There She Goes, My Beautiful World is a story of Gosia Buzzanca’s quest to become a writer. Dr Gemma June Howell finds a memoir which reaches into the recesses of memory, identity and the worlds we carry within us, and calls to anyone who has ever felt lost or yearns for a sense of belonging.
There She Goes, My Beautiful World is the first book by Barry’s Gosia Buzzanca, and one of those rare books that quietly detonates inside you. It is not a whisper, it’s an elegy: clear, distinctive, and resolutely authentic. Born in Poznań, Poland, where she began publishing short stories before moving to the UK in 2008, Buzzanca eventually settled in the Vale Of Glamorgan. A regular writer for Buzz, she holds an MA in Creative Writing, was the recipient of the W&A Working-Class Writers’ Prize and was one of 10 participants (as was I) in this year’s Hay Writers At Work programme.
Written in first, second and third-person narratives and told in vignettes, There She Goes, My Beautiful World demonstrates the author’s confident feel for form; drawing in the reader with a detached intimacy that feels uniquely compelling. The language is economical, yet powerful, and you can tell each word has been selected for its literary impact. This is a very special book indeed, and a standout, revealing memoir from a rising star in working-class literature. It is, in many ways, a love letter to her younger self as a developing writer: “…and it all makes sense and it’s all for you. The poet. You don’t know this yet, but you are going to chase this feeling forever.” That moment where writing becomes identity, where words become purpose and where the interior world finally finds its medium.
This memoir feels like a farewell to lives lived, first in 1980s and 90s Poland and subsequently in south Wales. Lives recalled through fragments of memory: visceral, sharp, unapologetically felt. The descriptions are a sensory excavation – bodily, textural, familiar, nostalgic: the smell of petrichor as the summer holidays draw to a close. Anatomical: “spill their guts” and “your head feels like a flame that doesn’t burn”. It is also delightfully aural – onomatopoeic in places, capturing the sights, smells, tastes and sounds of the author’s beautiful worlds.
Buzzanca does not shy away from moments of embarrassment, shame, sexual exploration or experimentation. She reports them without flinching: “tiny cuts on your forefinger now, like fish gills”, as she shaves for the first time, or “tights burning cold, embarrassed but alive”. These details are not sensational, they are human. They are honest. They are written without the distortive polish at an excessively superfluous, sanitised distance. At one point the author cleverly shows a meta-awareness when she states, almost knowingly, almost challenging the reader and the market: “Perhaps this is the stuff the publisher wanted you to write about.”
There She Goes, My Beautiful World – Gosia Buzzanca
There is humour in There She Goes, My Beautiful World: genuine humour, moments that make you laugh out loud. And yet beneath that laughter there is always something else stirring. Something darker. Something the book never hides. Buzzanca captures the minutiae purposefully – poetic, precise – taking the reader back to a time before. Before digital dominance. Before the surveillance of self-image. Before curated childhoods.
This memoir explores working-class life not through sociological generalisations but through the universality of lived experience and embodied truths, touching on themes of trauma, adultification, loss and grief. It offers a glimpse into the external barriers and inner silent worlds of working-class life at the turn of our current century: resonant across culture, time and place, this book refuses to simplify the complexity of that silence.
Instead, what emerges here is a transformative encapsulation of the jigsaw pieces of our collective sense of self and becoming. Honest, raw, and introspective, you get a sense that the author has tentatively invited you into their past and gently guides you through it – carefully, tenderly, with a deep respect for the people who lived in it. We are introduced to her hidden self, where natural elements are her friends, where small gestures matter, and despite the world around her, she keeps on dancing, keeps on writing…
This book understands loneliness, not melodramatic loneliness, but existential loneliness: the loneliness of the thinking young woman, the lonely distance of the outsider. The loneliness of being hyper-aware too early, too young. As a reader, you long to reach out and give Buzzanca a big cwtch, especially when she states: “It is surprisingly quiet on your journey to the end of the world.”
There She Goes, My Beautiful World is honest, brave, vulnerable, funny, dark, sharp, and fierce. It is crafted with literary intelligence, socio-political awareness, and instinctive emotional truth. Gosia Buzzanca has written a book that will resonate with anyone who has lived the contradictions of an ‘outsider-within’ existence and recognises how women carry worlds inside them.
Gosia Buzzanca’s There She Goes, My Beautiful World is published by Calon.
Price: £16.99. Info: here
words GEMMA JUNE HOWELL