eating disorder recovery – twenty-one words

My body, my self

March 14, 2025Posted in a thought, anorexia, anxiety, Autumn, books, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the seaTagged anorexia nervosa, books, despair, Emma Copley Eisenberg, fiction, Housemates, reading, writing1 Comment

Other people’s words about … other people’s writing

Most of the articles that Leah’s housemates were reading and talking about in the kitchen were also clearly a product of this system. Either they made arguments about ‘justice’ and ‘representation’ that were so flatly predetermined and simple as to make Leah want to crack a pencil in half or they were written in gesturing and floaty theory-ese that was outrageously divorced from the relevant concerns of being a person. Either they purported to know everything, tacking all the problems at once and offering vague, useless answers, or they tackled nothing, risked nothing, tried for nothing.

But books were no better. Most of the books that lined the front window of the volunteer-run bookstore on the avenue were either practical guides to overcoming compulsory monogamy and white supremacy or neatly contained novels about pretty people struggling to fall in love, or stay in love, or have a child, or lose weight (a shocking number of the books lefties loved revealed a plain hatred of fatness), or lose weight after having a child. The viral book reviews, shared in their housemate group chat, were almost always written by viciously smart Brooklyn-based writers who panned any book they deemed too ambitious or emotional — offensive on principle it seemed — in clipped, sarcastic prose. Only smallness of scope and affective numbness were aesthetically acceptable.

From ‘Housemates‘
By Emma Copley Eisenberg

I think this is one of the best critiques I’ve read about the written world today. How do we escape the aesthetic smallness of scope and affective numbness? I don’t know, but I think Eisenberg is onto something here.

Taperoo Beach, March 2025.

Leah, one of the two main protagonists of Housemates, is fat and queer and in love with her housemate Bernie, who is attracted to Leah but not driven to pursue the attraction, or at least not initially. And here again Eisenberg questions our social mores, the platitudes we repeat to ourselves and to others, this time about the discourse of sexuality. Was she more or less comfortable among queers than she was among everyone else? Bernie asks herself. About the same, came the answer. But if she really listened, really paused, there was another answer, which was: less. The style. The discordance, the mismatching, the pride, the attracting of attention and the comfort in that attention, the physicality to dance, to fuck, to march. The physical in Bernie felt meant for other uses.

Leah and Bernie move in a world where people pride themselves for being other, for not living according to the usual socially accepted order. And yet their world, too, demands acceptance and conformity to certain philosophical and sexual tenets. I love how Bernie has the courage to question the over-sexualised expectations that she perceives the people around her to have of themselves and others. The physical in Bernie felt meant for other uses. Now that’s a celebratory sentence if there ever was one.

Taperoo Beach, March 2025.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Styron’s disconsolate characters live in a world which is itself afflicted with melancholia, an entire existence clinically depressed: Greg Cwik remembers the works of William Styron, whose memoir, Darkness Visible, I remember reading in my very early twenties.
I am, to date, a slow writer—my debut novel took ten years. My second, nine. There was overlap between those years, but still. Upon finishing a book draft, I feel no sense of accomplishment: there are so many more to go. Meanwhile, as is true for any number of artists, my well-being is predicated on that of my writing. The first depends on the second. I think sometimes of what Honoré de Balzac said when he ran into his writer friends at the end of a day. He didn’t inquire how they were doing; instead, he asked if they’d worked well that day, since, if they said yes, it necessarily followed that his friends were thriving: R O Kwon on the benefits of powerlifting and how it helps her cope with writing … and with life.
I wish I could tell you in simple terms what it is we make together, she and I. The names there are tend to be a bit off-key. We’ve cared for each other, durably and devotedly, for decades, but we are not ‘family’ in the eyes of any relevant authorities, and certainly not a couple. (She’s a lesbian; I’m a straight man.) We’re not roommates or lovers or coparents. We are not co-owners of a condo, a couch, a dog. It’s true that we’re both professors and so maybe, on somebody’s HR spreadsheet, we go down as ‘colleagues’: Peter Covellio, on indefinable friendships.
Medicine knows one thing about you and decides it therefore knows everything about you – or, at the very least, it has a single frame within which it pictures every single thing about you: Fiona Wright, on how her late-stage diagnosis of autism affected her anorexia.
While eating disorders can (and do) develop on the basis of body image, they are often adaptive, which means the person engages in those behaviors for reasons other than weight loss: While we’re on the this theme, Maggie Slepian explores the long-term course of eating disorders and comes up with the conclusion that recovery is often out of reach. I’ve linked to this article because I am interested in eating disorders and have written about them myself, both on my blog and in my fiction. But this piece troubles me for many reasons. In the first half, Slepian details all the strategies she used when she was severely anorexic to lose weight — there are so many triggers here, I don’t know where to start. (The only thing she doesn’t do is list her lowest weight, but that seems tokenistic.) Beyond that, though, I am tired by Slepian’s conclusion that recovery — by which she means mental recovery as well as physical recovery — isn’t possible. I have read numerous pieces by former anorexics who say the same thing, and I disagree My belief is that, at least in some of these cases, the writers of pieces like this simply haven’t lived long enough (yet) to outlive their eating disorders. In my case, I continued to experience mental symptoms for twenty years after I was initially diagnosed, which was a long time after I had physically recovered. But twenty years in, the disordered, depressing thoughts did fade and within twenty-five years they were gone, and they have never returned. Recovery is possible, at least for some of us. It just takes a long, long time and it doesn’t look the way people expect it to.

