anxiety – Page 2 – twenty-one words

Freeze

December 28, 2024December 31, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … how to write

Why does the talented student of writing stop? It is usually the imagination, turned to creating a story in which you are a failure, and all you have done has failed, and you are made out to be the fraud you’ve feared you are. You can imagine the story you might tell, or you can imagine this other story — both will be extraordinarily detailed, but only one will be something you can publish. The other will freeze you in place, in a private theatre of pain that seats one. These writers were — are, in many cases — people who know how to write. What they don’t know is how to become unstuck. How to leave that theatre they made for themselves, how to stop telling themselves the story that freezes them.

I discovered I needed to teach not just how to write, but how to keep writing. How to face up to who you think is listening. Is the person listening more important than you? Or is the story you would tell more important than you? I was teaching how to stand up and leave that room in your mind so you can go and write — and live. But the question after that, always, is, Live with what?

From ‘On Becoming an American Writer’
in ‘How to Write an Autobiographical Novel‘
By Alexander Chee

I’ve read a few how-to write-a-book guides, and in doing so I’ve found some useful tips along the way, although I’ve never found anything that really sustained me in them. When I read Alexander Chee’s essay, ‘On Becoming an American Writer’, I realised why.

What I was looking for when I picked up those books, what I’ve been looking for all along, is advice not on how to write, but on how to keep writing. By which I mean, how to sustain yourself, how to live with yourself — as a writer, yes, but also as a human. Because if you are a writer, or if you see yourself as someone who could be a writer, or if you see yourself as someone who has written something and wants to write something else (and these are not the same things, though they are on a continuum) — if you are any or all of these things, anyway, then the two things are wrapped up in each other, impossible to disentangle, writing and being human. Writing and living. Writing and keeping going.

Front garden tree, Christmas Day, 2024

I am not particularly good at sustaining myself, either as a writer or as a human. I tend to be plagued by self-doubt and self-loathing — to such a degree, in fact, that I would call this tendency both instinctive and self-destructive. It certainly doesn’t make me very productive. I find myself often frozen in place, as Chee puts it, in that private theatre of pain that seats one.

What sustains me when nothing else does is that writing, the very process itself, feels meaningful to me. Maybe this wouldn’t be enough to keep another writer going, but for me at least, it is what I always return to in times of doubt and frozenness.

I don’t know why writing feels meaningful to me; if pressed, I couldn’t even articulate what its meaning is to me. But still — beyond the search for happiness or wealth, neither of which things I have ever lastingly found through writing — there is this: writing feels meaningful to me. That is what sustains me.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Doom — once a simple noun, often attached to its twin, gloom — has taken on a life of its own in the past few years. More than a fleeting feeling or an emotional response, it’s become a philosophical stance and, for some, a way of life : Michaela Kavanagh visits Ben Green’s post-collapse property, where he prepares for life after environmental collapse. Along the way, Kavanagh considers the difference between those who believe the climate is doomed and those who believe that we can still do something about it. I found Green’s response fascinating, though all the way through this piece I kept thinking: If global warming continues, won’t his garden die, anyway?
The end point of great fiction is not necessarily wisdom or enlightenment. It is really just another kind of scrabbling around in the dark, scratching here, then over there, carving out tunnels, kicking up dust, managing strife : So much has been written about Alice Munro in the wake of her death and her daughter’s revelations that it’s hard to say anything new at this point, but I found this piece by Sebastian Smee thoughtful and on-point. Shame, Smee writes, is a theme that permeates all of Munro’s fiction — and did so throughout her writing career. Perhaps this is why her fiction will endure despite what we now know about her life.
What follows is a set of tools I’ve found useful both for the inward business of attending to my state of mind, and for the outward work of trying to do something about the climate crisis — which are not necessarily separate jobs: Rebecca Solnit, in a piece from three years ago that remains today as relevant as ever, on why not giving in to despair is the most important thing we can do to change or slow the course of climate crisis.

Begin again

December 12, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, blogging, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, rituals, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, The Great First Chapter Project, What I love about ..., writingTagged Elsey Come Home, Susan Conley2 Comments

From the annals of The Great First Chapter Project

About a year ago my husband handed me a brochure for a retreat in a nearby mountain village. We were standing in our Beijing kitchen while the girls played make-believe dog at our feet. The brochure was more like a handmade pamphlet – four pieces of white computer paper folded in the middle and stapled three times along the crease. There was a grainy photo of a cement terrace on the cover, and a more alarming photo of people sitting in a room with their eyes closed, and text under the photos that explained something called a ‘day of silence’ and yoga and the chance for participants to reinvent themselves. My husband, Lukas, told me these things would make a good week’s vacation for me, and he smiled while I looked at the photos, but it was a distant smile.

from ‘Elsey Come Home‘
by Susan Conley

I’ve been thinking, as you do at this time of the year, about endings and beginnings. About the things I hoped for at the start of the year, and the things that happened, and the things that I wanted to happen but didn’t (or haven’t yet). And about next year too, of course — the same kind of things, what I hope for, what I dread, what I can plan for, what I can’t. What I might just have to take on the chin.

