writing – Page 2 – twenty-one words

End-times

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

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

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

from ‘Private Rites‘
by Julia Armfield

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

Pathway to Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

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

Vines at Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

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

Lately I’ve been reading …

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

Calculus

July 21, 2024July 21, 2024Posted in a thought, anorexia, blogging, books, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, Winter, writingTagged Dead Weight, Emmeline KleinLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … counting calories

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

from ‘Dead Weight‘
by Emmeline Clein

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

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

Taperoo Beach, July 2024.

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

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

Lately I’ve been reading …

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

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

Echo

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

Other people’s words about … intimacy

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

from ‘Normal People‘
by Sally Rooney

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

Port Elliot, June 2024.

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

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

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

Aldinga Beach, June 2024.

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

Intimacy, which is its own terrifying echo chamber.

Lately I’ve been reading …

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

Sad place

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

Other people’s words about … funfairs

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

from ‘Western Lane‘
by Chetna Mario

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

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

Largs Bay, June 2024.

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

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

‘I know,’ the American man said back.

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

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

And we fled.

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

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

I don’t know.

Lately I’ve been reading …

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

Unrequited

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

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

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

from ‘Cursed Bread‘
by Sophie Mackintosh

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

I wonder.

Largs Bay Jetty, May 2024.

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

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

Bracken fern, May 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

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

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.

Only connect: Talking honestly

February 1, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, Cairo, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged Anna Kate Blair, If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Noor Naga, The Modern7 Comments

Other people’s words about … connection

I was never sure how honest I was supposed to be with friends. I didn’t think honesty was romantically or sexually loaded, but I felt sometimes that my understanding of friendship was distorted. I was always trying to determine, with everyone, whether I was on the right side of an invisible line. If asked, I’d always argue that the problem was with normative approaches to intimacy, though I’d never been asked. It had worked for Grace Hartigan and Frank O’Hara, I thought, and then I remembered that it hadn’t. I felt, talking to Cara, that perhaps I was veering into something too unstudied, but I wasn’t sure that could stop me today. I wanted comfort; I wanted to feel close to somebody.
‘I suppose I’m lonely,’ I said.

from ‘The Modern‘
by Anna Kate Blair

When it comes to friendships and intimacy, I am someone, like Blair’s narrator, Sophia, in the passage above, who is always struggling to interpret whether I am on the right side of an invisible line. I am frequently aware of my tendency to dive deep into conversations at an emotional level. At the same time I’m aware that most people aren’t comfortable with that depth, or with the emotional intensity that comes with it. In conversation I often try to pull back because of this, to reign myself in, although mostly I fail. It’s a dance I do, back and forth across that invisible line, over and over.

I am not sure whether people, when they’re talking to me, notice this or not. Maybe this is just part of my intensity, my awareness of it. But I like Sophia’s use of the word honest in this context. It is a loaded term, to my way of thinking. Not everyone fronts up to conversations wanting intimacy or intensity. Not everyone wants to engage in emotional honesty.

There’s that dance again. I don’t think I’ll ever figure it out.

Olive groves, Aldinga, January 2024.

On another note altogether, I’ve been immersing myself in books set in Cairo recently, partly because I lived there briefly when I was twenty-two and partly because I’d like to write a story set there myself one day. Talk to anyone who’s spent any time in Cairo and soon enough they’ll tell you that it’s not like any other city, that when you leave Cairo, you carry with you a kind of sense-memory that never leaves you. Reading these books has reminded me of this. Here’s Noor Naga’s male narrator, an Egyptian boy from Shobrakheit, in her wonderful, extraordinary novel If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English:

From Damanhour, I took the train to Cairo and inside it the air was very brown, like closet air. I fell asleep and woke up with a man feeling my thigh through my torn pocket. People think anyone with a camera will have coins instead of skin inside his pocket. When I arrived in Ramses Station in Cairo, the air was people. Nowhere you looked wasn’t people. You could turn into an alley and find fifty Sudanese men, bluer than black, with cheeks like shoulder blades and ankles like knives, or else women as tall as I am, women so pale you could see rivered blood at their wrists and neck …

If you read one book on Cairo this year, make it Naga’s novel. It will leave you with as much of a sense-memory as Cairo itself, I swear.

Sunlit tree, Taperoo, February 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- I hate the algorithm. Everyone hates the algorithm: Kyle Chayka on globalisation, the flat world, and how the internet and Instagram have introduced a globally monotonous aesthetic that, despite its supposedly democratic intentions and roots, smacks of elitism and colonialism that ultimately own us.
- The painful truth is we are a gawdy, grotesque, gluttonous, self-destructive country that watches ‘Botched’, dips Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in Velveeta, rolls coal, and responds to the mass murder of children by buying the same gun they were killed with in record numbers. No amount of education, social spending, or rehab will make us behave. Not with steroids, not with anything else: Adrian Nathan West, in a fascinating piece on getting ‘swole’.
- Most people aren’t aware of their bodies unless they are experiencing pain or pleasure. Most people think lifting the weights is the hard part. It’s not: Another piece on lifting, this time by Jordan Castro. In it he explores why lifting is more than a physical pursuit. I am fascinated by the similarity between what he has to say about lifting and what devotees of yoga say about yoga — they seem to me to be virtually the same.
- And maybe that’s the problem with land acknowledgements: not enough people understand that they’re not the end of the discussion: Kelly Boutsalis, a Mohawk journalist from the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve, explores land acknowledgments, and who they are really for.
- I’ve never been sure if I can claim a queer identity based on attraction alone: Erich Schlich on the Own Stories movement, on authenticity, on writing about queer characters when you have never fully identrified as queer yourself, and on the definition of queerness itself. I’m not sure how I feel about Schlich’s piece, actually. I’m not sure which bothers me more — his eagerness to define his identity in a certain way or his anxiety to claim that identity (because these are not the same things). But it made me think, all the same.

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.