Category: on writing

Soar

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Other people’s words about … tea

You made me tea 
while I shook the rain from my jacket 
You stooped to fit into the kitchen 
but handled the cups as if they’d been 
the fontanelles of two young sons 
whose picture sits in the hip of your 501s. 
We spoke of — what? Not much. 
You weren’t to know how your touch 
with the teaspoon stirred me, 
how the tendons of your wide, divining hands
put me in mind of flight.

You wouldn’t have known 
when you bent to tend a plant 
that your shirt fell open a smile’s breadth. 
You parted the leaves and plucked 
a tiny green bud. Best to do that 
with the early ones, you said. 
I thought of the salt in the crook 
of your arm where a fine vein kicks. 
Of what it might be like to know 
the knot and grain and beat of you; 
the squeak of your heart’s pips. 

From ‘Tea’
By Tiffany Atkinson

Once upon a time, I used to describe myself as someone who drank ‘endless cups of tea’ — which was indeed true, once upon a time — but these days I’m sensitive to caffeine, and so my morning pot of tea, the treasured pot of tea, is the only tea I drink for the day.

And while I drink that pot of tea, I write. Some years ago, when I decided to make a commitment to writing something every day, no matter how little, I linked the commitment I’d made, very strategically, to my morning pot of tea. That way, I told myself, even when I’m filled with doubt about whatever it is I’m writing at the time, even if every part of me wants to give up on it, even if procrastination and writer’s block are overwhelming me, I still put myself through the process each morning — because of the cup of tea that accompanies it.

That’s how I wrote Ravenous Girls, in fact — one pot of tea at a time.

Morning pot of tea, June 2025.

Tiffany Atkinson’s beautiful poem Tea — which I found in a book that a dear friend gave me, Sophie Dahl’s Ten Poems about Tea — isn’t about tea, not really. It starts with a simple, everyday gesture, a man making a woman a cup of tea, and then, like all the best poems, it takes flight. It soars.

It’s a poem to be read slowly, to be savoured, just like a pot of tea.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Mirror

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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 …

Disappear

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Other people’s words about … identity

Ed is never sure if he is a man anyway. Sometimes, he’s certain he’s a woman. Other times, he feels like nothing at all. When it comes down to it, Ed isn’t sure if he wants to belong, not to gay clubs, or queer spaces, or straight bars. He doesn’t want to decide on his pronouns with confidence and clarity, and he doesn’t want to announce them to the world via his Twitter bio or email signature or when introducing himself at parties. He doesn’t want his identity to be valid. He doesn’t want his feelings to matter. He doesn’t want to change his name, or his life, and to say, ‘I feel so seen,’ because Ed doesn’t want to be seen at all. He doesn’t want to be seen as a man, or a woman, or a non-binary person. What Ed wants is to be invisible. What Ed wants is to disappear entirely. He wants to be nothing, by which he means not only that he wants to die, but that he wants to have not ever existed at all, for his body and every person’s memory of his body to be instantly and utterly erased from the world.

He can feel himself start to wheeze again. He struggles to catch his breath.

From ‘Evenings and Weekends‘
By Oisin McKenna

I grew up as a member of a generation that didn’t recognise people who have the kinds of feelings that Ed expresses in the passage I’ve quoted above, a generation that didn’t have the words that a person like Ed — a person who feels that the body they were born into doesn’t reflect their true gender — might need to reach for. That is to say, the vocabulary that Ed and his friends use in Oisin McKenna’s novel, Evenings and Weekends, isn’t a vocabulary that I or my contemporaries used or even had access to. As a corollary of this, the space that Ed and his friends occupy in the world isn’t a space that many people knew how to occupy when I was in my teens and early twenties.

This isn’t to say that people didn’t question their gender identity in those years, only that the conversation around gender identity barely existed. As a consequence, many people — many, many people — didn’t recognise that it might be a conversation they wanted to have, either with themselves or with others.

And yet when I read the passage above, I am moved less by Ed’s uncertainty about his gender than by his unwillingness to be labelled. In theory, the language of gender identification that’s available to him, which wasn’t available to people of previous generations, should free him to articulate his identity, but in practice he finds the labels as constraining as they are freeing.

For better or for worse, this is the power of language. It gives us the tools to express ourselves, but in doing so it determines the way we experience the world. I’m no discourse analyst but this, I think, is what Ed is struggling most deeply with. Kudos to McKenna for finding a way to put it so succinctly and movingly in fiction.

