Hello St Marks

For readers, trauma memoirs are the literary equivalent of slowing down to gawk at a crash; the drama is magnetic but you can feel like a heel afterwards. Rachel Gotto's trauma memoir, 'Flying on the Inside', leads with a string of catastrophes—a dead husband, a dead brother, a brain tumour—then becomes an essay on addiction. Having survived radical surgery for her brain tumour, Gotto finds herself cured but physically addicted to benzodiazepines. Her approach to recovery challenged my preconceptions about medicine and made me uncomfortable; see what you think.