Longlisted for the 2019 PEN Open Book Award
“Devastating and lyrical.”
—The New York Times
“Though her plainspokenness resembles Rupi Kaur’s accessibility, Daley-Ward has a specific story to tell, one that is suspenseful and affecting in its details.”
—The New Yorker
“A coming-of-age memoir . . . of particular lyricism and bracing honesty.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A few months ago, I thought I lost my love for reading. I spent weeks putting books down after a few pages. Nothing spoke to me. Then one magical day, I stumbled on The Terrible. . . . Daley-Ward’s beautiful prose wrapped its hands around my neck—I found myself doing stupid things like walking through New York at rush hour with my nose buried in her book.”
—Jamal Jordan, The New York Times Book Review (New & Noteworthy)
Elle’s Best Books to Read This Summer
“Profoundly beautiful . . . [Daley-Ward] interweaves verse and prose to great effect, offering less a simple retelling of her life, and more of an impression of it, a sense of how it must feel to live it. Much of what Daley-Ward recounts of her childhood is devastating . . . and she has a unique ability to tell these parts of her life with an unflinching intensity, the kind that sears itself onto your skin; and yet this is not a story without hope or love.”
—Nylon (Great Books To Read This Summer)
“I tore through Yrsa Daley-Ward’s poetic memoir, The Terrible, in a matter of hours. . . . An impressive take on the memoir that prioritizes emotion over event.”
—The Paris Review (Staff Picks)
“Absolutely stunning . . . a poetic look at someone's life.”
—Lauren Christensen, CBS This Morning
“[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.”
—Ploughshares
“Unflinching . . . The Terrible’s raw yet lilting prose draws the reader in at once. Unpredictable shifts in form and structure—from prose to poetry and script—are refreshingly disorientating. This is both a defiant book and a defiantly inventive one.”
—The Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Open up the first page of Yrsa Daley-Ward’s genre-defying memoir, and you’ll find yourself immediately transfixed by her rhythmic language. Ward unspools the story of her difficult coming-of-age as it felt, foregoing the pacing of a conventional memoir for something more poetic and visceral . . . in this book, her unique voice has room to grow roots on the page.”
—Refinery29 (Best Books Of June 2018)
“Devastating, in the very best way . . . generous, utterly human, and, eventually, hopeful.”
—Buzzfeed (Exciting New Books To Add To Your Summer Reading List)
“Daley-Ward splits herself wide open in her lyrical memoir.”
—Bustle (New Books To Read This Week)
“Yrsa Daley-Ward is laying her pain bare and turning it into uplifting, unconventional poetry. . . . If readers thought she bared her soul through bone, her memoir The Terrible will be another lesson in how to fearlessly turn the pain of her past into uplifting prose.”
—PopSugar
“Yrsa Daley-Ward has left all of herself on the page yet again. . . . An emotional look at growing up.”
—HelloGiggles
“Daley-Ward beautifully recounts her life thus far, equally reflecting on the wonderful and the terrible.”
—Medium (21 New Books You Should Read this Summer)
“[The Terrible is] powered by the strains of family separation, sexuality, and dreams.”
—The Millions (Must-Read Poetry)
“Beautiful and honest.”
—Joanna Goddard, A Cup of Jo
“A powerful, unconventionally structured memoir recounting harrowing coming-of-age ordeals . . . Daley-Ward resists classification in this profound mix of poetry and prose. . . . [She] has quite a ferociously moving story to tell.”
—Kirkus (starred)
More praise for Yrsa Daley-Ward
“Yrsa’s work is like holding the truth in your hands. It sweats and breathes before you. A glorious living thing.”
—Florence Welch, of Florence + the Machine
“daley-ward effortlessly mines the bone. the diamond from the difficult. the things that are too bright and taboo. she lays her hands on the pulse of the thing. . . . an expert storyteller. of the rarest. and purest kind . . . daley-ward’s extraordinary talent. ability. to both see and write the veins of the true life. the true lives. is a gift. a breath.”
