Blueprints

Affording only six months of therapy and a taste for oversharing, Blueprints is a collection of raw autobiographical essays by Wales Book of the Year winner, Crystal Jeans, that explores the struggles of addiction and mental illness during the turbulent transition of adolescence into adulthood and the strains of marriage, childbirth and parenting. Growing up in south Wales, navigating gender and sexuality, relationships with others as well as her own body, Jeans writes about traumatic sexual experiences and her mother's death with a frank self-awareness. Fiercely feminist and full of sharp cultural references, this is not another Sad Girl self-indulgent trauma story, as Jeans resists distinguishing big T and little T trauma, or rape with a small R, instead she validates writing about personal experiences of pain and loss while grappling for a sense of identity in an economically and environmentally troubled modern world.