One Year Out

This is the voice of a writer with a keen sense of life’s mundane weirdness, and a poet’s knack for startling imagery. One Year Out is a valuable addition to the personal essay genre. - Airini Beautrais

One Year Out traces one terrible, beautiful year through addiction, public rehab, and mental unravelling - then an unexpected move to Bali, where recovery collides with wellness coaches, turpentine cleanses, and healing sold by the gram. In nine essays that are confessional, funny, and unsparingly honest, Charlotte Bell writes about what addiction does to a body and a conscience: the institutions, the friendships, the rejection, the small rituals of strangers keeping each other alive. Moving between Aotearoa and Indonesia, this is a debut that resists neat redemption - sitting instead in the messy, often absurd distance between falling apart and finding some new way to hold together.

Airini Beautrais says: “Deeply sad in places but also deeply funny, One Year Out is a refreshingly honest, insightful and self-reflexive memoir in essays. Charlotte Bell writes with unflinching clarity, aware of her own vanities and shortcomings, as well as being compassionate towards her past and present selves, and able to acknowledge what she has achieved in her recovery journey without taking anything, or anyone, for granted. There is also a genuine empathy for the people around her, from support workers and fellow addicts in recovery, to Bali travellers hoping to find themselves. Throughout all this is the voice of a writer with a keen sense of life’s mundane weirdness, and a poet’s knack for startling imagery. One Year Out is a valuable addition to the personal essay genre, but also to wider understandings about what it is like to live with mental illness and addiction.”