Paper Cuts: A Memoir

About the Book

A dazzlingly original memoir, Paper Cuts takes us inside the mind of a young Oxford academic devastated by severe mental illness.

‘I have a small line of red dots on the back of my left hand, where the needle goes in. I have had hundreds of ketamine injections, more than anyone else, perhaps. The needle goes in, and the truth comes out. Sometimes I am a child again. Sometimes I have the innocence of a child, but I am not innocent. I know too much. I have known too much.’

With Paper Cuts, Stephen Bernard boldly lives through the trauma of childhood abuse and mental illness. He writes to escape and confront, to accuse and explain.

Each morning when he wakes, Stephen Bernard must reconstruct his self: every night he writes himself a letter to be read the next day. The fractured, intensely personal narrative of Paper Cuts follows a single day in his life as he navigates a course through the effects of mania, medication and memories.

‘Beautifully written… Brilliant’
Henry Marsh

‘Distinguished and desolating… The saving grace is the writer’s undaunted eye for the beauty of the world’
Hilary Mantel

‘Chilling, riveting, extraordinary, wonderful’
Roddy Doyle

‘It is an extraordinary book in its unblinking truthfulness’ Hannah Jane Parkinson, Observer

About the Author :
Stephen Bernard is an English academic at the University of Oxford and formerly a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow and Junior Research Fellow of University College, Oxford. He is the editor of The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons and The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe, and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. Paper Cuts is his first and only experiment in autobiography.

Review :
Jesus - what a book. Chilling, riveting, extraordinary, wonderful - I’m trying to think of the words to describe this book but none of them do it justice. A distinguished and desolating memoir. I have never read such a succinct and unsparing chronicle of the destruction of body and spirit that can be brought about by the violation of a child. It’s the equivalent of a letter from a gulag, except that the events take place in Sussex in the 1980s … The saving grace is the writer’s pleasure in scholarship, and his undaunted eye for the beauty of the world. I'd nominate Paper Cuts by Stephen Bernard [as a book of the year]. It's a literary memoir which is unforgettably fleet, stinging and painful. A beautifully written account - both brilliant and appalling - of the psychological consequences of sexual abuse of the author when he was a vulnerable boy by a priest... Rarely have I felt so angry. It is an extraordinary book in its unblinking truthfulness, even more so in its refusal to deny the complexities and ambiguity that follow such childhood trauma. This vivisection is just what we need in the discussion and literature of mental illness and its sources. The form in which Bernard presents his thoughts, his memories, his perceptions, is liturgical. Moments emerge, dissolve, shape themselves round each other, in rippling patterns of the appalling and the ordinary… The prose is clear and plain, vulnerable in its earnestness, confident in its craft. ‘I am glad that I wrote it, that it is written,’ he writes at the end, and I’m glad too. It’s both a testament of great documentary usefulness and a really beautiful piece of art. Terrifying and eloquent ... an extraordinary personal account of the psychological consequences of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest. Sometimes all we can do in the face of evil is name it; and the naming is the only victory we get over it. But it takes courage, immense courage, to be the one who calls out the name. That is what makes this book an act of pure heroism. I can only hope the writing of it was its own reward for the brave man who wrote it. A day in the mind of a man who was brought to the edge of madness by the sexual abuse inflicted on him when he was a child. Paper Cuts is harrowing, but never gratuitously so, and in between the vivid and looping confrontations with past trauma, we follow Bernard's joyous, precarious and often intellectually brilliant thought processes, alongside his current preoccupations as an Oxford University academic. Paper Cuts did what only the very, very best art can do: it altered me. I read it in a few unforgettable hours, wishing it would end, wishing it would go on. I salute Stephen Bernard with all my heart. His elegant sentences lure you into a frankly nightmarish life, but one that has filled me, astonishingly, with hope.