“ Yrsa Daley-Ward makes the emotional brutality of dealing with family, adolescence, addiction, and sexuality accessible to her readers. She continually incorporates gut-wrenching imagery in her work, and in both bone and The Terrible, she packages heightened emotion into just one or two lines.”. The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward review – a wincingly honest coming-of-age memoir The extraordinary, troubled life story of the model, actor and ‘Instagram poet’ has a prose-poetry all her own Yrsa.
As a young black model and LGBTQI+ activist who writes accessible verse, Yrsa Daley-Ward might once have been invisible to the literary world. However, social media has broken down the boundaries of how poetry is written and consumed. Daley-Ward has emerged as one of the stars of this new generation of feminist “instapoets” (their number includes the million-selling Rupi Kaur and Hera Lyndsay Bird) whose compressed, eminently shareable compositions connect with thousands of people.
Daley-Ward (who is now 29) found fame with bone (2014), a raw and visceral debut collection that tackled race, heartbreak, relationships, mental health, body image and sexuality. The best poems dealt with her childhood and family. The Terrible, her slim coming-of-age memoir, delves with even more disarming honesty into the life struggles that made her a poet.
Much of it makes for grim reading. Written as mixture of prose and poetry, it begins with Daley-Ward suddenly being informed by her hard-working Jamaican mother, Marcia, that the man she calls Dad is not her actual father. Her real parent is a married academic in Nigeria who dies before Daley-Ward can meet him.
The Terrible Yrsa Daley Ward Pdf
Meanwhile, Marcia keeps a string of ropey boyfriends. From the age of seven to 11, Daley-Ward is packed off, with her younger half-brother, to live with their strict Seventh-day Adventist grandparents in Chorley because Marcia is worried her main boyfriend, “Dad”, might try it on with her daughter. “My body is too big to stay home,” is Daley-Ward’s attempt, as a child, to make sense of this. There’s more than enough for a soap opera here.
- The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward — the life struggles that made her an Instapoet By Francesca Angelini However, social media has broken down the boundaries of how poetry is written and consumed.
- So begins The Terrible, Yrsa Daley-Ward's brave, raw, completely lyrical memoir that captures the surreal magic and incredible discomfort of adolescence, burgeoning sexuality, rootlessness, and connection.
Things only become more difficult. At school, she is a black face in a “sea of white”. Her idols are Pamela Anderson and the Sweet Valley High twins; her Very Best Friend, whom she practises making out with, tells everyone she is a lesbian. When she is at home, her grandparents won’t let her venture further than the garden gate, except for church missions: “Sleepovers are unnecessary and the cinema is terribly sinful…We have many, many rules. Washing out the bath attentively / and with intention.”
The wry tone turns considerably darker when she returns to live with her mother, who is rarely home. Now faced with freedom, she discovers sex, drugs and depression. By the time Marcia dies of cancer in 2007, Daley-Ward is off the rails, partying so hard she keeps “a drug-survival kit” containing Bonjela, vitamin C and melted chocolate. Self-destructive tendencies prompt her to leave her husband, who loves her unconditionally, the only good guy she has ever been with. As she starkly puts it: “I cannot have a family; freedom is all I need.”
In London, Daley-Ward tries to make it as a model: this, she finds, is largely impossible when you are black. Her main income comes from lap dancing and escort work, episodes of which she mines with analytical detachment.
In bed with a “snoring and grunting and gurgling” elderly punter, she recalls waking up and understanding many things, including soul damage, mortality and the idea that every young person should spend time with an older person. There is a refreshing absence of self-pity to this memoir.
The Terrible By Yrsa Daley-ward
Detractors tend to dismiss the collective work of “instapoets” as unpolished and technically unsophisticated, but Daley-Ward is a stylish writer, as well as an unusual voice. She doesn’t avoid the many pitfalls of drug writing, but she has a knack for distilling wild emotions into precise imagery, for selecting insightful impressions. Her handling of depression and grief is potently relatable.
The Terrible Yrsa Daley Ward Quotes
And amid all this bleakness she still manages to strike a defiantly uplifting note, showing how she works her way out of her pain by channelling it all into poetry: “Your soul comes up, I’m telling you / No such thing as a block, not really. / Your soul arises and you let it; or you don’t”.