The World I Fell Out Of: The Inspiring Sunday Times Bestseller

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No karma there at all. Yet it’s odd. A universe where terrible things happen at random is a dreadful place to live; but when the person it has happened to becomes an inspiration, then maybe there is a hidden strand of wisdom. Somewhere. She is perceptive ― and lacerating ― about the pressures felt by disabled people to be cured … Above all, the book is a plea to those still living with well-functioning bodies to be aware of what they have. To love themselves and relish their ability to dance, run, go to the lavatory without help. With serious disability can come wisdom and perspective, and Reid passionately urges fellow women to set aside their self-loathing and “get out there and live”’ Sunday Times

Melanie Reid will be in conversation with Libby Purves as part of the Cheltenham Literature Festival, from October 3-12; www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature Those people" are the residents and former residents of the New Plymouth suburb of Paritutu, who believe their health and in some cases the health of their children and grandchildren has been destroyed by the toxic dioxin released from the American-owned Ivon Watkins Dow (IWD) agri-chemicals factory in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. When we married, my husband expressed glee that I was 12 years younger than him because it would be useful when he got older. From the birth of TV3 in 1989, journalist Melanie Reid became a fixture on the channel's current affairs shows, often reporting on battles against bureaucracy. A It just seemed polite. Maybe it was a bit of masochism on my part, or a feeling that I couldn't trap him in my disability, so I felt I should offer and I did. But he was wonderful and has been amazing. He has evolved and changed and we joke that between us we are one functioning person; I have the brainpower and he has the functioning body. He has been wholeheartedly wonderful.Now she has written a book detailing life from that fateful moment through her long months in the spinal unit of a Glasgow Hospital to the initial fears and challenges of returning home and the impact on relationships. A generous, life-changing book ... some of the most insightful writing on what it means to be human that I have ever read.' - Clover Stroud, author of The Wild Other

Now it’s challenging, going from a 52-fancies-herself-as-32-year-old woman, to 90 plus overnight… and even nonagenarians have superhero powers compared to tetraplegia. That’s 40 years of acclimatising to decline, frustration, loss of power and independence … pfff! – by-passed in an instant. The government has had four or five years to set this straight. Mark my words, there will be a class action suit bigger than anything they've ever seen. You’ll be able to push me to the pub in a wheelchair,’ Dave said. ‘And empty colostomy bags, that sort of stuff.’ A highly toxic compound called 2,3,7,8-TCDD, one of a class of chemicals known as dioxins, was created in small quantities in the manufacturing process, and remained as a contaminant in the herbicide. Before 1972, the level of contamination was relatively high, but that year New Zealand passed regulations limiting the level of dioxin to 0.1 parts per million (ppm). The level of contamination permitted was reduced tenfold in 1982 and tenfold again in 1987, a level which made manufacture uneconomic, and production of 2,4,5-T ceased. The Paritutu factory was the last in the world to stop production. I would be immensely flattered if even that was half the case,” she says. “But there are compensations: I have enjoyed so many things since my accident that I never thought I could enjoy. The sound of silence; the stillness; the minutiae of life; watching the birds. Watching insect life. I never had a bird table before my accident; I was too busy.”Unflinchingly honest and beautifully observed, this is a memoir about the joy - and the risks - of riding horses, the complicated nature of heroism, the bonds of family and the comfort of strangers. Above all, The World I Fell Out Of is a reminder that at any moment the life we know can be turned upside down - and a plea to start appreciating what we have while we have it. Much about the science of dioxin is messy. For example, there is no dispute that dioxin causes some cancers, but there is vigorous disagreement on whether or not it can cause multi-generational mutations. TV3 quotes the studies which support the idea that dioxin is "mutagenic"; the Ministry of Health quotes those which suggest it isn't. Similarly, it is difficult to accurately state precisely how elevated blood dioxin levels might affect the health of a given individual. "Safe" levels of dioxin exposure have been repeatedly revised downwards over the decades as new evidence of its dangers have come to hand.

So many souvenirs; it's as if her old life shattered with her bones and threw glittering shards of her past and future in all directions. Just at the point where my career at The Times was ascendant, and he, at 63, was happily anticipating the prospect of being a kept man in retirement, I blew it. Because you aren’t fanciable and you won’t be, can’t be and never will be. Because the great game of sex, in all its hurts and joys and sleaziness and beauty, is no longer one you can play." Danielle was just a 15 year-old school girl, a car crash victim whose spine was crushed by her own seatbelt. She was the first person to utter words to a heavily medicated Melanie. Danielle’s buddy, Daniel, was a year older and hiding a dark secret. My answer to that is why don't you look at the exposed group and do the health study on those people those people who walk down the road with me and say `in this house they lost this many children; in that house they lost this many children and she's now got a baby with hydrocephaly'."The frustrating thing about this condition is that it’s a constant fight to keep your insides working properly,” she says. Until Melanie started writing, it seemed that colostomies and catheters were ‘c’ words, never to be mentioned in polite society. Now millions of us know about the suprapubic urinary catheter below her tummy button; the colostomy bag she had fitted last year when she further broke her leg.

One abiding contradiction is that, while Reid believes the built environment should be altered to make life easier for disabled people – with CEOs of companies forced to spend a week in a wheelchair to understand their disabled workers' needs – she has done little to make life easier for herself. When that is taken away from you, and you are suddenly 4ft 3ins, you feel disempowered in an incredibly real way which possibly I might not have felt if I had only been 5ft," she says. She is working on a follow-up to Let Us Spray. Journalism, though, may turn out to be not enough. Next stop: court. Dave is completely blond; a ditsy blond. But he’s been amazing. He is the most amazing man to have coped with what he’s coped with because he didn’t marry me for this.” Melanie has, from time to time, offered him an ‘out’ clause – “almost etiquette”, she calls it. It’s moments like that that leap out from the humour; moments that are stark and uncompromising; that occasionally make the column difficult to read.Last year, she and David put in a new kitchen, but it's designed to fit in with the style of the farmhouse rather than her wheelchair.