My published writing – Page 2

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.

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.

Community

January 14, 2024Posted in a thought, anorexia, blogging, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, summer, the beach, work, writingTagged Jo Hamya, Three Rooms2 Comments

Other people’s words about … social media and the internet

My suitcase was a water bottle, a P60, my clothes without a wardrobe and brutalised with creases — but, I thought, I should not be complaining, there was always someone who had it worse than me. Whenever I forgot, I looked at my phone or self-flagellated with the Guardian. There was a proliferation of opinions on Twitter about what it took to be a good, inclusive, progressive person, but I read such lists and threads on the cusp of going to Waitrose or preparing for sleep, whereupon they were quickly replaced with other lists: sliced bread to be bought, teeth to be brushed. When I remembered I had forgotten them, I felt like a terrible person anew. I wanted to discuss this with someone, but there was never any time. Quickly, I realised the absurd wealth of the places I had been in over the past year: rooms in which such discussions could be played with in theory, without urgency, at any time, and then set aside to be taken up at a later date. The internet was one such room: a constant, useless distress in my pocket. I had resolved to stop looking at my phone if I could help it; to turn off my notifications and live less theoretically.

from ‘Three Rooms‘
by Jo Hamya

We all bewail the role of social media and the internet in our lives while continuing to use it unceasingly, it seems to me, but I found the passage above by Jo Hamza’s narrator particularly poignant.

Recently, I read online about what some people are calling the ‘Nazi problem’ on Substack. I gather, from my brief research (online, of course), that Substack has been accused of not proactively removing Nazi content, and that as a result, people are now querying whether it’s an acceptable platform to continue to publish on. Some of the opinions I read (again, online) were by people who had only recently moved from another platform to Substack, and they were expressing exhaustion at the thought of moving to yet another platform.

I sympathise. I think it’s impossible to keep up with all the news about the relevant platforms. I prefer to work towards longevity and sustainability in one or two spaces — either the spaces you are most comfortable with or the spaces that you feel are most suitable for what you are writing about. For that reason, I’ve been writing this blog since 2014 here on WordPress, and I don’t intend to move away.

I hesitate to use the word community (despite its very common usage in this context), but nonetheless, here I am, still blogging away. And here you are, some of you, still reading my posts. So thank you. Truly, thank you ❤️.

Beach tree and seaweed, Island Beach, Kangaroo Island, January 2024.

I’ve spent the first couple of weeks of 2024 quietly, catching up with family and working. Since the publication of my novella, Ravenous Girls, in 2023, I’ve begun writing something new, a continuation in the story of the characters I introduced in Ravenous Girls. I am a slow, doubtful writer, and the publishing world is, in contrast, a fast, uncertain world, but I am quietly enjoying my writing these days — for the moment, at least.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing over the last few years, it’s that you have to celebrate the moments of joy and hope. They are rare and tentative and they quickly disappear, but they happen — every now and then.

PS On that note, if you are curious about my novella or my writing process, you can listen to me in conversation with Elizabeth Walton over on WordRoom, where we discuss novellas, anorexia, literary prizes, the difference between YA novels and literary fiction for adults … and much more.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- The best I can do is to write books that are small but oblique enough to stick in people’s gullets so that they remember them: Rumaan Alam, quoting Helen Garner on her book The Children’s Bach. I loved reading a non-Australian writer’s review of an Australian writer, and there’s a lot to enjoy here on why Helen Garner has such universal appeal.
- I just couldn’t get over how voluptuous these wines were – how ripe, how velvety, how silkily smooth: Just for the fun of it, and to remain on the theme of Australian-ness, here’s Fiona Beckett on why Australian shiraz is so good. I’m a very moderate drinker — one glass of wine, never more, a few times a week — but when I do drink, it’s Australian shiraz for me, all the way.
- The 139 best book covers of 2023: Book lists are ubiquitous at this time of the year, but I enjoyed Emily Temple’s review of 2023’s book covers.

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.

