on failure and courage

It was the last weekend in April when I first fell. Or at least when I first remember falling. I went to Clunes Booktown and came home with three volumes of Virginia Woolf's diaries and two volumes of the Penguin Classics Greek Myths—battered and worn in a manner that only made them more appealing.

Later it would be Kate Tempest's The Bricks That Built the Houses when I saw her speak at The Wheeler Centre and Gloria Steinem's memoir, My Life on the Road, when I saw her speak at the Town Hall. Steinem's book came with the ticket price and how could I give up the chance of a personally signed copy of The Bricks? I couldn't.

A book of Blake's poetry would follow, as would a collection of Warsan Shire's, and more Tempest with The Brand New Ancients. All necessary for my poetry class, or so I told myself. A dear friend would send me some books and I'd pretend that this was ok because I hadn't bought them myself.

A trip to Readings for a Melbourne Writers Festival program and Fiona Wright's Small Acts of Disappearance would come home with me. Later a visit to the underground treasure trove of City Books with the intention of buying a short story collection for a friend saw me leave with two for her and one for me. This trip to City Books also instigated a cross-country purchase of Woman in Sexist Society edited by Vivian Gornick and Barbara K Moran.

A restrained weekend at the Mildura Writers Festival would add a single David Malouf. My second stint volunteering at Melbourne Writers Festival and I would fall hard for Elizabeth Harrower, A Few Days in the Country would come home with me. Trips to second-hand book sales, library sales, op-shops and vintage markets would add Helen Garner, Tony Birch, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Eimear McBride, Hannah Kent, Ruth Park, Anne Tyler and Sonya Hartnett. And others. Many others.

There were more beautiful gifts in the mail and the launch of a friend’s debut poetry collection. I wandered through a newly discovered op-shop and brought home my first Agatha Christie. I discovered graphic novels and comics and added one of each. An unexpected gift voucher to a Melbourne treasure added three new names in Ali Smith, Lucia Berlin and Christina Stead. As Christmas approached I gave my Kris Kringle a simple list of a dozen names. Some of them—Vivian Gornick, Julie Koh and Shirley Jackson among them—appeared under the tree.

Earlier this year I had glanced at my tbr pile and decided that in 2016 I would do two things. Firstly, I would read every book in my tbr and post a review here and secondly I would abstain from buying any more books until I'd reached the bottom of that pile.

I did neither.

This week I finally finished putting up some new bookshelves at home. They line the walls on each side of the window in my bedroom. I spent most of an afternoon filling them. At first I tried to arrange them alphabetically, then by genre before deciding that height was the only option—inclined as I am to appreciating aesthetics over logic.

I stacked them side by side, pushing them up against one another as I filled shelf after shelf. Among these books are the remnants of my original tbr pile as well as the books I told myself I wouldn’t buy this year.

On the title page of many of these books is my name, a habit I've taken with me from childhood. On many of the newer books, the ones whose corners are still sharp, I’ve written the city or town I found them in, too. Some say New York or London, others Melbourne or Ballarat. Some list the name of the person who gave them to me, others have handwritten notes tucked inside their pages.

While cleaning out my parent’s bookshelves this past week (I guess I was feeling inspired after doing my own) I found a collection of books that transported me back to my childhood. Stamped inside these books, in either red or blue ink, were the words ‘rejected copy not for sale under copyright’. I flipped open cover after cover, searching for the stamp. I ran my fingers over the long-dry ink, feeling the waves of nostalgia wash over me.

My Aunt and Uncle used to work for a printing company. A spare room in their home was lined on two walls with bookcases that seemed endless to ten-year-old me; shooting towards the ceiling and brimming with books. Whenever I visited, my Aunt would hand me a plastic bag, point to a bookshelf and say take what you like. When they visited us, there was often a plastic bag bulging with books tucked into their car somewhere.

I often wonder if I would be the reader, or the writer, that I am without all those books. Those rejected books that filled my childhood and lined my bookshelves. Those rejected books I forwent sleep to devour, the ones that formed the figurative staircase I climbed to get here.