Mirror

January 29, 2025Posted in a thought, anorexia, anxiety, books, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, summer, writingTagged anorexia nervosa, Body Friend, books, creative-writing, despair, fiction, Katherine Brabon, reading, writing2 Comments

Other people’s words about … hunger

I aligned my body with Tomasz’s in the early days, when we first met. When he would move his body, ride his bike, commute to work, I would join him. If he slept in, then I would try to do the same, even though I’ve never been able to sleep through any morning. And I aligned my body to his hunger. Hunger as perhaps our original pain. Though conscious of participating in clichés of gender, I would not say I wanted to eat, was embarrassed, needing too much, was sure of it. And so we would have coffee first thing and only later, hours towards lunch, would we eat. Often I didn’t know if I was hungry and yet I ate at the designated times. Hunger by the minute hand’s salivation. There was some murky shame behind this, some inkling that our capacity to eat when we are not hungry is our greater hunger, our great undoing, danger and sadness, our signifier. Only some animals do this, become gluttons when they live with us. The birds who cannot stop pecking, pecking at their seed because it’s there, all there in front of them. The cats who eat until they vomit. They need us to stop them eating and they need us to feed them. We are the same but we are the hand that feeds us.

Perhaps I aligned myself with Tomasz’s body because his seemed to me to be good. As though I wanted to find another body to live by, because mine could only do wrong. Doctors were surprised at the tenacity of [my] illness. ‘It’s aggressive,’ they would say, and then they’d write the same in my file: ‘a severe and aggressive manifestation’.

From ‘Body Friend‘
By Katherine Brabon

The narrator in the passage I’ve quoted above from Katherine Brabon’s novel Body Friend isn’t anorexic — her illness is of another kind, some kind of autoimmune illness that Brabon leaves unnamed throughout the novel. Still, I’m fascinated by the way the narrator’s thinking in this passage aligns itself with a kind of anorexic thinking pattern, a pattern that Brabon identifies instead as a cliché of gender. The thoughts the narrator expresses here, the murky shame she feels, remind me of the way I used to think about my body, my hunger, my appetites, my eating patterns when I was still experiencing the symptoms of anorexia (both before and after treatment — indeed, for years after treatment).

My first boyfriend, when I was in my early twenties, was a tall, naturally thin guy (very thin) whose appetite waxed and waned; he would eat nothing for hours, opting to smoke cigarettes instead, and then he’d suddenly become ravenous and eat his way through what seemed to me vast quantities of food, the equivalent of several meals at once. He didn’t exercise much, perhaps because he wasn’t a natural athlete.

My second boyfriend, meanwhile, whom I met in my late twenties, was a slow eater, someone who put his fork down between bites, to talk, to smoke, to drink. He didn’t always finish what was on his plate; if he’d had enough, he stopped eating, which seemed miraculous to me, evidence that he felt a freedom from compulsion around food and eating that I couldn’t imagine ever feeling myself. He loved exercising — he had been a runner in his twenties, until injury forced him to stop, and he shaped his days instead around surfing and cycling and swimming.

