Where the World Begins

A deeply personal memoir on the re-emergence of memory after sexual violence, and an exploration of the self and the body and a worldview transformed

At twenty-three, Rosie Price was beginning to establish a life and a career in London, when a long-buried memory returned to her. The memory was one of rape: a night, four years previously, the details of which had been inaccessible, now returned with a force that upturned Rosie’s life.

The accompanying tide of image and sensation felt more real to her than her immediate surroundings; her body no longer solid, but made of pixels, like a character in a computer game. The boundaries between the world and the self were suddenly amorphous, vulnerable to breach, and entirely unsafe to inhabit. Alienated from her own body, Rosie also felt alienated from her own history, as the great gaping holes of missing memories disruptively returned, calling into question the life she had lived in the intervening years.

What followed was a crisis. Over the weeks, months and years, it would become Rosie’s project to repair this great rupture: to reassemble herself, sometimes with tenderness, other times with brutality, using story as a mode of recovery. She read, she wrote, she began to practice yoga and boxing - and to interrogate the conception of the body as a discreet vessel in which a whole self can be securely contained. A question took shape: Where do I end, and where does the world begin?

Through narrative and philosophical enquiry, this book seeks answers to that question: not only in Rosie’s own history, but also in the work of writers and thinkers who have wrestled with it for decades. In a discovery both thrilling and frightening, Where the World Begins charts a worldview transformed, and the porous boundaries between us all.