solace – Page 2 – twenty-one words

Like breath

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

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

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

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

from ‘Running in the Family‘
by Michael Ondaatje

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

Daytime, Deep Creek, October 2024.

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

Gully of grass trees, Deep Creek, October 2024.

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

Resting place, Deep Creek, October 2024.

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

First light, Deep Creek, October 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

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

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.

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.

Becoming

March 10, 2024Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, summer, walkingTagged Anne Enright, The Wren5 Comments

Other people’s words about … leaving home

Much as I love my mother, much as I love that fabulous fridge, the free heating, the coffee grinder with whole, organic beans, much as I love reading on the sofa while she shifts and grunts over her Sudoku, I really did need to get away.

Meanwhile, some oozing, inner self knew what I was doing when I loaded up the boot of her car and broke her heart. When I made my mother drive me across town to a damp room in a run-down street, whose only attraction was the fact that she was not in it. I was going to fall apart. I had been so good, I had done all the things. Now, I wanted to sleep under a hedge and wake to the rain.

I also wanted to move out of this crap, overpriced town but I had not figured out where to go yet, so I was in a house in Ballybough that belonged to someone’s dead granny, first of all with Lily and, when she left for London, with her friend Stuart and one other randomer in the box room. Every time I went online, I found light-flooded interiors with potted plants the size of our kitchen. Outside, the red-brick streets were starting to look curated and I was just flicking through a life that wasn’t mine. Just flicking through.

from ‘The Wren, The Wren‘
by Anne Enright

I remember going away, leaving my childhood home, like the narrator in the passage above, Nell, does when she leaves her mother Carmel. I found it harder to break away than Nell and so I bought a plane ticket and flew overseas, because that was the only way I could make myself leave —- it required money; it required fear; it required loneliness; it required a non-refundable, one-way plane ticket to the other side of the world. I am not speaking figuratively here. As soon as I was on that plane, I felt afraid but I could not jump out —- that’s the thing about planes; you can’t jump out —- and so I went on flying away, leaving home (although, like Nell, I grew up and came home again eventually).

Path to the beach, Silver Sands, March 2024.

Last year I turned fifty-three and yet the stories that most move me, the books I most often read, are still, even now, about young people coming of age —- or if not young people, then people at moments in their lives when they become bigger or older or wiser or sadder, when they become in essence someone new, which is after all another form of coming of age. Perhaps what I mean is that I love stories of becoming.

Being fifty-three is a time when you come of age in another way. It is, you know, especially for women. I am right in the throes of that now, my last coming of age, perhaps.

It’s funny in some ways, because all the things I taught myself to do when I was younger, all the things I taught myself to do in order to grow up and look after myself and find a way of moving through the world with more ease (which is perhaps the very definition of finding a way to grow up) no longer work, not at fifty-three. My coping mechanisms, that is to say, are no longer effectual at helping me to cope — not because they no longer work, I don’t think, but because I simply can’t do them anymore.

Crooked tree and seat, The Washpool, March 2024.

For example.

You teach yourself to be intimate with other people -— a man you love, a friend you adore, another friend you trust. You teach yourself to be fit and strong. You teach yourself to drink a little wine every now and then, because it helps you to relax. You teach yourself to be okay with solitude. You teach yourself these things -— I taught myself these things -— but now these things, most of them, are slowly becoming inaccessible to me, simply by virtue of the fact that I am fifty-three. And fifty-three, I am finding, says no to these things. Physically, I mean. It says no.

Cracked mud, March 2024.

So I look down the tunnel of my fifties and I see what every other fifty-year-old before me has seen, no doubt. And I do not feel, no matter what decision I make, as though I am growing bigger or wiser or sadder or in any way newer. I am growing older, definitely. There is that.

But then there are books like The Wren, The Wren. Because I lied a little when I said that all the coping mechanisms I taught myself as a younger woman no longer work for me. One of them still does. I read. I read. I read.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Within the strictures of neoliberal capitalism, one of the few ways we can now relate to the old-fashioned concept of morality and being ‘a good person’ is through our brand and speech, where we spend our money, the businesses and causes we align with, and how we present ourselves to others. We don’t have commandments, only hashtags: Ahona Guha explores the ethics of using social media to protest the violence in Gaza (or not). This clear, thoughtful essay is less about whether we should speak up or not than it is about what it means to speak up or not, why we use social media, what social media means to us and how we can use ethical principles to guide us in our lives.
- Inevitably, Waylon would lie down beside him, gingerly resting his enormous, wart-covered head on Austin’s thigh. They could remain that way for five or six hours at a time: Peter Holley explores why a wild animal will always be … a wild animal.
- Women and racial and ethnic minorities are 20 to 30 percent more likely than White men to experience a misdiagnosis: Liz Szabo explores the biases and prejudices that cause medical misdiagnosis. For reasons that may be clear from the content of my post, I find this article particularly relevant right now.
- ‘I reject the world’: Oh, Sinead. Jonno Revance looks at the legacy of Sinead O’Connor, a woman ahead of her time.