All that food

December 16, 2023Posted in a thought, anorexia, anxiety, Australian bush, blogging, books, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, native coastal vegetation, native flowers, nature, on writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, summer, writingTagged Bryan Washington, Family Meal2 Comments

Other people’s words about … not eating

Mae doesn’t look convinced, but she hands me another bowl, which I pass to TJ. He holds it in the space between us, locking eyes.
You didn’t take any, he says.
I took plenty, I say. I’m stuffed.
No. I watched you.
You must’ve blinked.
Then try some more.
I just told you–
Don’t be a dick, says TJ.
Boys, says Mae.
Her voice is terse enough to shut us up.
Mae holds our gaze until we’ve settled. Then she pours more wine into her coffee mug, twirling her food with a fork.
It’s been too long since we’ve been together, says Mae. Let’s make it a nice evening.
So TJ shoves the bowl of tomatoes my way. I scoop more onto my plate. Then I take bites from the spaghetti and the chicken, and it’s all delicious, and the three of us eat silently, until there’s something like a hum between us.
Is the bathroom still in the same place, I ask.
Mae points down the hallway. I don’t look at TJ when I stand. But once I’ve locked the door behind me, I turn on the faucet, and it’s maybe another five seconds before all that food leaves me.

from ‘Family Meal‘
by Bryan Washington

When I was a teenager receiving treatment for an eating disorder, people had certain fixed ideas about what kind of person was likely to experience anorexia. By ‘people’, I mean not just family and friends but doctors, psychiatrists, medical researchers. Anorexics, people thought then (because that was what we called people with anorexia in those years, anorexics, a label that many people would now object to), were generally white, middle-class, well-educated, high-achieving, likeable young women with a tendency towards perfectionism.

Perhaps, back then, this was true. Or perhaps, more likely, if you were anorexic but you happened to be male, poor, uneducated, older than twenty-five, queer, or a person of colour — or any combination of these things — then your anorexia went unrecognised. Undiagnosed. Untreated.

We know better than this now, I am thankful to say.

Fringe Lily, December 2023.

In the passage I’ve quoted above, Cam, one of the narrators of Bryan Washington’s second novel, Family Meal, is grieving the loss of his boyfriend, Kai, who died in unexpected, violent circumstances. Cam is Black and queer; he is also addicted to many things, including drugs, sex and, yes, starving himself. He is surrounded by friends who see what he is doing to himself and try to talk to him about it, try to show him that they see, and that they care, and that he doesn’t need to be alone. It takes him a long time to see this for himself, though.

Cam’s experience of struggling with food is different from mine, and that’s partly because of who each of us is — precisely because I did, after all, fit most of the anorexic stereotypes I’ve listed above — although it’s also partly because everyone’s struggle with food is, simply, different. But I am so glad, so glad, that contemporary literature that includes stories about anorexia and disordered eating has broadened to include other stories than ones like mine.

And it’s funny how, no matter what your background, no matter what your life experience, the feelings don’t change. I’m fucking suffocating from the weight of myself, Cam writes.

I remember feeling exactly the same.

After the rain, Flooded scrub, November 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- It never occurs to me to be bored of repetition because to me, there is no place closer to the divine than in the repeated utterance, the paper folded back again and again, the same cup for the same coffee made in exactly the same way. Its novelty that exhausts me. I suppose I also don’t have the arrogance to assume that I can exhaust something totally in just one go. Who am I to say that I’ve gotten everything out of it the first time around: Brandon Taylor explores why, as a writer, he values exploring the same story more than once. As with much of what Taylor writes, I love what he has to say here. Does a writer need to write something new each time they write a new book? Or is each book a chance to go deeper into the themes that most interest a writer, to re-examine them, to learn anew? I will go on thinking about the questions Taylor poses in this post for a long time.
- Burton has written a vivid, intimate sketch of 1980s adolescence – and a clear-eyed reflection on the traumatic experience of loving someone with a severe eating disorder. Fuelled by emotion recollected in tranquillity, it’s a coming-of-age story of remarkable compression, compassion and nuance: I was stoked to receive a lovely review of my novella, Ravenous Girls, in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald newspapers today. It’s short but sweet, and I’m very grateful.
- Today there are a couple of varieties of tourist reviled more than we. The British, who can’t be helped; the Australians, who, because they’re good-looking, have no idea that they’re just like the British, and so are, on top of the drunken doofishness, cocky; and the Germans: Lauren Oyler explores Marienbad, with hilarious results.
- Since 1970, according to one large-scale synthesis of national bird surveys, U.S. bird populations have declined by close to 30 percent, a loss of nearly three billion animals. The culprits are many, but glass is among the most catastrophic, second only to cats as a direct killer: Ben Goldfarb, on why Chicago is the world’s most lethal city for birds — and how easy it could be to change this.

