'I like eating cold, clammy wraps from big pharmacies that are open late and sell just a few foods like protein bars and powders.' Flower is a book of realistic confessions, likes, dislikes, memories, and no-brainer observations, treating personal truth as unavailable - something that must be made up and convincing. Taking cues from Roland Barthes's Roland Barthes, Joe Brainard's I Remember, Marguerite Duras's Practicalities, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, his daughter's improvised games, poor internet writing and shitty AI, Ed Atkins, in his first work of non-fiction, equivocates between inanity and divinity, ease and pain, sentimentality and sterility. An anti-memoir, a list, a listless blur - Flower is a highly original, moving and absurd book by one of the most influential artists of his generation, formally inventive and disturbingly of our time.