One of the things that happened for me this year was that, as part of winning the Deep Creek Residency, I got to have a conversation with a publisher after he’d read the first 20 pages of the manuscript I’m currently working on. I’m the kind of writer who works from project to project — that is to say, uncontracted — and I also spend years between publications, years working alone, writing and rewriting and doubting myself all the while, so this was an incredible opportunity, one I’ll be forever grateful for.

Over the course of one hour, the publisher and I talked about many things, one of which was how important it is to get the first few pages of your manuscript right. We talked about prologues. We talked about hooks. We talked about grabbing the reader within the first five pages. We talked. We talked. Oh, we talked.

And I’ve been thinking about beginnings ever since.

Abandoned writer’s cabin, Deep Creek, October 2024.

So much has changed for me in the last two years when it comes to writing. I’ve had my first piece of literary fiction published, my novella Ravenous Girls. I’ve begun work on my second piece. I’ve won a residency. So many beginnings! Somehow, it seems fitting to end my year of writing on this note, thinking about beginnings.

On this note, I’ve started collecting quotations from books whose first chapter, or first few paragraphs, or even — rarely — first sentences, grab me. I’m calling this The Great First Chapter project, and I can’t think of a better way to start than with the first paragraph I’ve quoted in this post, which comes from a novel I love, Susan Conley’s Elsey Come Home.

My husband, Lukas, told me these things would make a good week’s vacation for me, writes Conley, and he smiled while I looked at the photos, but it was a distant smile. There it is, the story lying ahead of us in a nutshell: the story of a husband and wife who love each other but are estranged, the story of a marriage that needs healing. I knew the moment I read this line for the first time that I would love this book, and I did.

View from the cabin, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Before I go, I wanted to mention some good news I’ve had recently. My story ‘A Farewell’ was shortlisted for the MIKI Prize and included in the MIKI Prize 2024 Anthology, which was launched last week, and just this week my story ‘City of Lights’ was highly commended in the Marj Wilke Short Story Award 2024. I’ve never really focused on writing shorter pieces before, but this year, while I was working on a longer manuscript, the one that the publisher and I were discussing, I also started writing and submitting stories here and there, where and when I can. I have a lot to learn, but when it comes to beginnings — this feels like another one.

The cabin from afar, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading (and listening) …

- Begin again: On the theme of beginnings, the most beautiful song I know is this one, by Measure.
- Don’t fuck around second-guessing the market. Write the book only you can write. Don’t write for an imagined audience. Don’t write for an imaginary critic. Challenge yourself according to your own intensely demanding critical apparatus. Give it to people who will be harsh. Read it aloud. Re-write and re-write and save the drafts: Timely words of encouragement from Max Porter, in conversation with Dizz Tate back in 2015.
- After you’ve learned to see every date, every man who expresses interest, every room you’re invited up to, as a plot point on the way to the inevitable climax where you get hurt—it makes your mind tangle up, like a sewing machine on a knotted stitch: Stella Mehlhoff, on the effect of coming of age as a post-#MeToo generation member. I’ll be honest, as a Gen X-er I find this piece unbearably sad, although I’m glad I read it. The #MeToo movement, Mehlhoff tells us, has made her generation of women afraid of sex, afraid of romance, afraid of dating. Is this true across the board? I hope not.
- Duck is delicious. Why can’t we have that?: This year, both as a reader and a writer, I discovered flash fiction, otherwise known as microfiction, or stories that are under 1,000 words. In this piece, Esquire offers its own version by sending out napkins around Thanksgiving to five authors and asking them to write a piece of fiction that fits on the napkin. The idea is quirky and genius, and I enjoyed most of the pieces here.
- If sadomasochism is a running theme in Normal People, Conversations with Friends and Fifty Shades of Grey, it is not because any of these novels evince the slightest interest in the transformative potential of subversive sex but rather because sexual quirks are readily legible as a form of deviance in want of normalization: I’m a huge fan of Sally Rooney’s fiction, although I can’t always pinpoint why. Her writing draws me in, moves me and makes me think, and yet it also troubles me. This piece, by Becca Rothfield back in 2021, back when Rooney had published only two novels, articulates some of the things I feel about Rooney’s writing — it’s long, but worth the read.

Like breath

October 23, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, birds, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, My published writing, native coastal vegetation, nature, nature writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, walking, writingTagged Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family1 Comment

Other people’s words about … places that reside within our hearts

During our visit to the jungle, while we slept on the verandah at 3 AM, night would be suddenly alive with disturbed peacocks. A casual movement from one of them roosting in the trees would waken them all and, so fussing, sounding like branches full of cats, they would weep weep loud into the night.

