The Museum of Words

2017 | Biography

When she was diagnosed in late 2015 with a tumour sitting right in the language centre of her brain, Georgia Blain's only warning was a niggling sense that her speech was slightly awry. She ignored it, and on a bright spring day as she was mowing the lawn, she collapsed on a bed of jacaranda blossoms, blood frothing at her mouth. Waking up to find herself in the back of an ambulance being rushed to hospital, she tries to answer questions but is unable to speak. After the shock of a bleak prognosis and a long gruelling treatment schedule, she immediately turns to writing to rebuild her language and herself. At the same time, her mother moves into a nursing home with Alzheimer's, and her best friend and mentor is also diagnosed with the same brain tumour. All three of them are writers, with language at the core of their being. The Museum of Words is idiosyncratic and personal, a meditation on writing, reading, first words and last words, picking up thread after thread as it builds on each story to become a much larger narrative. This is a writer's take on how language shapes us, beautiful and shimmering, often taken for granted, until we are in danger of losing it.

Georgia Blain (Author)