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.

Loss

October 6, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, blogging, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, on writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, spring, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ..., writingTagged Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans1 Comment

Other people’s words about … doing what we love

It was a lie that Timo had not loved [playing] piano enough. He had loved it very much, but in a way that was difficult to describe. It was apophatic — he could only describe it through its negation. He only understood how much he loved the piano after he had given it up. Even that decision in hindsight seemed arbitrary, a whim. An act of petulance. But he had loved it, and he still did. Every day, he felt like a struck tuning fork, vibrating all the time. Except that it wasn’t pitch he was tuned to but something else, some horrible frequency cutting through the universe. Loss, he thought. It was loss.

from ‘The Late Americans‘
by Brandon Taylor

In the passage above, Taylor’s character Timo is a graduate student in Iowa who used to study music but then gave up. Sometimes, when he is on his own in the apartment he shares with his boyfriend, Fyodor, who works at a meat-packing plant, he sits listening to classical music recordings, losing himself in the music he so loves. But when Fyodor comes home, Timo switches the music off immediately, mid-piece, refusing to talk to Fyodor about this thing he so loves — refusing, also, to allow Fyodor to share in a part of him that in many ways still feels like the truest part of himself.

The Washpool, September 2023.

When I read the words I’ve quoted above, I thought about the times that I’ve given up writing over the years. Though I’m not beginning to claim that I am as talented a writer as Timo is a musician, nonetheless, writing for me has always been a channel of creativity, a tool that helps me make sense of and navigate the world. I don’t know why, honestly. I do know that I have a longing to make something beautiful (though this is another impulse I don’t really understand), and that writing is the only way I know how to (try to) do this. Maybe that’s why, every time I’ve ‘given up’ writing ‘for good’, I’ve returned to the practice later.

I’ve written before about how I’ve learned over the years to value my writing practice for the practice itself rather than for any measurable outcome. That’s partly what I’m saying again here, in response to the words I’ve quoted today. But it’s more than that, too. What Taylor expresses so beautifully is the same sense of loss I always feel when I stop writing. His image of a tuning fork vibrating to the wrong frequency describes this feeling beautifully. At the same time, I’d also describe the feeling another way, as a feeling of being muted. Silenced. When I don’t write, I feel as though I have lost my voice: I feel as though no-one hears me.

I understand, as a writer who is published very infrequently, that few people hear me, anyway. But writing is my way of speaking to the world, and not writing is the opposite of that. Not writing feels like grief.

The Washpool, September 2023.

Meanwhile, I’ll be back soon with another post about writing, and with a little piece of news, the news I’ve been hinting at for months now. Watch this space! ❤

Lately I’ve been reading …

- I could list everything that pissed me off about this tweet: Rebecca Jennings from Vox, on discourse bait and why and how we should ignore it.
- There is a fairly tedious assumption that if you love wildlife you must hate cats, and visa versa. And nothing will turn cat people off faster than encountering a person who hates cats: More on cats! In this essay, Celia Haddon sets aside the environmental arguments for keeping cats indoors to point out the benefits it has for cats themselves.
- We strongly believe that humanity must take the simplest, most cost-effective, most common-sense upstream steps to lower the risk of another pandemic. Fixing humanity’s broken relationship with nature —- and bats in particular — would diminish the interface where dangerous viruses can move from their normal hosts into people and other animals: When did we stop talking about the pandemic? Here, Steve Osofsky and Susan Lieberman explore why leaving bats alone is the best way to prevent another one.
- Another bloke came in. A big fat bloke. I don’t like fat blokes. I ordered another beer. He had a stud in one ear and another in the side of his nose. I don’t like studs in the ear and in the nose: A short story by Barry Revill, which is by turns blunt, tender and hilarious.
- But good writers recognize that grammatical rules are dictated by problematic power structures and are not independent measures of correctness. Good writers assess the rhetorical context for their writing and make deliberate decisions about where to conform and where to stray: Laura Hartenberger discusses AI, ChatGPT and more. This is a fascinating article, long but worth reading.

