The Art of Not Falling Apart
My first book, published in 2018
When I lost my job, I dreamt of plunging my employers in burning oil. Instead, I wrote a book, The Art of Not Falling Apart. It’s a mix of memoir and interviews about how we cope when life goes wrong.
It was described by the Mail on Sunday as “a manual on how to survive in the 21st century” and by Robert Harris as “a kind of war reporter’s dispatches from the barricades of modern life”. It was a New Statesman Book of the Year, a Mail on Sunday Book of the Year, a Number 1 Amazon Kindle bestseller in five categories and recommended self-isolation reading in The Guardian and the i. You can order it here.
Here are some other quotes:
“Patterson is a passionate, funny woman who refuses simply to struggle on. She believes in living,” Sunday Times
“I’m in awe of the honesty and bravery”, Booker-prizewinner Bernardine Evaristo
“A beautifully written and uplifting memoir about love and loss – and finding the resolve to carry on,” Matthew Syed, The Times
“Patterson invests her case histories with such intelligent passion and cracking candour that you feel as if you are listening to your cleverest, funniest and, above all, kindest friend. This is a manual on how to survive in the 21st century.” Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday
“Shames the sleek, smug lessons of the Lean In brigade by celebrating… the varied circumstances, uncertain fortunes and individual abilities that shape human effort,” TLS
“A tender, beautiful exploration of how we survive pressure, from a tender, beautiful writer,” Johann Hari, author of Lost Connections
“a surprisingly joyful book by a writer so good that the people who sacked her were clearly morons,” Sunday Telegraph