An autobiographical memoir tracing a childhood spent in the care system through to recovery and emigration — structured around the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.
The Architecture
Between The Cracks moves through the ten sefirot of the Tree of Life — Hod, Netzach, Tiferet, Geburah, Chesed, and onward — not as decoration but as the book’s actual skeleton. Each chapter is anchored by a poem or song threaded through the prose: a period lyric, a piece of contemporaneous writing, something that was actually there at the time, sitting alongside a retrospective narrating voice looking back. The book calls these two registers the then-voice and the now-voice, and it moves between them deliberately, without smoothing one into the other.
The manuscript’s register is viva voce — rambling, tangential, occasionally inappropriate, closer to a testimony given aloud than a tidied literary memoir. That’s intentional. Life didn’t arrive in neat chapters, and the book doesn’t pretend it did.
Reading It As It’s Written
Individual chapters and passages are being adapted and published as standalone pieces on Medium as the manuscript progresses, each anchored to the same then-voice/now-voice structure, each carrying its own painting made for the book.
Read the serialised pieces on Medium →
Elsewhere
A Substack edition is also underway, mirroring this same anonymisation approach.