Larger than an Orange

by Lucy Burns

*A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021*

'Raw, tender and urgent' Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater

'Irreducible. Once read, it will never be forgotten' Helen Mort, author of Division Street

This is the story of an abortion.

The days and hours before the first visit to the clinic and the weeks and months after.

The pregnancy was a mistake and the narrator immediately arranges a termination. But a gulf yawns between politics and personal experience. The polarised public debate and the broader cultural silence did not prepare her for the physical event or the emotional aftermath. She finds herself compulsively telling people about the abortion (and counting those who know), struggling at work and researching the procedure. She feels alone in her pain and confusion.

Part diary, part prose poem, part literary collage, Larger than an Orange is an uncompromising, intimate and original memoir. With raw precision and determined honesty, Lucy Burns carves out a new space for complexity, ambivalence and individual experience.

'Lucy Burns' writing on choice and its aftermath is boldly innovative, achingly human, and powerfully vulnerable' Dr Elinor Cleghorn, author of Unwell Women

'Rapturous, engrossing and beautifully impossible' Holly Pester, author of Comic Timing

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Medical

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 23, 2021

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve only read one other memoir of an abortion (as opposed to a memoir in which an abortion is simply one event of many), Happening by Annie Ernaux, so it was perhaps inevitable for me to get similar vibes from the two works. Both are fragmentary, spare; matter of fact in tone to avoid melodramatic extremes of emotion. The difference, of course, is that in the 1960s abortion was illegal in France and so ending a pregnancy required clandestine action. However, even in 2017, when the then 26-year-old Burns had a medical abortion in England, where it had been legal for 50 years, she found that the process was invasive and officious. She presents the experience as infantilizing – not trusting the patient, and lacking in compassion. And although it was the only practical choice for her at the time and she remains firmly committed to women’s right to an abortion, it sparked feelings of guilt, shame and depression that lingered and affected her work and personal life. At counselling appointments she expressed disgust at herself, and she became obsessed with looking up American pro-life propaganda and testimonials from former abortion clinic workers online.

The book is, collage-like, assembled from pieces – sometimes as little as one paragraph or one line to a page – of dated autobiographical material, going back and forth between the summer of the abortion and the few-year aftermath as she suffers with irregular bleeding, chooses a new contraceptive method and has a short-term relationship; transcripts of radio debates; alphabetical lists of predicted search terms and so on. She even requests her medical records, including sections from it plus ultrasound images, and marks her baby’s would-be birthday.

I could imagine this working very well as a play for voices, especially because Burns is in the habit of counting each person she tells about the abortion and referring to them by their number until, at fifty-something, she gives up. Friends, receptionists, the people at work who adjudicate her petition to be granted two weeks’ leave: there are those she tells willingly and those she feels duty-bound to inform to explain her health or behaviour. Some remain a part of her life and others, awkward or judgemental, fade out of it.

This is a powerful read I can’t say I necessarily enjoyed, but did admire for its uncompromising clarity and honesty, and its willingness to probe both sides of ethical issues in a way that ‘good feminists’ might think they cannot.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Aurora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haunting. This story needed to be written.

[Jude Nonesuch · Rating 5 out of 5]

The blurbs for this go to extremely creative lengths to avoid the word “harrowing”, which it absolutely is and is I feel the best compliment I could pay to it. Kind of want to name-drop that me and the author knew each other if perhaps somewhat distantly at a point in the past – I’d assumed she’d moved to London but reading in the liner notes she was still in Manchester I wondered how many of the numbered characters might be people I knew; and then sort of reflexively feel this is the kind of banal flippancy so many of those characters seem to exhibit so idk. Anyway I feel that anyone who feels able to read an extremely grim book should read this book, like I will be lending it to friends but with the offer “would you like to read an extremely grim book”.

[Jasmine Nicholson]

This feels too personal to the author to rate, idk it just feels wrong to rate someone’s personal experience with a topic like this. This book did however teach me a lot about the process of getting an abortion in the UK and how patients are treated etc and dealt a lot with the guilt and aftermath some women feel after getting one. You could tell this was a very personal story but it was told very well and I like the structure of how the book was told and especially enjoyed the lack of characters name etc where numbers were used instead to tract who she had told etc. really powerful and makes some amazing points in how we deal with this issue in the uk.

[Johanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is so poignant. It tells us so much about misconceptions and misinformation that are being spread about people who choose to end a pregnancy.
I am lucky to never have needed one and I also just learned something through this book- information about the medical, long-term effects an abortion can have.
And lastly this book, despite its shortness, still also addressed problems in women’s healthcare and how little understanding/sympathy we have for one another in this world.
And how lost/alone we often feel in this world because we don’t know where to find the help we need.

[Angharad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking good

[Helena · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really beautiful, considered and human reflection on the author's experience of abortion. It doesn't look at moralising or justifying, but on the lived experience of having an abortion, of knowing it's the right thing to do while finding it difficult. When I read it I felt like this had needed to be written for a long time. The different approaches to writing on different diary dates captures the different states of mind. I really enjoyed reading this.

[Olivia]

Evidence has shown that the most common emotion after an abortion is relief, but we must also hold space for people to have varied and complicated feelings following their abortion. That being said, I worry that, given the dearth of published accounts of abortion, a story such as Burns' may lead people to believe that abortion is likely to be a negative experience. This is not Burns' fault as she should be able to tell her story, but still. This made me wary throughout the reading experience. Speaking of the memoir itself, I felt it was a bit contrived - watching Terminator during the abortion, really? - and a bit scattered. Nevertheless, for me, the most compelling aspects of this memoir were Burns' encounters with medical professionals who were dismissive and did not take her pain seriously. As today's Guardian headline shows, this is a big problem right now in the NHS: "institutionalised gender bias meant the term [benign] was used more widely in gynaecology, resulting in conditions being “normalised” by non-specialists and deprioritised within the NHS." This is unacceptable.

[Ceraphina · Rating 1 out of 5]

a wildly irresponsible book, I do not recommend this to anyone. Statements were made as factual, yet no resources or websites provided to statistics/data/surveys mentioned. The only one that was there was for 2 medical books for the medication she wrote out on a few pages.

No nuance. The stylistic choice of having nameless characters, instead just given numbers, like "four" and "twenty six", or just a dash line like a censor in reference to others was pointless.

Writing was choppy. Many pages contained just a couple sentences.

Again, I don't recommend it. The only happiness I have is seeing how few people have even read this.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s almost impossible to give this book a rating. In one way I loved it. A visceral impactful story of the impact of an unwanted pregnancy and abortion on the physical and mental state of the author. In another way I hated it. The constant and incessant navel gazing. I do recognise all those crazy and contradictory questions and comments by the medical profession however. I always found “how many teaspoons of […]” a rather crazy question and now wonder if I’d turned around and asked the medical professional to make the same judgements would they have realised how crazy?

[Eily Elizabeth]

I fear I don’t want to rate this as Lucy is currently my lecturer. But what I will say is I thoroughly enjoyed this book - although I don’t know if enjoy is the right word. It was so raw and real that it constantly punched me in the gut. I loved the non-linear way of writing, it took me a moment to get into the rhythm of it but I found it really helped the flow of the book and kept me engaged. I will be recommending this book to my friend! I may be biased but I am happy to sing its praises.

[Kathryn Parsons · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very real, and very realistic. And it highlights something that seems to fall by the wayside when it comes to abortion: behind everyone's opinion, there are the women actually going through this confusing as hell experience.

Lucy Burns strips it bare and says it like it is. This is a brave book and a hard read.

[Ayreon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't decide between 3 or 3.5 stars. Engaging enough that I read it in one sitting. This is partly because I knew if I put it down I wouldn't want to pick it up again.
Raw and powerful in places but I wouldn't say I enjoyed it as it was mostly traumatising.

[Kayleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good but also harrowing!

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

So fucking good. I felt icky and sad and like Lucy and I were the same person.

[Eve Lister · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this was the blue touch of a cervical exam. Awful and true.

[Elia Mueller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gut wrenching and impossible to put down

[Hattie Kingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crucial, powerful, haunting. A must read.