This is me happy

September 14, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, spring, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans7 Comments

Other people’s words about … happiness

Ivan closed his eyes. He tried to remember what it was like when [he and Goran] were good and together and all right. He tried to imagine what it was like the first time they met on the app and made plans to see each other outside the auditorium at night. They’d stood on the bridge and looked at the lights of the auditorium, gold and tiered like a delicate rock formation. Then they’d walked around the river path and talked all night about music, about ballet, about where they spent their afternoons, best place for coffee, how to dodge the undergrads.
That night had been so good, like something out of a dream. And they were so far from it now.
‘I can’t make you happy,’ Ivan said.
‘You do make me happy. This is me happy. I am happy.’
‘This can’t be happiness. If this is you happy, then I don’t think I understand what happiness is for.’
‘Sometimes happiness is just letting people feel how they fucking feel,’ Goran said.
He looked the furthest thing from happy. He looked pissed off. He looked annoyed. He looked like he was going to cry. His eyes welled. He bit at the inside of his jaw, then sat down sharply at the kitchen table, trying to catch his breath. Ivan sat down next to him, reached for his hand, and for the first time in a very long time, Goran let him.

from ‘The Late Americans‘
by Brandon Taylor

I’ve been fighting a battle with fleas for the last couple of weeks. This might seem like a random thing to write about after quoting Brandon Taylor’s words about happiness (and love … and life), but somehow it feels directly related.

Lizzie, my rescue cat, the cat who went from living in the garden and not letting me touch her to jumping up on my lap every night and curling up on top of me to go to sleep, started scratching ferociously a few weeks ago. Because I’ve never had a cat before; because I didn’t have any bites or itches myself (and still don’t); because, in all the years I had dogs,they never once got fleas; because, before I moved house a couple of years ago, Lizzie herself had never had fleas; because I thought (wrongly, as it turns out) that, since my house has bare wooden floorboards throughout instead of carpet, it was flea-proof — because of all these things, it took me a while to figure out that the cause of her scratching was fleas.

Semaphore Jetty, August 2023.

She’s far more domesticated than she was when she arrived in the garden of my old house three years ago, but still, a rescue cat is a rescue cat, and there are times when she likes to be touched and times when she doesn’t, times when you can pick her up and times when you can’t. So it took me several days to get her to take the medication, and several days more to get her to allow me to start combing her with a fine-toothed flea-comb. I flea-bombed the main room about two weeks ago, and since then, I’ve been vacuuming every day — every day, God, every day — and slowly, slowly I am getting on top of them.

What has this got to do with the passage I’ve quoted today from Taylor’s wonderful third book, The Late Americans? In part, it has to do with something I mentioned here a while back, some good news I had earlier this year. Astute readers might have guessed when I mentioned it that my news is writing-related, which it is, although I still can’t tell you the details yet because they’re still embargoed. It’s a small thing, a very small thing — a very, very small thing — and yet it’s made me feel part of the publishing world again in a way that I haven’t for over a decade. In this sense, though in a very small way, it’s something that I’ve dreamed of and longed for for a long time.

Spring flowers in the Scrub, September 2023.

And yet. Has my year been any happier because of this news? In a big-picture way, yes. But in a small-picture way, in my everyday life — no. (No, no, no.) Happiness still eludes me. I am not unique in this, I realise. Still, in these past few weeks, as I vacuumed the house and combed my cat and put on load after load of laundry, I found myself returning to Taylor’s words over and over. This is me happy. And: If this is [me] happy, then I don’t understand what happiness is for.

Why do we search for happiness in this way? Why do we expect it, even? I don’t know. I can’t tell you. And still Taylor’s words ring in my ears.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- For many practitioners, ECT is still seen as worth the risk: Astrid Landon on whether ECT works or not, and what its dangers are.
- That was the moment where I accepted that I have the kind of brain that loves to prepare for bad news and thus is wholly unprepared for good news or, in fact, great, incredible news: I read Sarah Thankum Mathews’s novel All This Could Be Different a few months ago and loved it. Here she is, in interview with Emily Gould, on writing the wrong novel for seven years before throwing it out, on why this novel might be a once-in-a-life writing experience for her, and on why the two things that stand in the way of her writing are self-doubt and rent.
- Swimming isn’t something you can be taught just by following the rules. You have to figure out how to move intuitively and you have to want it. Middle age isn’t something you can prepare for adequately. You have to figure out how to move through it intuitively and you have to endure it: Diane Mehta on swimming to ease her pain, on growing older, on Henry James, on Whitman … and on life.
- I used to love exercise, weight training specifically. Every few months I would train my way up to trying to beat my personal best deadlift. If and when I achieved it, I would clench my fist and say ‘yes Derek!’ And that was that. Working hard and achieving the goal was enough — there was no need for external recognition. Not so with books, it seems: In another exercise-related piece, Derek Owusu speaks about writers and their need for external validation … or not.
- Like Tennessee Williams’s Blanche Dubois, I want magic. It might be found in the enchantments of a novel’s style, the elegance of a scholar’s mind or simply the excitement of learning something new. So I try a few pages of this book and that, restlessly hoping to start one that finally keeps me spellbound: Michael Dirda on how to read. While I’d quibble with his preference for hardcover books over paperback and am outraged at his dislike of the plastic covers that librarians use to protect their books and his insistence in pencilling in notes in the margins, we have many habits in common as booklovers.