We begin with a woman in psychic and physical collapse and follows, with an almost agonising patience, the long process by which speech becomes a way back into the world.

First published in French as Les Mots pour le dire, it is structured around psychoanalysis, hyper-beamed on the realities when buried experience is given language slowly enough to alter the person speaking it.

Cardinal writes from inside the disorder of memory, her analytic room becomes both setting and method, a place where language is tested against pain and where naming something does not magically solve it, but can make it survivable. Part memoir, part case history, part feminist account of psychic formation, it remains striking for how directly it links private suffering to the structures that produce it.

Picador / Pan Books, London, 1984. English-language paperback edition; originally published in French as Les Mots pour le dire. Translated by Van Vactor and Goodheart, with preface and afterword by Bruno Bettelheim. Moderate cover wear and creasing; internally sound.