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The award-winning writer Rebecca Stott grew up in the closed and secretive Christian fundamentalist cult of the Exclusive Brethren. Books, even children’s books, cinema, music were all banned. Imagination, the ministering brothers preached, was a corrupting force.

As a child who had to sit still through eleven hours of church meetings a week during which the brothers preached impenetrable biblical exegesis, Rebecca learned to daydream. That strange childhood, she says, gave her the ability to imagine extraordinary things. And, as an adult, she’s found that she’s comfortable sitting with the inexplicable - she remains fascinated by the mysterious things that flicker at the edges of our vision.

But these tend to be things our society prefers to shut down. We love to close a good mystery. We don’t like not knowing. We are impatient to find rational explanations for everything that happens. And yet there is still so much we don’t know.

In this series of original essays, Rebecca explores how closely beautiful strangeness is woven into the ordinary and the everyday. She asks, in our push to rationalise everything, as well as our fear of being mocked or accused of indulging in magical thinking, are we losing opportunities for shared wonder?

In this fourth episode, Rebecca explores some of the mysteries of our experience of dying and of grief, drawing on the time she spent with her parents as they died. She looks for common experience in Joan Didion’s memoir A Year of Magical Thinking, which has been called a ‘monument to grief’.

Rebecca Stott, author of the memoir In the Days of Rain which won the Costa Biography Award in 2017, has 14 books to her name. These include the novels Ghostwalk, The Coral Thief, and most recently Dark Earth, as well as the creative non-fiction works Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists and Darwin and the Barnacle. She is a historian and broadcaster (ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Radio 4, A Point of View) and taught literature and creative writing for over 30 years including as a professor at the University of East Anglia. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Written and presented by Rebecca Stott
Producer: Kirsten Lass
Editor: Sara Davies
Sound Engineer: Jon Calver
Image by Maia Miller-Lewis

A Loftus Media Production for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Radio 4

Author photo credit :Sarah Weal

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