With both of them, doubting my own hunger, suspicious of my own greed, I would, like Brabon’s narrator, mirror their eating patterns. I would skip breakfast, even though doing so made me feel faint within a couple of hours. I would try to leave some food on my plate, even if I wanted to eat it all. I would try to slow down the speed at which I ate. When I was with my first boyfriend, I didn’t exercise much at all. Moving in with my second boyfriend, though, I took up cycling and swimming. I did these things because I knew instinctively that they, my boyfriends — the habits they had formed that determined the way they lived their lives — were right, whereas I was inherently wrong.

Native pelargoniums on the beach path, Taperoo, January 2025.

What drives this kind of thinking — or what drove it for me, anyway — is self-hatred and fear. I had believed for years that my appetites were out of proportion, that they needed curbing, taming; it was this belief that had led me into an eating disorder in the first place. I didn’t yet understand that appetite is a tricky word (a signifier, to borrow Brabon’s word), and that it can refer to things beyond food, things like desire and longing and hope, so that in trying to tame my appetite for food, I was also trying to tame those other appetites, the ones that truly frightened me.

Brabon’s narrator is experiencing other fears than the fears I experienced, and yet I think her fear has a similar source to the fear that I felt — fear of her own body, of what it can do if left to itself. Fear of its inherent faultiness. Its inherent gluttony. Fear that, if left to our own resources, we are like the cat that eats until it vomits, no better than that, equally repulsive.

Even today, I still feel those same fears sometimes (perhaps, after all, that’s where the gender cliché comes in), but I no longer feel the compulsion to mirror myself in someone else’s habits. And I am deeply grateful for this.

Lately I’ve been reading …

People sometimes treat my fiction, which often uses material from my life, as though it were a transcription of my experience. It isn’t. It has always been clear to me that my books are, and that I want them to be, fiction; all three of them are full of invention. When people ask me, as they sometimes do, how much of a novel is ‘true,’ it feels like a category error. The ideas of true and false don’t map onto the literary object we’re supposedly discussing. Lived experience has been utterly transformed. It’s like looking at someone’s oil painting and asking, ‘How much of that is flax?’: Garth Greenwell in conversation with Meghan O’Rourke about his third novel, Small Rain. I am a huge fan of Greenwell’s writing; his ability to write about the experience of embodiment, like Katherine Brabon’s, floors me.
But this week the third independent publisher in less than six months has merged with a multinational: Alice Grundy explores why Australia’s independent publishing scene is in dire straits.
In theory, this could amount to nothing: an order to look into something that quietly fades away: Zack Beauchamp explores Donald Trump’s first day in power, and the resulting threats to democracy. I try to avoid writing about Trump and politics in America today in general in my blog; frankly, they sicken and horrify me in equal measure. But here’s a start.
The air was so hot and the winds so powerful. The fires just spread and spread: Carolyn Kellogg describes evacuating her house in Los Angeles during the recent wildfires — and the books she chose to take with her.
I had few friends. I had a huge following. The balance was not sustainable: August Lamm, on how to give up your smart phone. I don’t consider myself addicted to my smart phone – many of the strategies Lamm suggests are ones I already use – but even so, I found some things to think about here.

We cannot know

September 12, 2024September 12, 2024Posted in a thought, Australian bush, birds, books, coronavirus, eating disorder recovery, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, nature, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, WinterTagged Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red CoatLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … writing about life

