Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it

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Rosen’s greatest coping method might be his tendency towards rigorous self-understanding; writing the book has been a way for him to process events.

He also offers tools to help anyone else looking to 'get better', and advocates using writing to make sense of and explore what has happened to you. In Getting Better, Rosen describes the moment he discovered a photograph of a baby boy sitting on his mother’s knee. Their stories, their lives, and the fate of the world, are bound by a single document: The Scarlet Papers. More than 20 years on, he finds that Eddie is “there, he’s in me, he’s around me … Is he ‘at rest’ in me and with me? He is suitably tentative about this, recognising that what might work for him might not work for others.And I thought, well, I'll turn the little words, the little collection ragbag of words and phrases that I know into a way of speaking it. What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? I think this is the first time he has written about the loss of a child and the impact on him, which was a very emotionally written chapter as one would expect. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Goldilocks and her little dog are off on an adventure, looking for that house again – the one with the chairs, the porridge and beds.

She eventually lands in the care of foster carer Louise, who is determined to change her life for the better. Rosen tries to emphasise that what he wants to do is not give advice, just describe what worked for him, but you get advice, nonetheless. Michael Rosen is a man of words , poetry, language …as someone who has worked in primary education for 35 years he is also a bit of a legend …but he is also a man of wisdom and compassion and this autobiographical book about life and living shows this . Michael Rosen has got through lots of crises in his life including the death of his parents, his son, jobs and a close shave with death with Covid. With a probing spirit, he raises essential questions about the human capacity to rediscover wellness within, even amid the darkest chapters of our lives.Following on from his book about surviving Covid this book by Rosen takes a deep dive into the experiences and illnesses that have shaped him throughout his life. Some of this comes with Rosen’s political viewpoint, which I agree with, but it stops it being general. He also thinks of the book as “a contemplation on recovery, and on death”:you could equally see it as a powerful riposte to those who deny the gravity of Covid-19.

You’ll appreciate that even more if, like me, you’re an obsessive of books and words and writing and stories. When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to find a “pocketful of happiness in every day.Before he was sedated, a doctor asked if he would sign a piece of paper that would let them put him to sleep.

Getting Better ranges more widely; in something between a memoir and a self-help book, he looks back at difficult and traumatic events in his and his family’s life and considers how he got through them, and shares the lessons he learned in the process. It's not that I find fault with this naivety so much as that it doesn't particular do anything for me as his reader.It doesn’t seem to matter if he’s writing children’s fiction, adult fiction or non-fiction, the words seamlessly jump off the page and into your heart. I choose the only seat he isn’t about to occupy himself, something wooden and old and half-covered by a coat. And amid the mood of optimism that has come with the news of impending vaccination, Rosen remains angry about the fatal consequences of what he considers the government’s failure to impose a swift enough lockdown early in 2020, despite the clear and urgent warnings being issued by the World Health Organisation. He is tall and lanky; when he sits down at his desk it is like watching a long piece of paper fold itself into creases.