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A review by jaclyn_sixminutesforme
The first time I thought I was dying by Sarah Walker
3.0
I took Declan’s Fry’s advice (see his insightful review in the SMH for more) and started my read of this collection with the final essay, Contested Breath. Fry’s tweet about this review helpfully pointed me to the @australianbookreview podcast in which Walker reads this (well worth a listen, it gave me chills!) It truly was beautifully crafted writing, heartfelt—perhaps even more so as it took on another dimension being read aloud. Yes Yes No was another standout for me, perhaps less from a craft level and more so because it is subject matter I’d love to hand to teen readers.
I found this was a collection that drew me to consider things like lens and gaze and agency as much as it drew me expressly to discussions about the body. There was a pointedness to the reflections that didn’t simply draw on the body and it’s functioning, but how these were observed and processed and almost fixated upon though this was not always particularly fruitful, or even pleasant, to read.
For me the individual essays felt untethered, not always feeling like they were making a point and more leaning to reflective and contemplative wandering. I think that was the point though, the essays are part memoir and social commentary and seem to knead at these discussions. While this isn’t necessarily a style of writing I’m averse to as a reader, I’m just not sure it worked for me here.
If you read Fry’s review you’ll also come across what he articulates as a genre of “unnerved memoir,” this collection writing into an existing field of work (“an almost comically crowded field.”) I reflected on this a lot as I read this book, particularly as several of the texts Fry names in this genre are works I’ve enjoyed… I wonder how much my engagement with this style of writing is because I am an unnerved reader of sorts. Please pop over and share your thoughts with Fry (he placed a call out on Twitter for comments) as I can’t unsee the patterns now—the stylistic tendencies that were articulated as typifying this genre admittedly for me are often what I find the strongest elements in a work, Osborne-Crowley’s recent release and the way memoir and meta content overlapped, for example.
Many thanks UQP for a review copy.
I found this was a collection that drew me to consider things like lens and gaze and agency as much as it drew me expressly to discussions about the body. There was a pointedness to the reflections that didn’t simply draw on the body and it’s functioning, but how these were observed and processed and almost fixated upon though this was not always particularly fruitful, or even pleasant, to read.
For me the individual essays felt untethered, not always feeling like they were making a point and more leaning to reflective and contemplative wandering. I think that was the point though, the essays are part memoir and social commentary and seem to knead at these discussions. While this isn’t necessarily a style of writing I’m averse to as a reader, I’m just not sure it worked for me here.
If you read Fry’s review you’ll also come across what he articulates as a genre of “unnerved memoir,” this collection writing into an existing field of work (“an almost comically crowded field.”) I reflected on this a lot as I read this book, particularly as several of the texts Fry names in this genre are works I’ve enjoyed… I wonder how much my engagement with this style of writing is because I am an unnerved reader of sorts. Please pop over and share your thoughts with Fry (he placed a call out on Twitter for comments) as I can’t unsee the patterns now—the stylistic tendencies that were articulated as typifying this genre admittedly for me are often what I find the strongest elements in a work, Osborne-Crowley’s recent release and the way memoir and meta content overlapped, for example.
Many thanks UQP for a review copy.