Following the award-winning success of her debut The Rice Paper Diaries, Francesca Rhydderch returns with It Might Not Be True, a beautiful memoir of life, love and everything in between. Most prominently, it’s about the author’s health: Rhydderch wants to dance, run, laugh, smell and touch, but instead she is plagued by tremors, shakes, stumbles and a lack of balance.
Increasingly unable to walk any further than the end of the street, her certainty of her own chronic illness is backed up, she thinks, in the eyes of passers-by as she fights to put one foot in front of the other. And yet, the doctors still can’t diagnose her. All the while, in It Might Not Be True Rhydderch evokes memories from the recesses of her past – reflecting on family life, her childhood spent in Wales, and most poignantly her parents, two remarkable characters whose presence is still felt long after their passing.
Delicately weaving together memories of the distant and recent past to make sense of an uncertain future, Rhydderch paints a visceral picture of living with chronic illness, exploring a difficult truth: there is no magical solution to life’s challenges, but there is always hope.