‘We cannot know.’ If used sparingly, this is one of the strongest phrases in the biographer’s language. It reminds us that the suave study-of-a-life we are reading, for all its detail, length and footnotes, for all its factual certainties and confident hypotheses, can only be a public version of a public life, and a partial version of a private life. Biography is a collection of holes tied together with string, and nowhere more so than with the sexual and amatory life. For some there is nothing easier than understanding the sex life of someone you’ve never met, and easier still when they’re conveniently dead; or in posthumously adding another conquest to the dance card of a known Don Juan. Others simplify things by maintaining that human sexual habits have always been more or less the same, the only variables being the degree of hypocrisy and cover-up.
But sex is a world in which self-deception can so easily present itself as objective fact, and ‘brutal honesty’ is no more likely to be true than shy evasiveness or sentimental melodrama as an explanation of what really took place. Oscar Wilde may have been a ‘posing sodomite’, but such evidence as we have suggests he preferred intercrural sex, and if so was not technically a ‘sodomite’ at all. We cannot know. Sara Bernhardt was a nymphomaniac. Oh, but she was also incapable of orgasm. Until she had the problem fixed by means of an ingenious surgical implant — which is reliably attested by that ‘hysterical duplicitous gossip’ Jean Lorrain, and then recorded in the [j]ournal of Edmond de Goncourt, whose views on women were old-fashioned to say the least. We cannot know. Robert de Montesquiou was a flamboyant homosexual, except that his biographer thinks he was too coldly fastidious to indulge his Hellenic urges, while [Samuel] Pozzi’s biographer thinks he may have been impotent from around 1884, and remained so. We cannot know. Pozzi had a reputation as ‘an incorrigible seducer’, a doctor who slept with his patients, who may even have used his consultations as foreplay. He also kept all the letters he had received from women over a sexual career of half a century or more. Yet after his death, Mme Pozzi instructed her son Jean to burn them all. So we cannot know a large amount … We may speculate as long as we also admit that our speculations are novelistic, and that the novel has almost as many forms as there are forms of love and sex.

from ‘The Man in the Red Coat‘
by Julian Barnes

Many years ago, my mother and I embarked together on a reading project for a year, our own little book club before book clubs were a thing. Our reading theme was American novels, and we took it in turns to pick a novel, one by one over the course of the year, which we each then assiduously read; afterwards, we caught up over coffee to talk about it. I remember this year with great fondness as a time of shared reading and conversations, conversations that began with reading and literature but moved on, as all good conversations do, to other things. Art. Love. Life.

Knotted trunk, Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

Recently we’ve begun another reading project together, one that we hope will involve some writing further down the track. As a result, my reading choices, which usually tend to fiction only, and generally to contemporary literary fiction at that, have widened. I’m reading fiction and non-fiction, works by contemporary writers and works by long-dead ones, works by women and works by men. Hence The Man in the Red Coat, which I might not otherwise have come across.

We cannot know. I’ve quoted Barnes at length here (which I hope he will forgive me for) because I love the virtuosity of this passage, the way he begins with a simple assertion, a certain truth, and then moves on in the space of a couple of paragraphs to cover themes at once intimate and specific to the period he is writing about (the Belle Epoque) but also meta-textual, concerning the art of biography itself, that collection of holes tied together with string. (What a lovely image that is.) And then, somehow, we arrive at the end of this flight of thought with another assertion, equally simple but bold, about the essence of novels and fiction.

We cannot know. Indeed.

Mangrove tree at Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

The photographs in this post, like the ones in my previous post, come from a recent trip I took to Darwin. I’d never been to Darwin before and was only there fleetingly on this occasion, but I fell in love with it, all of it. Darwin in the dry season: place of sunny days, rainforest-lined beaches, mangroves and vines and bush-stone curlews. When you visit somewhere new, you see things through a stranger’s eyes, which is to say that you don’t see its inner workings, its inner truth. Does that mean that you see its truth or something else, your own hypothesis of the place? We cannot know. But oh, the privilege of having the opportunity to see it anyway.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- From then on, [Hannah} Whetzel ate exactly 40 cheerios before every run, which became a team joke: Christine Yu on negative coaching and toxic team cultures and how they affect female athletes.
- As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel: Omer Bartov, Israeli-born academic and former IDF soldier, on Gaza and what he calls the logic of endless violence. In this nuanced essay, Bartov explores why, despite his deep connection to Israel, he is adamant that the war in Gaza must stop.
- I knew I was signing up for the isolation of being the only vegan at a family cookout or party, but I didn’t expect to rarely interact with other Black vegans at plant-based restaurant meetups, food festivals, and Facebook groups. I’m not alone in feeling that way: Noella Williams on why we need to decolonise veganism.
- In two days, on 6 June, I’d be forty. My head was sore with two things: a vain dread of getting older and the work I needed to do to cure the problems in my third novel. I wasn’t worried about seeing the neurologist. Not one bit. Whatever this inflammation was, medicine would wipe it out. I was glad to know the symptoms weren’t phantoms. They were glitches and they’d be cured: M J Hyland, in a piece dating back to 2012, on living with Multiple Sclerosis.
- It has been a peculiar and exasperating five years. I’m a writer. I do other things but writing feels like my main reason for being on the planet: Another writer, Mark Haddon, also on the theme of illness, this time on writing and not writing, running, heart surgery. long Covid and brain fog.
- The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose: Cat Williams explores nature and the non-binary.