Fumbling

November 22, 2023Posted in anorexia, 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, rituals, solace, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged Good Girls, Hadley FreemanLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … growing up

I also felt like I was being pushed into a world where I didn’t understand the rules. The summer before we moved, a bunch of my friends at camp were caught kissing boys behind our cabin with their T-shirts off. I didn’t even know why a girl would take her T-shirt off with a boy, but I knew it was very wrong to do so, because they all got into big trouble. I’d started going to after-school ballroom dancing lessons in New York, which was something kids from my part of Manhattan did, maintaining an Upper East Side fantasy that we all still lived in an Edith Wharton novel. At the last dance, a boy put his hand on my bottom. Again, I couldn’t understand why a boy would want to touch my bottom, but I knew I didn’t like it. But I also knew that admitting I didn’t like it — like admitting I didn’t know why a boy would want to see my chest — would make people laugh at me. So I said nothing to him, to anyone.

from ‘Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia‘
by Hadley Freeman

One of the things I loved about Hadley Freeman’s memoir Good Girls is that, as well as recounting the years during which she lived with anorexia, she also recounts her life post-anorexia, post-‘recovery’. While the story she tells of her rapid and precipitous descent into anorexia in early adolescence is vivid and poignant, it’s the rest of her story that most spoke to me — the years during which she maintained a pattern of restricted eating that wasn’t quite anorexia but also wasn’t quite wellness or sanity, the years when she lost herself to drug addiction, the years, finally, when she began to come to some kind of peace with herself.

It’s time that eating disorder narratives did this more often, I think. I said nothing … to anyone, Freeman writes in the passage above, and, elsewhere, So much of anorexia is about suppressed conversations. But I think this is as true, if not truer, of those years when a person who has survived anorexia begins to make their way back into life, those years when a person begins to try to make something of their life other than an anorexic one. (And they are years. For most people, the transition away from anorexia is long and slow and painful.) We need, in our narratives about anorexia, to engage with the whole experience, not just one part of it, the most clearly visible part. We need to tell the whole story. I hope that in the future there will be more writers like Freeman who do so.

Looking out onto Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra, November 2023.

I’ll return to this theme in future posts, because there’s so much to unpack here, and because it’s one of the things I was most conscious of when I wrote my novella, Ravenous Girls. In fact, though, what most drew me to the passage I’ve quoted in today’s post is something else. Here Freeman, describing her pre-anorexic period, her pre-adolescent years, writes, I also felt like I was being pushed into a world where I didn’t understand the rules. This is how I felt, too — at twelve years old, at thirteen, even at fourteen. I was what people kindly describe as a late bloomer, which is to say that I entered adolescence reluctantly, lingering in childhood for as long as I could, wishing that I could somehow stay a child forever. Teenage rituals, those fumbling intimacies between boys and girls that Freeman describes here, puzzled me. I knew this marked me out as different, or at least I believed that it did, and so, like Freeman, I remained quiet. I regret this quietness now. I see, looking back, that I was muting myself, retreating into a silence that wasn’t healthy or sustainable. As Freeman notes, it’s in suppressing conversations that anorexia steps in, and that was certainly true for me.

Ravenous Girls isn’t only a story about anorexia, though that’s a part of it. It’s a story about silence and muteness. Perhaps these are themes I’ll continue to explore for the rest of my life. It’s a theme that endlessly fascinates me.

For sale, November 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Whatever happened, I knew, it was going to be a disaster for both sides. A selfish thought ran through my head: we’re never going to go home again: Mya Guarnieri, and Israeli, married a Palestinian and they both live in the US. Here’s her experience of the conflict.
- Sometimes — and this was a tragic element to contemporary life — you experienced something deeply intimate with a person, and it was this very experience of intimacy which foreclosed all possible intimacy in the future. That was, you used it all up in one go right up front, and there was nothing left. He felt a little sad about that: A story by one of my favourite writers, Brandon Taylor. Taylor has written that the protagonist, Per, is a recurring character in his upcoming stories, and I’m looking forward to reading more about him.
- Does meditating really improve your health? Care Chesler explores the science.

