Welcome to Literary Friction on NTS. I'm Carrie Plitt, here as always with my co-host Octavia Bright. Hi, Octavia. Hi,

Carrie. How are you doing today? I'm really good. This sounds out. How could I be any other way?

It's just a way to lift the mood, you know? Yeah, it really is. Feeling good. Can we get an ice cream

after the show? Yes. Yes. Please. I love ice cream. So today we are talking about pain in literature. From Virginia

Wolf to Susan Sontag, writers have grappled with how difficult it is, both to describe and

understand the pain of others. Today we're going to examine that phenomenon, but also look at some

of the writers who have captured the experience of pain in a unique and interesting way. One of those writers is Cheneid Gleason, whose personal essay collection Constellations tells the story of a life in a body. We're very, very lucky to have Cheneid with us here today. Octavia, do you want to tell our listeners a little bit more about her? Of course I do. Cheneid Gleason is a writer of essays, criticism and fiction.

Her writing has appeared in Granta, Winter Papers and Gorse, and a story of hers will appear in

being various new Irish short stories published by Faber in May 2018. She is the editor of three short

story anthologies, and she's worked as an arts critic and broadcaster and has presented the book show

on RT Radio 1 in Ireland. She lives in Dublin and it was such a pleasure to meet her. Yeah, it really

was. So today we'll talk to Sheneid more generally about the exploration of pain and literature.

And finally, we will give our book recommendations. So join us for the next hour as we try to

face this challenging universal experience.

Shnade Gleason, thank you so much for coming on literary friction. Thank you. I love this podcast.

Well, I'm really thrilled to be here. So thank you. Well, thank you for buttering us up from the start.

We love compliments. And we love your books. So we've asked you to start with a reading. Could you please set it up? Yeah, this is one of the essays called The Haunted, haunting women. And lots of parts of constellations are about me and lots of it isn't and this is about two women that I'm

related to namely my grandmother and my great-grandmother who had very different lives to mine

growing up in poverty and growing up with no education growing up living in tenements and I think

about them a lot because my life is very different and better and my daughter's life will be very different and better to their life. But there's also this sort of scene that runs

through my family that maybe we'll get to it in this. So I'm going to read The Haunted Haunting

women. I see women coming over the hills, walking down into the towns and cities,

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