Health and bodies

I go to memoir because there, someone understands what this is like, to be smaller and more fragile and vulnerable to those ‘large, heavy bodies spilling out of doorways’, to ‘feel the micro-aggressions as macro’ (Atkinson), to grow up in a world where even your own father says things like ‘Good day—for a rape’ (Lilley) to old ladies, even though he doesn’t mean you, of course not you, love.

Lee is by turns satirist and survivor of the New Victorianism. On a jog through Woollahra’s Trumper Park, Tom dreams conventional dreams of a house in the bush, a place for he and a loving partner to raise ‘a number of virile and sensitive children’ with landscape needs of their own. The middle-class dream is out of reach for now, but his religious devotion to physical fitness is the means by which he dreams it. He doesn’t just display the idea that ritual exercise on an organic diet is morally good, he believes it is spiritually good. Wellness, as we now call it—or sell it—is a condition devoutly to be wished, the hard-earned product of what Coach refers to as ‘lifestyle ambitions of a more enduring nature.’

‘This is not an essay or a book review. This is a love story. I fell in love with writing, and then I stopped. I’m trying to figure out what happened, and whether I can fall in love again’

About halfway through The Recovering, Leslie Jamison writes about a conversation she has with an ex-alcoholic: ‘I listened to his…

I visited the Sydney Markets at Flemington, and the Vegan Market in Marrickville on the same weekend late last year, and expected to write a study in contrasts.

What makes an organism fit? How can we measure its fitness? What are the unfit bits?

Writing overly dramatic and just-plain-bad poetry is a surefire way of losing emotional intensity. I kept asking myself, ‘Where has my language gone?’ The answer comes in the form of a question: ‘What language?’ Even after giving oneself appropriate distance from the event – in my case the attack – how does one describe a violent spinning that lasts for hours? How does one describe severe nausea? Every time I tried to capture my symptoms in a poem it was ‘woe-is-me’, a plea for comfort, or, worse, didactic.

‘She tells me she doesn’t think the internet has changed much in the past two decades. We still chat and flirt. It’s just more widespread.’

Travel is supposed to be transformative, worldly, independent, brave. It is supposed to be a breaking free from the things that bind us to our everyday and repetitious – and by implication dull and stultifying – lives. We are supposed to value travel because of this, because it is international and not domestic, unsettling and not homely, disjunctive rather than routine. And I want these things, of course I want these things for my life and for that idea of myself as I’d like to be.

‘Tidiness isn’t just about how things might be or currently are – it’s about how things should be.’