Noreen Masud's A Flat Place

Instead of healing, being.

---

What I love about reading is the way that every so often, a book will show up just at the time when you need it. It will be a book that gives language and image to thoughts that have been sitting unformed somewhere in the back of your mind, which you have never quite been able to articulate. Reading such a book can make you feel as though its author has spent months, maybe years, wandering around inside your mind, studying it, finding all the right words to put to those not-yet-formed thoughts of yours.

For me, Noreen Masud’s very excellent memoir, A Flat Place, which I finished reading this week, has been one such book. This book is a memoir and travelogue, published in 2023. It’s about flat landscapes – fens, moors, beaches, fields – and the strange, shapeless solace which, for Masud, who carries a complex history of unnameable violence, such landscapes provide.