The title of Anna Beecher’s first work of nonfiction can be read in various ways – an expression of triumph, relief or anticlimax. She uses it as a punchline to the book’s opening chapter, which recounts a car accident she experienced as a graduate student in the US. Here she conjures in vivid detail the violent shock of impact, the moments of silent disbelief in the immediate aftermath as she waits for understanding to catch up with physical sensation, dreading the discovery of what happened to the occupants of the other car, now spinning on its roof.

In the event, no one is hurt, but Beecher pictures all too readily a parallel reality in which the crash resulted in several deaths, and she and her friend return home carrying the weight of that knowledge. “Our lives are punctured by moments of impossibility when the future unlatches from the present and a gap opens, which we must find a way to step over,” she writes. Her memoir is structured around these points of shock in her own life, and for the most part the experiences she relates are recognisable, even ordinary: being bullied at school, brushes with binge drinking and bulimia, various heartbreaks, a breakdown, a parent’s illness, the loneliness of leaving family and friends to move continents. “Looking back at this chain of non-disasters, from which all parties emerged bruised but alive, I now see loss,” she says. But the cumulative toll of these ruptures is so significant because they are satellites orbiting the central tragedy of her life – the death of her elder brother from cancer at the age of 25: “Little losses, against the vast loss of John.”

Beecher was shortlisted for the Sunday Times young writer of the year award in 2021 for her first novel, Here Comes the Miracle, which drew on her own history to tell the story of a talented musician diagnosed with a terminal illness in his 20s. The novel shares with the memoir a keen sense of questioning, a desire to look beneath the surface of things to find hidden meanings and correspondences. Beecher is a gifted writer with a knack for capturing the exquisite detail of intense emotions without being sentimental, and for rendering the familiar tropes of grief startling. “It is difficult to find the world moving forwards, remaking itself without regard for the space in which your brother stood.”

One section of the book recounts the journey she made on foot from London to John’s grave in Oxford, a walk of 150 miles (previously published as an essay in the Guardian). The walk is both pilgrimage and penance, an imposition of physical hardship as if in apology for her own aliveness, in the same way that her mother – who later has cancer and recovers – is plagued by persistent guilt that she survived when her son did not.

What it means to be alive is a thread glinting through the book, the question weightier for Beecher than it might be for someone who has not known grief intimately at such a young age. Is being fully alive best expressed in physical abandonment (through drink, sex, dancing) or punitive discipline of the body? She tries both, repeatedly returning to the shocking contrast between her own youth and the immediacy of death. In one section, she switches the first-person narrative for the second person. As if stepping back and addressing her earlier self, she exhorts: “Realise, joyfully and guiltily, that life is long for most of us. You are young, and might take a young person’s mundane risks.”

The final section details her journey, in her mid-30s, to motherhood, and includes one of the most raw and compelling blow-by-blow accounts of giving birth that I have encountered. Beecher wonders if John will somehow help her during labour, “because I would be glancing up against the beyond into which he had vanished”. But when the moment comes, the reality is far more pragmatic: “A singular thought came shining, clear as a coin, through the pain: I get to do this because I am alive.”

Pain, joy, love, fear: these are the gifts and burdens of life, and in this profoundly affecting book, Beecher has articulated them with precision and beauty.