End-times

August 16, 2024August 16, 2024Posted in a thought, anorexia, blogging, books, coronavirus, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, rituals, Running, solace, staying humble, staying true, work, writingTagged Julia Armfield, Private Rites1 Comment

Other people’s words about … the end of the world

It has been so many years — a decade of this, another decade before that of almost this. People take supplements, for vitamin D, for energy, complain the damp has reached their bones. It rains constantly and the fact of the rain, of the rain’s whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets, of yoga challenges, of buying fruit and paying taxes, of mopping floors and taking drugs on weekends and reading books and wondering what to do on dates. It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention — exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.

from ‘Private Rites‘
by Julia Armfield

In Private Rites, three sisters, Isla, Irene and Agnes, are living in the end-times of the world. Their world, their day-to-day, is one of endless rain, of land flooding, buildings subsiding, people drowning. It’s not the world we live in, not quite — and yet it is. When I read the passage above, I thought of the days of the Covid lockdowns, of 2020 and 2021 when on the one hand everything stopped — when no-one went out, when people lost their jobs and their lives — and yet on the other hand, people went on. They bought food; they spoke to their loved ones; they slept and ate and bickered and loved each other and tried to stay healthy and tried to stay apart from each other while also trying not to let go of each other. Armfield’s rainy, drowning world is a lot like that.

Pathway to Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

The pandemic is over now, at least officially, and no-one speaks about it anymore, except in passing, but it has changed our lives forever. Meanwhile, in the background, there is the climate crisis, which was possibly what made it possible for a pandemic like Covid to happen in the first place, and which continues apace while we look away and go about our lives.

Vines at Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

For me, Armfield’s words in the passage above capture all of this, the worry and the refusal to worry, the going on and the not quite going on. It is exhausting, and it is boring. Writing about it, I think, is important.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Forty-three words, nine clauses, a single semicolon. Not a massive sentence per se, but one which violates much of the common-sense advice about simply getting to the point: Ed Simon on Zadie Smith, Annie Proulx, E B White, and the magic of the long, long sentence.
- I love writing! But I hate writing! But I love writing! Katie Williams, on struggling through the writing process, and why she still loves it.
- In all that beautiful solitude I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. I hadn’t known how much I needed this aloneness, after years of crowded work at a university, after months of eldercare, the phobias of the pandemic, and the stresses of a crowded, socially mediated, 21st-century life: I don’t surf, though I am close to someone who does. But I found so much in this piece by Mylene Dressler about surfing with which I resonate. Many of the things that Dressler celebrates in surfing are what I, as a middle-aged, non-athletic, non-competitve runner celebrate in running. I [surf] for a certain kind of peace, an assertion of body, and of choice, Dressler writes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
- And I’ve felt daunted by the decades that lie ahead, if I do indeed remain childfree: how will I generate meaning and momentum, entirely on my own steam? Elle Hunt explores childlessness and why women remain undecided. I think the most interesting aspect of this is regret, which Hunt explores several times, though I’d disagree with her concluding lines. Regret is inevitable, I think, part of the human condition, a reflection of the availability of choice in the first place. We can’t prevent it and we shouldn’t fear it.
- Memoirs and essays about eating disorders are often structured in redemptive narrative arcs — the writers describe the specific ways they starved or purged until their enamel wore down and their hearts almost stopped. Then they begin to recover, sometimes against their will, and from this place of tentative health, they write. I can’t find myself in these narratives: Billy Lezra explores what recovery from an eating disorder means when it doesn’t mean getting well.
- At no point did I feel as if I wanted to end it all, but my identity had shifted into something unrecognisable: Meera Sodha, British food writer, on how she lost her appetite … and slowly found her way back.