One evening I kept the tape recorder beside my bed and wakened by them once more out of a deep sleep automatically pressed the machine on to record them. Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them — inaudible then because they were always there like breath. In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge fluorescent light) there are these frogs as loud as river, grunting, the whistle of other birds brash and sleepy, but in that night so modest behind the peacocks they were unfocused by the brain — nothing more than darkness, all those sweet loud younger brothers of the night.

from ‘Running in the Family‘
by Michael Ondaatje

I have just spent a week away in Deep Creek, having been chosen as this year’s lucky winner of the Deep Creek Residency for writers. I spent that week away writing, reading, bushwalking, running, writing again, then writing some more. It was a joyous time, the rarest privilege, to be given time away simply to write.

Daytime, Deep Creek, October 2024.

In our lives, I think that there are some places, connected to some times, that are somehow magic, that come to us through luck or stealth or a great deal of planning and then reside with us forever. These places become a part of the fabric of who we are, though we may not always understand why, and what we feel, when we think of them or remember them or revisit them, is a sense of awe — a sense of connection to something deeper than we can articulate.

Gully of grass trees, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Deep Creek, place of grass trees and rolling hills and shrike thrushes calling in the trees, place of kangaroos and echidnas and sheep and shingleback lizards, place of tawny frogmouths and fogs and sunshine and rain and big, big skies — Deep Creek is, anyway, one of those places for me, a place close to my heart. I have left Deep Creek now, and the hopes and dreams I went there with — that I would write copiously and productively, that the story I’m writing is worth telling, that the manuscript I’m working on might one day get published — may or may not come true, but Deep Creek is still with me and always will be. I don’t know how else to put it.

Resting place, Deep Creek, October 2024.

And this is what I love about the passage I’ve quoted above by Michael Ondaatje, the way he captures the mystery of a place, its essence; the way it has become a part of him. I have never been to the jungle that he writes of, never heard peacocks who weep weep loud into the night. But in Deep Creek I have felt what Ondaatje describes. In Deep Creek I have felt that I have found a place that will, like breath, always be with me.

First light, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Working on that novel was like visiting a little town every day for four years, a place so dear and sweet. Then I sold it: Thea Lim explores the commodification of art, and of our lives.
- I was so numbed by life that month, by all the accumulative sadnesses of being 50-something in a whirlpool of life change, that I wasn’t sure how to feel. But when I stood up from my computer to walk around the neighborhood and look at all the familiar things, so many of which had years of memories attached to them, each their own little story, I let myself feel happy. This wasn’t the novel. It wasn’t the Big 5. But it felt truer to the writer I wanted to be: On a related theme, Amy Stuber, on writing short stories, trying to write a novel, and then returning to short story writing. On writing what she wants to write, not what the industry tells her to write. And on growing older.
- Ethical Consumption can ultimately serve as a type of delusion or fantasy where we tell ourselves that our economic actions are righteous and that we’re doing our small part to make a difference, even in the face of underwhelming evidence: Elizabeth L Cline, exploring the problems with ethical consumerism and making the argument for returning to Consumer Activism.
- Even now, years later and sober multiple times over, the story I recount reflexively about Nick’s death and my concurrent relapse is not the true story: Adam Spiegelman, on heroin addiction and the aftermath.

Stay true

September 27, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, blogging, books, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, walkingTagged Anam, Andre Dao2 Comments

Other people’s words about … reading

When I get to our house, Lauren and Edith are both asleep. The house is dark and quiet, and warm too — the solidity of English homes is a welcome point of difference to Australia, where we were used to draughty Edwardian weatherboards — and, still buzzing with the thoughts that occurred to me on my walk home, I pour myself a tumbler of the Aldi whiskey we got on special, and, thinking of how a quiet house and a calm world allow a reader to become their book, and how, at the same time, it is the act of solitary reading that produces that quietness and the calmness, and how, at the same time, it is the reader’s desire to be a model reader, their desire for quietness and for calmness, that makes it so — thinking of that, I sit down at the dining table in the living room and try to remember the thoughts I had on my walk home — as if thoughts can be possessed, rather than experienced; as if my thoughts are a book that I can lean into, to which I can be true, and through such trueness of reading make order, quiet and calm where before there was none.

from ‘Anam‘
by Andre Dao

There are a couple of things that resonated with me in the passage I’ve quoted above from Andre Dao’s award-winning novel, Anam.

First, there’s the mention of draughty Australian houses. I thought, reading these words, of the grey, rainy winter days of my own childhood in South Australia, although unlike Dao, I grew up in a 1920s colonial-style house rather than a weatherboard one. Our house had french windows and a verandah with wrought-iron lace trimming and a terrazzo floor. The ceilings in the house were high and the walls were thick, and we had central heating, but we used it sparingly. In June and July, then, when the days were at their shortest, those rooms were cold; I remember going to bed with a hot water bottle to warm my feet on. Even in adulthood — perhaps especially in adulthood — the houses I’ve lived in have been chilly in winter, the kind of chilly that requires you to wear several layers to ward it off.

In Australia, we like to believe that we don’t experience cold weather, and to an extent that is true — but there is nothing like the internal climate of a poorly heated house to remind you that winter does exist here. It does indeed get cold.

Guinea Flower, Aldinga Scrub, September 2024.

But the main theme of this passage is reading, and the quietness and calmness we seek from it. A quiet house and a calm world — isn’t that what most of us want? How wonderful it is that reading, an activity whose seeming simplicity belies its complexity, can give this to us.