—nayyirah waheed, author of salt. and nejma
“[Daley-Ward] has a knack for getting directly to a story’s heat-point, and once there, to distill the emotions within it down to a line or two.”
—Hanif Abdurraqib, The Atlantic
“Daley-Ward’s short poems cover subjects like depression, falling in and out of love, and sexuality, with a fierce staccato that, as the title suggests, cuts deep.”
—Vogue
“[A] stunning excavator of human heat and light.”
—HuffPost
02/15/2018
Born in England of West Indian and West African heritage, actress/model-turned-poet Daley-Ward had a big hit with bone, self-published in 2014 and given a trade-house publication in 2017 that won strong reviews. This memoir addresses painful questions of race, religion, and sexual experience in a mix of poetry and prose.
★ 2018-04-03
A powerful, unconventionally structured memoir recounting harrowing coming-of-age ordeals.Though she earned acclaim for her debut poetry collection, bone (2014), Daley-Ward resists classification in this profound mix of poetry and prose. Her Jamaican mother was sent to live in England during her first, teenage pregnancy. Her father, whom she never met, was Nigerian, married to someone else. The author was raised entirely in England, largely by her maternal grandparents, Seventh-Day Adventists. She discovered her poetic calling on a pilgrimage to Africa, after drugs and depression had left her at the end of her rope. Before then, she had worked as a model and aspired to be a singer, though her most lucrative source of income was sex work. The one main constant in her life has been her younger brother, Roo, who attempted suicide after their mother's death. Roo had a different father than his sister, who had a different father than their older brother. Their mother subsequently had a series of boyfriends, some of whom played quasi-dad to the offspring none of them had fathered. "I think about these parents of ours / our makers / our stars. (Such impossible, complex stars.)," she writes. "How they came, exploded, / and fell away." Daley-Ward had developed well before her teens, both physically and mentally, so much that her mother feared her then-boyfriend would have sexual designs on her and sent her to her strict grandparents. She soon became aware of the attention her looks brought her, and she exercised her power to attract men and feared the power they might have over her. She abused alcohol and drugs, both to feel something and not to feel anything, and she found older men willing to support her. Then she got engaged to a man who truly loved her but whom she sensed she didn't deserve. "I don't think that I'll live a particularly long life," she writes. "It doesn't bother me. You gather speed when you're descending."The subtitle is apt: Daley-Ward has quite a ferociously moving story to tell.
In this memoir, poet Yrsa Daley-Ward, the author of BONE, delivers a lyrical narration of her past troubles involving sex, drugs, and issues of womanhood and identity. Not typical in memoirs, Daley-Ward’s nonfiction title brings in elements of fiction. “My little brother and I saw a unicorn in the garden in the late nineties,” she narrates. Although her delivery is very fast in places, her vocal variation makes it work. Howard Daley-Ward’s voice comes in later in the audiobook to give life to Yrsa’s younger brother, Roo. In contrast to Yrsa’s rich voice, Howard’s sounds a bit stiff. This work, like BONE, aims to be accessible but still poetic. Told unflinchingly, its rawness is elevated by the author’s voice. A.C. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
In this memoir, poet Yrsa Daley-Ward, the author of BONE, delivers a lyrical narration of her past troubles involving sex, drugs, and issues of womanhood and identity. Not typical in memoirs, Daley-Ward’s nonfiction title brings in elements of fiction. “My little brother and I saw a unicorn in the garden in the late nineties,” she narrates. Although her delivery is very fast in places, her vocal variation makes it work. Howard Daley-Ward’s voice comes in later in the audiobook to give life to Yrsa’s younger brother, Roo. In contrast to Yrsa’s rich voice, Howard’s sounds a bit stiff. This work, like BONE, aims to be accessible but still poetic. Told unflinchingly, its rawness is elevated by the author’s voice. A.C. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