Calculus

July 21, 2024July 21, 2024Posted in a thought, anorexia, blogging, books, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, 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, the beach, the sea, Winter, writingTagged Dead Weight, Emmeline KleinLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … counting calories

In 2008, I downloaded a new app to my iPod. The icon featured a silhouetted figure in the middle of a balletic jump, lithe and limber like I wanted to be, and when I clicked open the app I was welcomed and asked to input my height, current weight, age, gender, and goal weight. MyFitnessPal, which debuted on the app store in 2005, is to this day one of the most popular calorie counting apps worldwide. Its icon is also regular featured in eating disorder starter pack memes and discussed on pro-ED websites. ‘Does anyone else have MyFitnessPal app trauma???’ someone posted, while another joked darkly about ‘the myfitnesspal to eating disorder pipeline’, and another mocked ‘myfitnesspal’s yassification of orthorexia’. The app is focused on calories in and out, calculating your personalised daily allotment based on your biometrics and the date by which you’d like to hit your weight goal. During the era I spent addicted to the app, every time I considered putting something in my mouth, I searched it in the apps’s expansive database, and often decided against eating it after seeing its caloric content. What I did eat, I entered, and the app updated my remaining calories for the day accordingly. The app quickly became a ritual and a rulebook, and scrolling my daily record in bed at night a practice as yearnful and penitent as running my fingers through rosary beads.

from ‘Dead Weight‘
by Emmeline Clein

I have written two novels now that feature characters with eating disorders in them, a YA novel and my recent novella, Ravenous Girls. Both the characters in my books, like myself, experienced the onset of their anorexia in the late 1980s or early 1990s, before the existence of the internet, let alone of iPods and the app store. And yet when I read the passage I’ve quoted above by Emmeline Clein, I thought how familiar it sounded and how, despite the passage of time and the onslaught of digital technology, the experience of anorexia has remained in its essence the same across generations, at least in certain parts of the world and among people of a certain class.

Whether you count calories by consulting a book of charts that is updated and republished annually (as my characters and I did in the 1980s) or whether you download an app and then ‘chat’ about it online with your pro-ana friends, you are still counting calories. You are still measuring yourself by your food intake and the effect it has on your physical appearance. You are still, in other words, measuring your worth by what you eat and how you look.

Taperoo Beach, July 2024.

There are people who say that when we write about the experience of anorexia we trigger others to seek the experience out. I am not one of those people. The subtitle of Clein’s book is On Hunger, Harm and Disordered Eating, and I think it’s the first two words of that subtitle that grab me most strongly. Hunger is the primary experience of anorexia, whatever your age or sex or class or gender, and harm is the result — in some cases, terrible harm.

Perhaps we can’t prevent that harm when we write about it, but perhaps, too, we can try to make sense of it. And that, I believe, is important.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Each week I bookmark pieces I’ve read online that I might list on my blog, and each week my list grows and grows, since I read far more than I blog. For this post, I’ve dived into my archive of bookmarks for some pieces I’ve loved over the last two or three years.

- Twenty years ago we did not have constructive ways to leave the age of fossil fuel behind. Now we do. And the solutions keep getting better: Rebecca Solnit, on why the stories we tell about climate change are as important as the things we do — and why they’re not, in fact, all about doom and gloom. Like many people, I tend to spiral into despair whenever I consider climate crisis. Solnit’s piece, from early 2023, is considered and wide-ranging and allows much room for hope.
- When I was confident we could meet socially, or off-the-record, we embarked on that all-too-rare thing in adult life – a new friendship: Alice Vincent, in another piece from 2023, on forming friendships later in life.
- But I knew, even at that young age, that I had to write in order to feel whole. Whether or not anyone else read my work, or paid me for it, was a separate matter: Ann Napolitano with some wise words on writer’s block, on not writing what you know, and on offering yourself grace.
- Again, I feel grateful that so much of my education happened in spaces of that kind of permissiveness, where the value of unexpected pleasure was seen as greater then the danger of non-catastrophic, unpleasant experience. That space of permissiveness allows for a kind of discovery: I’m a huge fan of Garth Greenwell’s two novels, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, so when I heard that his next novel is coming out later this year (in the US, at least), I got pretty excited. While we wait for that, here is Greenwell in a fascinating, thoughtful conversation about cruising, queer spaces, the #MeToo movement and capitalism.
- It didn’t occur to me to be scared: Maggie Slepian, in a more recent piece, tells a startlng, moving story about how she nearly drowned while she was out kayaking … and what happened afterwards. This one is worth reading all the way to the end, though I can’t promise you won’t cry.
- The sex was okay, I guessed, but what I really liked was seeing my body through their eyes; the hollows of my stomach, the knobby delicacy of my collarbone. I still felt a sick shame in the pit of my stomach in the morning when they left, but it was less like an overpowering stomach flu, more like a mild bug: I’m finishing with this more recent piece by Emma Specter, which returns to the theme of my post today, and what Specter calls the ‘calculus [of] … calories in, calories out’. Does this sound familiar?