How wonderful, too, that in discussing this Dao takes us from the idea of reading books to reading our own thoughts — and how we may stay true to them.

Lizzie, August 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Mine is not, I think, a rare journey. We used to be called midlist, we writers who win prizes and get great reviews but don’t sell in large numbers. I’m not sure trade publishers even use that term anymore. They’re not really interested in middling sellers. No matter the thrill and attention out of the gate, if we don’t make that transition from promising debut to big seller, trade publishing loses interest: Having had a novella published myself by a small publisher myself late last year, I was interested to read this piece by Rilla Askew, on being published by a small press after earlier publications with a trade publisher.
- And indeed, when Shane calls escorting ‘the most exhilarating thing I’d done in my life’, it feels like she’s admitting to something forbidden: Sascha Cohen explores Charlotte Shane’s memoir of her life as a prostitute. This is an interesting read, although I was disappointed not to see a reference to Australian Kate Holden’s memoir, In My Skin, which explores similar transgressive territory. (Spoiler alert: Holden, like Shane, enjoyed working as a prostitute and often liked her male clients.)
- All this automation could make us reconsider what we like about the manual aspects of writing. It’s a bit like the challenge photography presented to drawing and painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: it didn’t eliminate these techniques, but it did make people rethink what they wanted from them: Simon Reader reviews two new books that suggest that we can protect our writing from AI by practising ‘structured chaos’.
- In these countries, where olive cultivation can be traced back thousands of years, the loss of olive groves is akin to losing a culture as well as vital income: Daphne Chouliaraki Milner explores the effect of climate change on the world’s olive growers.

Echo

June 29, 2024June 30, 2024Posted in a thought, anorexia, anxiety, books, Cairo, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, gratitude, hope, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, What I love about ..., Winter, writingTagged Normal People, Sally Rooney3 Comments

Other people’s words about … intimacy

He exhales. In the spring he would sometimes wake up at night beside Marianne, and if she was awake they would move into each other’s arms until he could feel himself inside her. He didn’t have to say anything, except to ask her if it was alright, and she always said it was. Nothing else in his life compared to what he felt then. Often he wished he could fall asleep inside her body. It was something he could never have with anyone else, and he would never want to. Afterwards they’d just go back to sleep in each other’s arms, without speaking.

from ‘Normal People‘
by Sally Rooney

I don’t know anyone who writes about intimacy better than Sally Rooney, especially in her first two novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People. What I love about Rooney’s writing is that she understands how our emotions convey themselves to us by manifesting themselves physically. Connor’s longing for Marianne in the passage above, his longing to be inside her, is both physical and emotional. It’s all-encompassing, unspeakable, the kind of intimacy that he doesn’t have words for — that most of us don’t have words for. Only Sally Rooney, as I said, can write this way.

Port Elliot, June 2024.

I’ve been thinking over the last few months about why I write and what I want to write about next, now that my novella Ravenous Girls is out in the world. And I’ve been writing, too, or trying to. Earlier this year, in fact, I submitted part of a new manuscript, the manuscript I’ve been thinking about over the last few months, to the Deep Creek Residency — and this week I found out to my excitement that, based on the strength of the material I’d submitted, I have been named the winner for 2024 of the residency. Which is deeply exciting.

It’s funny how writing works, though — by the time I got the news about winning the residency, I’d pretty much convinced myself that this manuscript, or the version of it that I’d worked on and submitted to the residency, was unfeasible. Clunky. Strained. Embarrassing, even.

So maybe I was wrong about that; maybe I somehow got myself lost inside my own echo chamber. This happens to me over and over again whenever I’m writing, and yet each time it happens to me, it astonishes me anew. It’s not a place I recommend staying in very long, this echo chamber. It’s a desolate, lonely place.

Aldinga Beach, June 2024.

Partly what I’m writing about in my new manuscript is Cairo. Partly what I’m writing about is the two sisters that I wrote about in Ravenous Girls, Frankie and Justine, at a later stage in their lives. And partly what I’m writing about is intimacy, not in the way that Sally Rooney writes about intimacy, but intimacy nonetheless.

Intimacy, which is its own terrifying echo chamber.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- And still you write. It takes stamina and dedication and perhaps a bit of insanity to work on the same story, year after year, and do it without praise, without support, without even the knowledge that it will come together in the end: On the subject off writing, here’s Peyton Marshall, on the value of writing slowly. Long-time readers of this blog will know that there were ten years between my second book, a novel for young adults, and my third, a novella. Talk about getting lost inside an echo chamber! I find much to relish in Marshall’s words here.
- To be honest, I’m a little frightened of how humbled I am. Which is why I must share my news several times a day, and with all 12.9K of you — to show that, even in the wake of success, one can achieve an improbable amount of humility: Still on the subject of writing, in this piece Jeff Bender lampoons the social media posts that writers publish in the wake of publication. Ouch! This made me laugh at first, and then cry. In the end, it’s not the writers who come off badly here — it’s the industry.
- Clouds rend the air: This poem, ‘My Atmosphere’ by Alan Felsenthal, took me by surprise. Read it to the end and you’ll see why. Reading it again now, I’m still left breathless.

