Suppose a Collapse — Lucie McLaughlin

I grew up watching films with my mum. One of the most affecting was Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies. We laughed and cried, whilst watching a mother and daughter, on their respective sofas, watch tv and smoke fags. My dreams are the offbeat moments in these fictions where I smoke with my mum. I yearn for the imperfect feelings of familial harmony in Secrets and Lies, a meal eaten at a table, unacquainted people brought together.

It hurts, I said. It’s like the storm in my head broke the thunder directly above my flat, the lightning half a second before.

Suppose A Collapse arranges moments between two cities, each viewed through the lens of the other, intimately mapping the interiors of a fourth floor flat in Madrid and the childhood bedroom of a three-bed semi in Belfast. Memoir, poem and essay combine to form a collection of experiences based on the author’s changing relationship with her absent father, extended ‘(non)family’ and mother, while film and art inform the movement between lucidity and a fracturing present. How many times can we fold up our lives into smaller and smaller shapes until there’s no room anymore, only the one that we’re in?

Lucie McLaughlin is an artist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her work has been published in Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, California, performed at Raven Row, London and exhibited at Lily Robert Gallery, Paris. She is currently on the MLitt Art Writing at Glasgow School of Art.

www.luciemclaughlin.com

Suppose A Collapse perplexes and entices all at once. There is so much to unearth in the looming silence of an absent father, the steaming alleyways of old Belfast, the turquoise pools of Madrid. A generous writer coming into her power, McLaughlin captures the flux and frenetic cadence of youth without neglecting quiet moments of beauty, which she tends to with cinematic detail.

–Meadhbh McNutt


Through acutely described moments from different locations and times Suppose a Collapseliterally collapses thoughts, locations, sensations and artistic endeavour into each other. Spatial and temporal displacement becomes a fulcrum through which McLaughlin grapples with the bringing into consciousness of experience and histories.  Her writing enacts an explorative process that is strikingly grounded in situational specificity; in sensations of air, light, texture and spatiality.

–Helen Robertson


I read Suppose A Collapse all the way through in one go - and loved it! The audacious mix of memoir, poetry, essay is as compelling as it is convincing. Some of the details - such as those relating to mosquitos - are pin sharp, other parts take on those hallucinatory qualities I remember from being off school ill with a fever. It will be a book that rewards second reading.

- Angus Carlyle