Becoming Somebody Else: Blackouts, Addiction, and Agency amongst London’s Homeless

By Joshua Burraway

What does it mean to exist outside the normative temporality of life, of housed living, and, ultimately, of selfhood? Becoming Somebody Else takes up this question, offering a window into the fragmented and chaotic lives of people experiencing homelessness in urban London as they drink and drug themselves into blackout in post-austerity Britain. A state of being where time, body, agency, and self collapse into a memoryless abyss, the blackout is a prism into how human beings make and unmake their selfhood in the wake of social suffering and personal trauma. Attending to the words and histories of several individuals, Joshua Burraway knits together structural, psychological, and phenomenological approaches to understand the ways in which memory, agency, and selfhood are sites of struggle and belonging, and in doing so, suggests new ways of thinking about addiction, homelessness, and therapeutic possibility.

Chicago: HAU Books, 2025. 329p.