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.

Sad place

June 13, 2024Posted in a thought, ageing, anorexia, books, Cairo, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, health, Lately I've been reading about, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, staying humble, staying true, Winter, writingTagged Chetna Mario, Western LaneLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … funfairs

Deep down, the funfair was a sad place. You couldn’t hear yourself think. Everything was too bright and too big. The floor was covered in sawdust and underneath it, dirt. On the other side of the Round Up there was a wire fence around a patch of muddy grass with a few bits of hay, and inside the fence was the saddest horse you ever saw. Chestnut brown with white socks, covered in flies, its nose more or less touching the ground because its own head was too much for its neck to bear. It wasn’t just sad: there was something mean in it that wasn’t its fault. When I whispered to it, ‘hello, horse’, it slowly turned its whole body away.

from ‘Western Lane‘
by Chetna Mario

In my memory, the Cairo Zoo is a little like the funfair that Chetna Maroo’s narrator describes in the passage I’ve quoted above.

I visited the Cairo Zoo thirty-two years ago, just once. I didn’t take any photographs or record it in my diary at the time, and the man I visited it with, the man I was living with in Cairo, an American man, is no longer in regular touch with me, so I don’t know how accurately I’m recalling it. But in my memory the zoo was a place where the animal enclosures were small and narrow with bare ground and no grass, a place where the animals were thin with their ribs showing through their mangy fur. It was also a place where families wandered down the paths with an air of celebration and festivity, where children carried balloons and mothers pushed prams and vendors walked past, selling roses and snacks. It was a sad place. That’s how I remember it.

Largs Bay, June 2024.

In the camel enclosure, a camel stood before us, a camel whose toenails had grown so long that they curved down towards the ground. The American man and I stared silently back at the camel.

‘That’s cruel,’ I said at last, my voice wobbling. ‘They should cut its toes.’

‘I know,’ the American man said back.

He laughed helplessly and then he looked as though he might start to cry instead.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Oh God, Rebecca, let’s get out of here.’

And we fled.

How did we get to the zoo that day — by bus or train? I don’t know. Where did we go afterwards — back to our apartment in downtown Cairo or to the fiteer place that we loved for lunch? I don’t know. Is any of this memory true? I don’t know.

And if it’s not true, this memory, this story that I’ve just told you — even though I remember it that way — do I have the right to tell it to you?

I don’t know.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- The sobriety narrative is appealing in that it organises life into a tidy before and after, the epitome of a transformation story, powerful proof of the capacity to change: On the subject of telling troublesome stories, here is Sara Martin exploring the recovery narrative. In my novella Ravenous Girls, the narrator, Frankie, longing to understand what her anorexic sister is experiencing, devours memoirs written by people who have recovered from an eating disorder. It’s only slowly that she realises the inherent faultiness of these recovery narratives. This, in part, is what Martin explores in this piece.
- While eating disorders are more prevalent among adolescents and young women, eating disorders affect people of all genders and ages, including those in experiencing perimenopause and menopause in midlife: On the subject of eating disorders, here’s the Butterfly Foundation on the growing recognition of the prevalence of eating disorders in older women.
- Disappointment isn’t self-indulgence or a lack of gratitude; it isn’t a failure of character or a threat to my wellbeing. It is the natural byproduct of wanting something that has not come to fruition. To desire is to make ourselves vulnerable; to come up empty-handed hurts: I am usually wary of people who write about their mindfulness and spiritual practices. I find the language they use, somewhat counterintuitively, self-absorbed, and the practices they preach alientating. Despite this, I found this piece by Benjamin Schaefer, on how writers often mistake disappointment for jealousy, thought-provoking.

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.

