She informs the reader of what the written word has meant to her, how it is part and parcel of who she is.
She is well aware of her prognosis and as she reflects on her writing life as well as her life as a wife, daughter, mother and friend. In this poignant memoir, Georgia writes so eloquently of the things that writing and reading are to her. The above questions were ones that needed to be faced by the writer Georgia Blain, who in 2015 was given an awful diagnosis, that of a brain tumor lodged in the portion of her brain responsible for language. What if the things you love most to do are taken away from you? What if the things that define you are lost? What if your life is to be cut ever so short? What if you had an incurable brain tumor? This idiosyncratic and deeply personal memoir is a writer’s take on how language shapes us, and how often we take it for granted ― until we are in danger of losing it. The Museum of Words is 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. All three of them are writers, with language at the core of their being. At the same time, her mother, Anne Deveson, moves into a nursing home with Alzheimer’s weeks earlier, her best friend and mentor had been diagnosed with the same brain tumour. After the shock of a bleak prognosis and a long, gruelling treatment schedule, she immediately turns to writing to rebuild her language and herself. 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. She ignored it, and on a bright spring day, as she was mowing the lawn, she collapsed on a bed of blossoms, blood frothing at her mouth. Prior to this, Georgia’s only warning had been a niggling sense that her speech was slightly awry. In late 2015, Georgia Blain was diagnosed with a tumour sitting right in the language centre of her brain.
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