Unrequited

May 30, 2024Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, Australian bush, Autumn, birds, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, native coastal vegetation, Other people's words about ..., out & about, reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, the beach, What I talk about when I talk about running, writingTagged Cursed Bread, Sophie MackintoshLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … a woman’s desire

The meat was ready, steaming, when I lifted the lid of the pot. As I sliced it up I pictured meeting the ambassador in the hotel room. First, he will open the door and clasp me in his arms, I decided, putting a plate in front of my husband. He will kiss the hollow of my throat very softly, and then he will gaze upon me, I decided, like he did today, but with much more tenderness. I cut my potatoes up into tiny pieces. My husband chewed and chewed, with the mouth that never kissed me. He will lay me down on the soft white bed and undo the buttons slowly, I decided. He will kiss my eyelids. I will place my hands on his smooth back, I decided as I chewed. I will clutch him to me but not too hard, not like a drowning person. The light will be dim. The bedding will be spotless. He will tell me that he has seen what nobody else has ever noticed. He will say, ‘It’s you I’ve wanted all along, Elodie. I see you, Elodie. You. You.’

from ‘Cursed Bread‘
by Sophie Mackintosh

I came back to Elodie’s story again today, having quoted from it once before. Elodie’s story continues to compel me — her longing for her husband to desire her, to see her, oh, to want her. Though Elodie is young and has her life ahead of her, I wonder whether the feelings and desires she expresses in her narrative, those feelings and desires that in her tiny village community are so forbidden, are a little like those an older woman might feel, a woman my age, on realising that the desires she once thought might be realised are now out of reach.

I wonder.

Largs Bay Jetty, May 2024.

I’ve spent the last few weeks quietly. Post-Covid, I still feel tired. It’s a funny kind of tiredness, not so much a feeling of lethargy as a feeling of being tissue-thin, emotionally and physically. I don’t know how else to describe it. Still, I’ve been walking and reading and even writing (a little), and I had a quiet moment of celebration a couple of weeks ago when I saw ten hooded plovers at Aldinga Beach.

Yes, ten. I have never seen so many before, and I walked home feeling quietly jubilant.

Bracken fern, May 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- You see, just because she can’t articulate her desires, doesn’t mean she doesn’t yearn for something more: On the topic of desire, here is Mesha Maren on quiet women who are filled with longing.
- But the land where we pitched our tent is no longer there. It’s somewhere in the North Sea: Rachel Keenan on her disappearing town. (Okay, I confess this story particularly got to me as someone who is employed by local government and has previously worked in positions in both state and federal governments. If you read it, you will see why.)
- Novel writing is such a personal and idiosyncratic thing, and there’s rarely a good reason to do it apart from fulfilling some serious internal nagging: Ladette Randolph interviews Carolyn Kuebler, whose words about writing — why she writes, how she writes — seem to me some of the wisest I have stumbled across.
- [Antimicrobial resistance as an] issue is ‘more acute’ than climate change: Kat Lay on how the Covid pandemic may have been relatively minor, as far as pandemics and illnesses go, as we look into the future.

Disjunction

April 27, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, Running, staying humble, staying true, the beach, What I talk about when I talk about runningTagged The Ex-Wife, Ursula Parrott1 Comment

Other people’s words about … getting divorced

I went to a gymnasium most afternoons between half past five and dinner time, because exercise kept me clearheaded writing copy in the daytime, and fresher-looking through the evening. The gymnasium had a running track on the roof. Going round and round it, regarding the view of upper Broadway electric light signs, or thinking that the person who invented the sweat shirt had no sense of design, or just counting off twenty laps to the mile, and debating detachedly whether to be energetic and run three miles, or lazy and stop at two, I felt very contented. Thump, thump, thump, around a board track. It was a simple occupation, but an absorbing one.
That feeling of running, of having been running endlessly, so that I was breathless, yet must go on running forever, seemed to sum up my life. Running through days of posing as an efficient young business woman, through nights of posing as a sophisticated young woman about town. Running from the memory of Peter, toward something or nothing, it did not matter which.

from ‘Ex-Wife‘
by Ursula Parrott

You could think, reading the passage above, that you were reading something from a book by a contemporary female author, a Millennial or a Gen Z writer, that you were reading a modern sad-girl novel. But you would be mistaken. Ursula Parrott published her wonderful novel, The Ex-Wife, in 1929. I am astonished at how true Patricia’s story, and Patricia’s voice, still rings now.

I read The Ex-Wife just before I came down with my first bout of Covid, and now, picking the novel up again and reading the words from it that I’ve quoted above, which so struck a chord with me at the time I read it, I wonder if I’ll ever run again the way Patricia describes, which is the way I remember running. Thump, thump, thump. I know that everyone feels like this after Covid, and I assume that it will pass. Still, the feeling of disjunction between the me who read Parrott’s novel a few weeks ago and the me writing this post is jarring.

