We All Come Home Alive cover art

We All Come Home Alive

A Life in Shocks

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We All Come Home Alive

By: Anna Beecher
Narrated by: Anna Beecher
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About this listen

 'Profoundly affecting' GUARDIAN
'Extraordinary. It made me cry' MELISSA HARRISON
'Wise and beautifully written' SINÉAD GLEESON
'Made me feel that I too was more alive' LUCY CALDWELL

A life is made up of many shocks -

The scream of wheels over asphalt as cars collide. The unexpected death of a loved one and the long trek of grief.

The brutality of teenage girlhood. The abiding temptation of hunger. The stumbling spinning magic of drunkenness.

The falling into love, for once utterly awake. The tearing open of a body and of reality itself that comes with birth and motherhood.

Anna Beecher tells the story of her life through the moments which remade her in these wise and luminously beautiful essays, for readers of Ann Patchett's These Precious Days or Maggie O'Farrell's I Am, I Am, I Am.©2024 Anna Beecher Essays Motherhood Parenting & Families Relationships

Critic reviews

A candid and lyrical reckoning that unites loss and joy. Wise and beautifully written (Sinéad Gleeson, author of CONSTELLATIONS)
Extraordinary: messy and beautiful and true. It made me cry (Melissa Harrison, author of ALL AMONG THE BARLEY)
Fierce and tender essays that made me feel that I too was more alive . . . Beecher's writing on pregnancy, labour and motherhood is searingly good, and the way she writes about loss and grief moved me to tears more than once (Lucy Caldwell, author of OPENINGS)
Intelligent, poised and emotionally exacting. Beecher's evocative essays on life's defining moments unpick how we might be made and remade by life (Cal Flyn, author of ISLANDS OF ABANDONMENT)
I could NOT put this down. We All Come Home Alive is an intricate and tender weave of girlhood, growing pains, and what it means to live inside our bodies. It's an utterly perfect book and Anna Beecher is a revelation (Lucy Rose, author of THE LAMB)
Anna Beecher's beautiful memoir, written partly in response to the death of her brother, describes in startling detail the highs and lows of existence . . . Beecher isa gifted writer with a knack forcapturing the exquisite detail of intense emotions without beingsentimental, and for rendering the familiar tropes of griefstartling . . . Pain, joy, love, fear: these are the gifts and burdens of life, and in this profoundly affecting book, Beecher has articulated them with precision and beauty
A bravely written and uplifting book, which locates power in the tiniest detail
What Beecher does truly brilliantly is paint vignettes of her past. The search for her husband's lost wedding ring, which a scuba diver miraculously scoops up from the silt and grime at the bottom of a deep rock pool is expertly recounted, and the graphic description she gives of her daughter's birth is gripping in its candidness
All stars
Most relevant
beautifully written and performed. I loved every second and immediately starting again for the love and the music in your words.
John was a beautiful human being, his wisdom will always be missed, you did him good.

outstanding

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Anna Beecher writes about the breadth and depth of living in a body in this world, there is sharp clarity to her description and open armed tenderness for the human heart. I listened in one go, sometimes weeping.

Deeply moving, wise and beautiful

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Anna Beecher's memoir captures with clarity and poetic language a life including teenage bullying, the death of her brother and its resultant grief, moving to America and childbirth. All conveyed with beauty and laser sharp detail and intimately read by the author here.

Beautifully written and read

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