Review by Liz Dexter
In the world of academia, no one knew my mother could barely write, her handwriting not much better than my paternal grandmother’s stroke-afflicted scrawls, and my father worked in a part-time job in a hardware store, semi-retired after years of driving forklift trucks in a warehouse in Staines while whistling to the radio and smoking Old Holborn roll-ups on his tea break.
I had betrayed my ancestors and was wearing the sheep’s clothing of a person I had invented and then become through sheer willpower.
Davina Quinlivan grew up in West London in a space where ambition was ground out of school students and they could only expect to work in some capacity at Heathrow Airport, spent a lot of time and energy moulding herself into the perfect academic woman. Starting at school where she made sure she excelled and continuing on for two decades in academia, she is now finding she ticks diversity boxes but is expected to fit herself into tighter and tighter categories, often discovering she is over- and under-qualified at the same time, her job ending up being more making applications for other jobs, than actually being an academic. Also the way she showed she cared by being inclusive has now shifted into “diversity” work which she must demonstrate, drawing the humanity out of it. How did this happen? How did she end up in a patchwork of part-time and fixed-term contracts and what is the route out to stability? The two quotations above illustrate the tension between her background and her life now, drawn too taut by her current precarity. Oh, and she’s caring for her mother through late-stage dementia at the same time as all this is going on, something she has to relegate to parentheses: “(… but that’s another story)”.
Quinlivan is a research fellow in Exeter University’s Department of English and Creative Writing and writes extensively as well as being Artistic Lead at a creative writing incubator. In this book, which explores a year during lockdown when everything is weird and a bit dreamy and certainly at a remove from real life, while screens full of people exist at the same time and often in the same spaces as real life, she mixes genres to dazzling effect, recording interviews, dreams and discussions with the Burmese ancestors she thought she’d tamped down into a specific space in her mind and life, all clashing and clamouring to be heard and considered. Meanwhile, the established academics themselves tamp down all their own humanity, “corporate cronies”, but worse, because they believe themselves to be “higher beings” (and they’re nearly all White men of course).
Opening with a deeply poetic and allusion-filled sequence, it’s clear from the start that this book is not a standard memoir and will twist genre and surprise the reader. Illustrations by James Roberts, mainly abstracts or birds, add to the panicky feeling of the book and echo the dream sequences and the recurring presence (or “presence”) of the local Saint Sidwella.
If you’ve been around post-docs and early career academics you’ll know only too well the precarity of their situations, hired, fired and re-hired, known in their fields but not researching enough to get the right scores because they’re always looking for the next position. If you’ve not been around this world, this book is enlightening and frankly worrying, as colonialism, sexism and racism seep into interviews and expectations, alongside the standard precarity of this career. A powerful evocation of a difficult time in a career that is little discussed.
Liz Dexter works with academics among others in her professional life. She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.
Davina Quinlivan, Possessions: A Memoir of Transformation in an Era of Precarity (Duckworth, 2026). 978-0715656044, 240 pp., ill. hardback.
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