Norfolk pine trees and autumn sunshine post-Covid, April 2024.

In The Ex-Wife Patricia’s husband has just broken up with her and she is trying to make sense of being, yes, an ex-wife. Though divorce is now far commoner than it was when Parrott wrote her novel; and though we accept the idea of wives committing adultery as much as we do the idea of husbands doing so; and though many women no longer feel the need to marry at all — still, it seems to me that Patricia’s feelings reflect what a young, heartbroken woman might feel now in a similar situation. Patricia feels betrayed by her ex-husband Peter, who leaves her after she confesses to him that she has slept with another man (even though he has, all along, been sleeping with another woman); she loves him, still, as much as she hates him; she wants to move on but can’t; and meanwhile she tries to make her way as a young, single, independent woman through the world. How familiar does all of that sound?

I am grateful to live in a world post-third wave feminism. I am grateful to live in a world that has allowed the #MeToo movement to happen finally. And yet. And yet. There is still so much that needs to change in this space. So very much.

Cuddly Covid companion, April 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

20. Acknowledgements for novels should be kept under two pages. You may add an additional page for every 400 pages of novel: Ryan Chapman provides a tongue-in-cheek list of 100 tips to improve your writing. Caveat lector. I love this list, both the serious tips and the not-so-serious ones. (In fact, they’re all serious, really.)

He’d never been one for small talk, preferring instead to launch into deep discussions, even with people he barely knew. He wondered if he could create a place like that outside of everyday conversation, a place full of awe, anguish, and urgency: Meg Bernhard on Frank Warren, the curator of Postsecret.com, a website I find myself simultaneously fascinated and bothered by. When we anonymously reveal our darkest secrets for others to read, as the website allows us to do, are we sharing and connecting with others, or are we just shouting our loneliness into a void? And conversely, in reading other people’s secrets are we reaching out to each other or are we just being voyeurs?

My theory … is [that] coffee companies are no longer aiming to be delicious; instead they’re just going for disgust-minimisation. I’d say that’s the right choice because deliciousness is a far more difficult goal than inoffensive mediocrity: Nicholas Jordan taste-tests eleven instant coffees. What a brave man! I’m not a coffee-drinker at all, but I admire his fortitude.

But if there’s one thing you learn from a lifetime of being different, it’s that you can’t rely on a broad public consensus to tell you anything true about yourself: Rafael Frumkin on identity literature and cancel culture — and writing about joy.

We’ll see

April 13, 2024Posted in a thought, anorexia, anxiety, Autumn, books, depression, eating disorder recovery, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged Austin Duffy, This Living and Immortal ThingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … getting sick

In the laboratory on the other hand it is rare that something totally out of the blue occurs. You set your own conditions and to a large extent the future is predetermined. Only some of the details are fluctuant. And even if something unexpected does occur you can usually work out the mechanism, uncover a logic that is always present in nature even if we don’t see it a lot of the time. Whereas in the clinic it sometimes felt as if there was not logic at all and that, when you were talking to the patients about what might happen to them, trying to answer their questions and so on, you might as well read their horoscope. “We’ll see,” you would say whenever a patient asked something as basic as “Will it work, doctor, the treatment?” or “What will happen?”, entirely reasonable questions, you might think, but completely unanswerable. “We’ll see,” you could only say, “we’ll see.”

from ‘This Living and Immortal Thing‘
by Austin Duffy

I used to be one of those people who loved watching medical dramas on TV — the ones set in emergency departments or in GP clinics or centred around a class of student surgeons. (You know the ones I mean.) It wasn’t the medical crises they depicted that I loved; it was the human dramas that the writers of the show wrote around those medical crises, the love stories, the broken hearts, the moral dilemmas — all those.

I’ve grown weary of those medical dramas, though. I don’t know if that’s just because I’ve become a more seasoned and cynical TV watcher overall or because I am more conscious now, as an older woman, of my own real-life encounters with the medical system. Whatever the reason, though, I recently very much enjoyed watching the TV dramatisation of Adam Kay’s memoir, This Is Going To Hurt (which I read some years ago). It’s a series I can highly recommend, even for the most seasoned watcher of medical dramas. (For starters, it’s so much more than a medical drama.)

Another jetty photo! March 2024.

[It felt as though] you might as well read their horoscope, writes Austin Duffy’s narrator, an oncologist turned clinical researcher, in the passage I’ve quoted above. He captures here something I once thought I’d found in the medical dramas I watched (until I saw through their paper-thin, highly sexualised plots). We seek treatment from doctors for our illnesses and frailties, Duffy’s narrator reminds us, but they, our doctors, are only frail, too. Most of the time — I truly believe this — they are working in the dark, making the best guesses they can about how to make us better. Sometimes they get it right; sometimes they get it wrong.

Austin Duffy is himself an oncologist, and he writes beautifully about the medical world and how it intersects with the other parts of our lives, our hopes and longings and dreams. I find it humbling to read the reminder he gives us, through his narrator, that our bodies write their own narratives — and that sometimes (mostly?) all that we, like his narrator, can say about the course of our illness is … ‘We’ll see.’