Unspoken

November 7, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, moments of beauty, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, spring, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged Anna Kate Blair, Beyond Evie, Ravenous Girls, The Modern2 Comments

Other people’s words about … desire

We stayed mostly silent, that morning, and my giddy feeling gave way to rational thought; my urban preoccupations returned. I was wondering why desire, if it were ordinary and human, always felt as if it had to stay hidden. I didn’t think that I could tell Robert of my feelings for Cara, but it seemed odd to leave it unspoken. It was as if the secrecy rendered the feelings taboo and made me wonder if they were dangerous when I knew they couldn’t be, that it was only that Robert would worry unnecessarily if he knew. It felt as if desire were only permissible in art, where it could be dramatised, made beautiful.

from ‘The Modern‘
by Anna Kate Blair

Sophia, the narrator of Anna Kate Blair’s wonderful novel The Modern is a thirty-year-old Australian woman living in New York on a fellowship with the Museum of Modern Art. She’s bisexual, though the term troubles her — not because she questions her attraction to men and women, but because the label itself bothers her. I didn’t want a term like besexual, she writes, that trailed a disclaimer, a need for clarification, behind it. But who was asking me to clarify? I rarely said it aloud. I didn’t want a term at all. I just wanted to exist in all my dimensions.

We talk so much these days about sexuality and gender, and that’s a good thing; where there was silence before, now there’s conversation. We talk about heterosexuality and heteronormativity and we write about their implications, and that’s a good thing, too. But I’m particularly fascinated by Blair’s thoughts, in the passage I’ve quoted at the start of this post, about desire. It’s true, I think, that desire retains its power most of all when it remains unspoken.

Daly Head, Yorke Peninsula, October 2023.

I’ve explored desire a little in two of my own books, my young adult novel Beyond Evie and most recently, though only in passing, in my novella Ravenous Girls. Like Sophia, labels trouble me. But I can’t help thinking that in part I wrote about desire in these books because, just as Sophia writes, that was the space where it felt most permissible for me to do so — because I could dramatise it, because I could (try to) make it beautiful.

Words, like stories, can be beautiful, can’t they? I hope so. That’s one of the reasons I write.

Daly Head, Yorke Peninsula, October 2023.

Moving on to on other reading-related matters, I’m taking a break today from my usual link to online essays that I’ve read recently because this month I’ve been focusing on reading novellas. Have you heard of Novellas in November? I’ve joined up, and I’m enjoying the chance to explore novellas, old and new, famous and not-so-famous. Feel free to join me over on Instagram for quotes from the novellas I’ve been enjoying, and for my thoughts about them.

Meanwhile, I’ll be back again with more of my usual posts soon.

I wrote a book!

October 28, 2023Posted in a thought, books, gratitude, hope, My published writing, on writing, spring, staying humble, staying trueTagged 20/40 Publishing Prize, Finlay Lloyd Publications, Kim Kelly, Ravenous Girls, The Ladies' Rest and Writing Room4 Comments

I’m breaking from the usual format here on my blog today to announce some exciting news:

Yes, I wrote a book! Or, to be more precise, a novella.

Called Ravenous Girls, it’s one of the two winners of the inaugural 20/40 Publishing Prize, and its official release date is today.

Ravenous Girls tells the story of two teenage sisters who grow close over the course of a summer holiday in the mid-1980s when one of the girls is admitted to hospital with anorexia. Narrated by the younger sister, Frankie, later in her life, it explores the chasms that lie between adolescence and adulthood, sickness and health, intimacy and loneliness —- and how the events of that summer will affect the two girls for the rest of their lives.

Long-time readers of my blog will know that this book has been a long time coming. I can’t begin to tell you how thrilled and excited I am to have won the 20/40 Publishing Prize and to see my title in print.

I’m keeping things short and sweet for today (because, you know, celebrations are in order). I’ll be back again soon with my usual kind of post, but in the meantime, for those who are interested, you can find out more about Ravenous Girls and the 20/40 Publishing Prize here, buy Ravenous Girls here, or buy both of the prize-winning novellas here. (I’m usually somewhat camera-shy, but for anyone interested, you can watch an interview with me, fellow Prize-winning author Kim Kelly and publisher Julian Davies of Finlay Lloyd here — just scroll down to the bottom of the screen to find the videos.)

PS Congratulations to Kim Kelly, author of the other winner of the 20/40 Publishing Prize this year, The Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room, which is set in the bustling streets of 1920s Sydney and tells the story of two young women, each having suffered devastating loss, who are thrown together by unexpected circumstances.