# Pathemata

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/maggie-nelson/pathemata/9781529951363

![Pathemata](https://quivercdn.com/covers/vintage/maggie-nelson/pathemata_978-15-2995-136-3-611f8864.webp?v=2026-09-30%2002%3A42%3A00)

- Book: [Pathemata](https://www.bookquiver.com/maggie-nelson/pathemata) ([Pathemata.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/maggie-nelson/pathemata.md))
- Authors: [Maggie Nelson](https://www.bookquiver.com/maggie-nelson)
- Publisher: Vintage
- ISBN: 978-15-2995-136-3
- Pages: 80
- Published: 2026-05-14
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

It’s not the dream that matters, it’s the telling of the dream – the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer. Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss – the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.