Lately I’ve been reading …

My novella, Ravenous Girls, is a story about two sisters in the 1980s, one of whom is receiving treatment for anorexia. Outside of fiction, there is some fascinating, erudite and nuanced writing about anorexia and eating disorders, as the articles I’ve linked to below all demonstrate. Each of these pieces, in their own way, moved me and made me think.

My twin sister (we’re fraternal) is beautiful and accomplished. When we were 14, my sister developed anorexia, impelled by perfectionism, genes, whatever spectral lever it is that tilts the cosmic pinball board and then everything changes. When we were 17, I developed anorexia, impelled by some unpoetic cacophony of motivations: wanting to be close to her, wanting to compete with her, wanting to rescue her, wanting to cancel her out: Katy Waldman, in a stunning article written some years ago about sisterhood and anorexia, recovery and non-recovery, families and love.

There were two selves: the sane one who wanted to eat and stay alive, and the one who felt somehow saner than sane — more refined, less mundane, eyes on some rarefied vista, voice genderless and supple and curling like smoke — who wanted to starve and die. Or starve and stay alive anyway, like a curiosity in a traveling exhibition. Or starve as a way to stay alive: Suzanne Rivecca, with a piece of writing I don’t know how to describe about the experience of having once had an eating disorder. This is not just an essay — it’s a chant, an invocation, a roar into the darkness. What I mean is that it’s compelling. Read it for yourself to see what I mean.

“BMI is a terrible marker of anything,” Dr. Gorrell says, referencing body mass index, the simplistic clinical measurement that experts have noted is flawed”: Derek Beres, reporting on the increasing prevalence (or is it just the increasing recognition? I’m not sure) of eating disorders in men. I can think of at least two young men in my circle of acquaintance who I think could be suffering from some kind of eating disorder, and I have sometimes thought about reaching out to them. But despite my own experience of anorexia as a young woman, I am separated from these young men by two things — an age gap of 30+ years, and the fact that I am a woman. I see now, partly from reading this piece, that my experience of an eating disorder was very gendered.

Even writing this bores me, and if there weren’t some tiny, tiny part of me that wishes I were still sick I would have never wanted to do it: Alice Gregory, reviewing Kelsey Osgood’s How To Disappear Completely. I read Osgood’s memoir some years ago, when it first came out, and like Gregory I was troubled by the way that Osgood, in her efforts to de-glamorise anorexia, only somehow manages to glamorise it all the more. But I also find this review of Osgood’s memoir by Gregory troubling for exactly the same reasons. Is it possible to write about anorexia at all, I wonder, without somehow glamorising it?

How do you know?

March 30, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, hope, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, writingTagged Brandon Taylor, The, The Late Americans1 Comment

Other people’s words about … writing

Seamus went into the hall after Oliver, and they kicked the snow off their boots. Their professor had just come back from the bathroom. He put a hand on Seamus’s arm and said, ‘Great work, Seamus. It’s a good poem.’
‘Was it?’ Seamus asked. The professor’s expression opened just slightly. Oliver patted Seamus on his lower back and returned to the seminar room. It was Seamus and the professor alone in the hall. Seamus could feel himself dripping cold water on the rug.
‘Is that what you need? For someone to tell you that your work is good?’
Seamus flushed.
‘I don’t know what I need. I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m wasting my time.’
‘Oh, Seamus,’ the professor said, and Seamus looked at him.
‘How do you know?’ Seamus asked.
‘How do you know what?’ the professor retorted, his head jostling a little, like it was a game or a riddle.
‘How do you know you’re not just wasting your time?’
‘If you don’t know the answer to that, then I can’t do anything for you,’ the professor said with a chastening laugh.
Seamus felt that he had been slapped on the nose and called childish. The world grew deep and saturated. It felt as if something vast and Godlike had peeled back the veil of his life and peered in at him. He had gone around giving away all his power, seeking certainty, approval. But that’s what children did. Seamus had been a child, selfish and stubborn in his ways.

from ‘The Late Americans‘
by Brandon Taylor

I’ve been thinking again about the process of writing fiction — how a writer takes the story they hear inside their head and puts it into written words. That’s what the process involves for me, at least, most of the time. I hear a story in my mind, a story with a very distinct voice, and I try to translate that story into one that other people can read — a story on paper, a story on a screen. A story, I was going to say, that is tangible. Tangible is the wrong word, though. Perhaps what I mean is, a story that exists in a form that other people can access.

The strange, sad part of this process is that mostly, while the story is still inside my mind, it feels like a very beautiful thing, whereas once it becomes something I can share with other people, it often turns out not to be a beautiful thing at all.

Lizzie in a pool of sunshine (and a room with a view), Easter 2024.

Unlike Brandon Taylor’s character Seamus in the passage above, I have never studied writing. One of the reasons I haven’t is that I don’t think that studying writing will answer the question that I always have about my own writing, which is the same question that Seamus has, How do you know you’re not just wasting your time? The truth is that you can’t know, which is what (I think) the professor is trying to say to Seamus without actually spelling it out for him. You will never know. If you try to find out, you’re going down the wrong track, asking yourself the wrong question.