Still, for me the most devastating thing about this passage is that even though Ed has the language to express the way he feels, he remains ultimately so unhappy, so desperate, that his deepest, truest, most instinctive response is to wish to be obliterated. 

The language may have changed, but the sadness, the desperation, hasn’t. What Ed wants is to be invisible. Indeed. I don’t have any answers, but I’m glad that novelists like McKenna are brave enough to explore these ideas, because they matter. As language changes, so does the world, and if fiction can help us to explore the consequences, then fiction, too, matters.

Lizzie, January 2025. (Okay, so, unlike Ed, she may not have words or language to express herself … but she is still a very effective communicator!)

Lately I’ve been reading …

Freeze

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Other people’s words about … how to write

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

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

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

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

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

Front garden tree, Christmas Day, 2024

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

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

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

Lately I’ve been reading …

Begin again

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From the annals of The Great First Chapter Project

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

from ‘Elsey Come Home‘
by Susan Conley

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

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

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

And I’ve been thinking about beginnings ever since.

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

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

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

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

View from the cabin, Deep Creek, October 2024.

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

The cabin from afar, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading (and listening) …

How do you see the world?

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Other people’s words about … the deeper truth

At dinner, my mother had asked about my own life. I had said that Laurie and I were wondering about whether or not to have children. My mother said that we should, that children were a good thing. At the time, I had agreed. But what I really wanted to say was that we talked about it often, while cooking dinner or walking to the shops or making coffee. We talked about every aspect over and over, each of us adding tiny life-like details, or going over hundreds of different possibilities, like physicists in endless conjecture. How hurtful would we be when we were both exhausted and sleep-deprived? How would we go for money? How would we stay fulfilled while at the same time caring so completely for another? We asked our friends, all of whom were frank and honest. Some of them said that it was possible to find a way through, especially as their children got older. Others said that all the weakest points of our relationship would be laid bare. Others still said that it was a euphoric experience, if only you surrendered yourself to it. And yet really, these thoughtful offerings meant nothing, because it was impossible, ultimately, to compare one life to another, and we always ended up essentially in the same place where we had begun. I wondered if my mother had ever asked these questions, if she’d ever had the luxury of them. I had never particularly wanted children, but somehow I felt the possibility of it now, as lovely and elusive as a poem. Another part of me wondered if it was okay either way, not to know, not be sure. That I could let life happen to me in a sense, and that perhaps this was the deeper truth all along, that we control nothing and no-one, though really I didn’t know that either.

from ‘Cold Enough For Snow‘
by Jessica Au

If you are someone who loves books, who loves reading — if you are someone to whom reading is fundamental to your life — you will know what I mean when I say that there are certain books, a handful of books, that, when you read them, change your life. Jessica Au’s Cold Enough For Snow is one of those books for me. It made me feel, when I reached the end of it, that I was seeing the world differently: its textures, its colours, the way I breathed the world in. There is a quality to Au’s writing, to the story she is telling, that is as lovely and elusive as a poem — and this is the kind of writing that changes the world for me.

Other books that have had the same effect on me? As I say, there are just a handful. Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs To You is one: Greenwell, with his layered sentences built of clause piled upon clause, writes about shame in a way that, for me, no other writer comes close to. Also: Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, Katherine Brabon’s The Shut Ins, Bryan Washington’s Memorial, Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh.

Everlasting Daisies, Morialta Falls, November 2024.

Each of the books I’ve named above is different from the others, but what they all share, I think, is a certain interiority. Whether through Rooney’s flat, prosaic narrative and dialogue or Washington’s choppy, plain sentences, we see the world through the eyes of their characters — and in doing so, we see the world anew.

I can think of no higher praise for a writer than to say of their writing: This has changed my world. So, I’m curious. What are the books that have changed your world? Drop a comment below — I’d love to know.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I’ve gone back through some of my oldest bookmarks for some of the pieces listed below. Even now, years after bookmarking them, these pieces still resonate with me in some way. I hope they do for you, too.

Like breath

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

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

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

from ‘Running in the Family‘
by Michael Ondaatje

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

Daytime, Deep Creek, October 2024.

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

Gully of grass trees, Deep Creek, October 2024.

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

Resting place, Deep Creek, October 2024.

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

First light, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

We cannot know

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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 …

Calculus

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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.

Echo

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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 …