Inkling

December 31, 2023Posted in a thought, anorexia, anxiety, books, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, summer, writingTagged Niamh Campbell, This Happy2 Comments

Other people’s words about … self-perception

The evening was cold with a bolt of black cloud over the dome of the courts. Inside, a maitre d’ approached. He led me to a high marble table with several stools and a can of light on a chain.
Thankyou, I said. I’m waiting for two more.
They were already late. I wondered if the robust twists of bread stacked in a basket to my left were real or fake. I didn’t see anybody that I knew. The food was expensive but I would not be paying for it. At times like this I simply felt too large. I am not a large person but I felt too large, as if I’d bloated, as if I were rangier and wider and more ungainly than other people.

from ‘This Happy‘
by Niahm Campbell

I’ve experienced the feeling that Niamh Campbell’s narrator describes suddenly coming over her in the passage above — the feeling of largeness, of having an outsized body in comparison to other people’s bodies — so many times in my life that I’ve lost count. Till now, though, I’ve always assumed that it was one of those quirks that is unique to people who have lived with an eating disorder.

It’s certainly true that one of the motivations behind my anorexia was a longing to shrink my body. And I’m not alone in this; over the years I’ve met other people with anorexia who have expressed the same motivation. In fact, back when I was a teenager, in the early days of my treatment, the nurses frequently used to say to me and my fellow anorexic patients, ‘You deserve to take up space.’ It was a kind of motto they came out with when we were feeling low, when we said hateful things about ourselves; they would chant it at us — in an effort to distract us, or perhaps to dissuade us, or even, impossibly, to cure us.

You deserve to take up space.

Those words, that chant, never quite resonated with me. My sense of largeness didn’t feel spatial; it felt physical and embodied, the way one person might have a louder voice than another, or coarser hair. Still, even as the feeling came over me — even as at certain moments it took up all my awareness — I understood that it wasn’t an accurate one. At heart, I knew even then that my body wasn’t any larger than anyone else’s, and that it was my perceptions that were distorted rather than my body. It was just that I didn’t know how to adjust those perceptions.

In many ways, I think, I still don’t. Instead, I’ve learned to ignore my perceptions, to see them as a false signal blinking at me that I choose to ignore. Maybe that’s a rudimentary way of dealing with them, but it’s the most effective response I’ve come up with.

Branch across the path, December 2023.

Because today is the last day of the year, the last day of 2023, I’m going to move on now to an entirely different topic. I want to finish this post with a beautiful poem by Lisa Holstein called ‘Happy New Year’. The poem comes from her collection Dream Apartment; its words are poignant and filled with sadness but also beauty, and so I can’t think of any better ones with which to bring in the new year.

Is it selfish to wish for more than to survive?
I see you, bare arms gleaming in the sun-

struck snow, I see the browned roast
you brought to your wine-stained lips

the stack of books you read, and those boots
that last fall you loved yourself in.

I see you in them again on this roll call
morning stroll through what intimate data

strangers tell me about their lives.
Once upon a time I asked them to

or they asked me, who can recall,
I’m into it, I guess. I like to watch,

at least, I can’t seem to stop, but I can’t
bear to share, so I’ll tell you here:

the cat finally came home last night—
spooked by so many fireworks barking,

he hid somewhere unsearchable for a while
no matter how I called and called.

He chose me, I like to say since the day
I found him starving on the porch.

I know the night is full of unsteady boats
on cold seas and horrible cages

and people far more alone than me
I’m sorry for your loss, your cancer,

the accident you had no way to see coming
and the one you did have an inkling of

I’ve learned how important it is to say
because of how difficult it is to say

and how loudly loneliness fills the silence
although, like anything, it depends—

for instance, I still can’t unhitch my breath
from even the softest whisper of your name.

Late groundsel flower, December 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- First, some of my own good news: Paul Daley named my novella, Ravenous Girls, as one of the best 25 Australian books of 2023 in The Guardian. I’m honoured and somewhat astonished to find my name listed in amongst all the other names that appear on this list, many of whom are writers whose work I adore.
- The enigma of how to sell a book touches all corners of literary culture: Tajja Isen, in a fascinating piece on how hard it is to sell a book, and how few books actually do sell.
- I did not know how to fall asleep without a book, how to wait without a book, how to be, without a book: Sarah Wheeler, with more on books and reading, this time making the case for audiobooks, which saved her from losing the ability to read during a bout of severe illness.
- With apologies to the everything-happens-for-a-reason crowd: no, there are indeed some things in life that are profoundly meaningless: Matthew Hays on reading his writer friend’s posthumous book after suicide.