A better question, I think, would be, How do you sit with the fact that you don’t know whether you are wasting your time or not? But I don’t know the answer to that, either.

The other side of the jetty from the photo in my last post, Easter 2024.

Since my novella Ravenous Girls came out late last year, I’ve been working on a story centred around the same characters, a sequel of sorts — the next instalment. I don’t know whether it will ever get published; I don’t know whether what I’m writing is any good; I don’t know whether anyone will want to read it. Like Seamus, I keep wanting to ask someone whether I’m wasting my time, but there is no-one who can tell me.

And so, like Seamus, all I can do is sit with the unknowing. There’s nothing else you can do. There’s no other way through.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- I thought I needed to know where I was heading with the book, but the more I wrote, the more I realised that so much of the pleasure of writing for me is about following a trail of not knowing: While we are on the subject of writing and not knowing, here is Stephanie Bishop, whose book The Anniversary has been long listed for the 2024 Stella Prize, on writing a book without knowing what kind of book she was writing (or where it would take her.)
- I do, however, believe that writing advice usually says more about the person giving it than the person receiving it: On a similar theme, here is Maura Lammers on how to incorporate other people’s advice about your writing into your writing (or how not to take their advice at all).
- As the world undergoes dramatic environmental shifts, so too does our neurological landscape. Fossil-fuel-induced changes – from rising temperatures to extreme weather to heightened levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide – are altering our brain health, influencing everything from memory and executive function to language, the formation of identity, and even the structure of the brain. The weight of nature is heavy, and it presses inward: When I saw the headline of this article, I thought it was going to be about climate crisis grief and its psychological effects. It’s not, though. In this article, Clayton Page Aldern explores the neurological effects of climate change — that is to say, the biological effects on the brain. What he writes is, frankly, scary.
- The occasional bout of food poisoning was a job hazard, yet it was long-term overconsumption that took the real toll: Corin Hirsch on the stress of being a food critic, and what happened when she quit.

All grown up

March 21, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, work, writingTagged Johanna Herman, The Trio2 Comments

Other people’s words about … becoming an adult

When he got his first office job, he got dressed each morning with a certain ironic remove. It was a game that everyone had to play to make a living. To be an adult is to sell out, but as long as there’s someone to recognise the irony you bring to this game it’s easier to maintain a sense of self-respect. These days there’s nobody in his life who would understand that irony, and he suspects that he’s transmitting his signal on a wavelength only he can hear. He knows that the outside observer will think of him as at one with his blazer and button-down shirt; there’s no crack for the irony to push through and unhitch the image of an indifferent, middle-aged man. When [his] students look at him, what do they see? A hypocrite? [His old friends] Thora and August would have laughed about it.

from ‘The Trio‘
by Johanna Herman (translated by Kira Josefsson)

I ran into an acquaintance the other day whose daughter had told me many years ago, when she was around twenty years, that she wanted to be a writer, like me. To that end, she’d enrolled in a Creative Writing degree. She wasn’t going to compromise, she said. Why do a vocational degree when what she wanted to be was a writer?

I hemmed and hawed and said quietly, ‘It’s useful to have a vocational skill as a back-up, though.’

I haven’t seen this man or his daughter for many years, and so when I ran into him the other day, I asked after him and his wife and then after his daughter.

‘What’s she doing now?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘she got her creative writing degree and now she’s working in the tax office.’

And then we shrugged at each other.

So it is.

Largs Bay Jetty, March 2024.

I still feel, when I’m getting ready for work, getting changed into my office clothes, that I’m taking on an identity that doesn’t match the ‘real’ me, though I’m not sure that I see the irony in this, as Johanna Hedman’s protagonist Hugo does. It feels more like a charade to me, a performance that isn’t very convincing. I doubt that I’m alone in this, though. As Hugo himself says: To be an adult is to sell out.

Indeed. Perhaps it’s unavoidable. In any case, here we all are.

Under the jetty, March 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Every dog is a rescue dog: Sara Bader on losing a pet.
- Reading near-perfectly executed shorter books is naturally making me wonder ever more so, as both reader and writer, if less is, perhaps, more: Call me biased as the author of a novella, but I loved this article by Paul Daley, which came out late last year, in praise of short novels. (Full disclosure: Paul Daley later wrote some very favourable comments about my novella Ravenous Girls, which you can read here.)
- I have fallen in front of people. I have fallen in front of so many people: Devin Kelly on learning (how to live). People often link adulthood and maturity, adulthood and strength, adulthood and something resembling confidence, Kelly writes. Personally, I have nearly always associated adulthood with fear and shame. I have learned, as an adult, less about what I am capable of and more about the opposite. I have learned about my capacity for cruelty and the sense of safety I find in shame, how I have sometimes used the shame I feel about myself to excuse myself for what I’ve done wrong, little self-deprecating jokester I can be, little not worth it kind of boy. Lots to think about here.