful questioning of her recent autism diagnosis, she asks whether or not the explosion of diagnoses in adulthood may be at the expense of autistic people who have much higher support needs. As the mother of a nonspeaking 21-year-old autistic son, who is among the world’s first wave of autistic nonspeakers to have been taught the purposeful movement of pointing at letters to spell to communicate, I’d love to see Kennedy embrace the writings of nonspeakers, who explode the “high-functioning/low-functioning” autism labels.
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The intellectual challenge of Kennedy’s sentences scorches new neural pathways. But this book is also funny, surreal, aesthetic and redemptive. William Blake wrote, “It is the most sublime act to set another before you.” Kennedy sets us before ourselves. Through eyes made compassionate in her forge, we see the irreducible, unique mystery that is each of us.