In an essay in her collection When I Was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson writes that books give her courage. Courage. When I first read that I wondered what she meant. But I think I understand what she was getting at now or at least I understand what courage in this context means to me.

This year has been punctuated by wonderful, beautiful highs and horrible, crushing lows. There were weddings and milestone birthdays, beautiful new babies and afternoons in the garden with my niece and nephew. There were wonderful new friends and reminders of how important old friends are. There were new beginnings and new challenges. There were unexpected triumphs and there were devastating heart-breaking losses—the kind that punctured my soul, taking something from me that I desperately wanted to keep.

This year was many things. This year reminded me how severe the world can be. It reminded me that a hug can often say more that words can, and sometimes better too.

And it reminded me that the love that was nurtured in childhood by those rejected books is not going anywhere. It is an unwavering, steadfast love that props me up, that allows me to escape when reality hurts too much, that reassures and emboldens me, that educates me. I line my bookshelves with that love, I stack it up on my bedside table and I write lists of potential new lovers.

When Marilynne Robinson wrote of courage, I think she wrote of that love. More specifically I think she was talking about how that love forges a type of courage that you cannot get anywhere else. It’s the courage to see the world through eyes that are not your own. It’s the courage to enter a space that does not belong to you and to sit and listen and begin to understand. It’s the courage to be challenged, the courage to ask yourself questions, the courage to ask others those same questions. It’s the courage to share something of yourself, to let something of those books crawl under your skin and stay.

I didn’t make it to the bottom of my tbr pile this year. I’m further from it today than I was at the beginning of the year when I set myself that challenge. But, sitting here at my desk, surrounded by these books that I love, books that will forever live under my skin, I don’t care.

This year in failing to reach the bottom of that pile, in failing to abstain from adding to it, I haven’t failed at all. I’ve moved through the highs and lows the past twelve months have dealt and I’ve come out the other side: a little older, a little stronger, a little surer of who and what I am. I’ve reaffirmed that love that started so many years ago with rejection and found courage in the books that have left a little of themselves under my skin, courage that pushes me to be the writer, to be the woman, that I am. I may not have stuck to that ill-formed resolution, but I haven’t failed.

two months, failure, etc.

Today marks two months since I left home. Since I boarded a plane and shifted myself to the other side of the world. For what? For something I couldn't find at home. For an adventure, one that felt so incredibly necessary. And yet, if I'm honest, the past two months have been characterised by intense emotional experiences that have tested everything I thought I knew about myself and this decision that I made.

Nothing good is easy. We appreciate things more when it takes a little something of us to get where we want to be. Only, sometimes you underestimate how much you have to give, how much of yourself you have to open up to get to that good. And sometimes, as you find these little pieces of yourself falling away, you wonder if the sacrifice is worth it. If the good is enough to compensate you for the loss.

They're questions I can't answer yet. They're questions I may never be able to answer. Maybe the point is in asking them at all, with no promise of an answer. Like moving to the other side of the world, with no promise of anything at all.

It's early summer in London right now and the sun rises before 5am. I lay in the single bed of my temporary home and stare our the window, thinking thoughts. I find myself musing like that quite often, moments when I'm alone and the city is spinning past me and I can stare out a window or across a street or straight ahead and just let my mind go. And often, more often than not, I find myself circling back to one theme. Failure.

I found the following quote on Brainpickings, my go-to site for, well, just about everything. And it feels quite pertinent right now. 

'The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it's hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else - a learning experience a trial, a reinvention - no longer the static concept of failure' - Arts Advocate Sarah Lewis, in her book The Ride: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

Before I left for London, a work colleague told me not to be afraid of failure. But, it's difficult to be afraid of something that you can't quantify. Something you cannot accurately describe. After all, what is failure? I've never been able to articulate exactly why I'm here, so what exactly does it mean to fail?

And if Sarah Lewis is right, it doesn't matter anyway. Because what might feel like a failure today, will be an experience tomorrow. 

kb xx

a week, a roller coaster

A week is a long time. And yet, no time at all. I've been in London for a week now. And I've found myself cycling through some intense emotional experiences. I'm calling it my emotional roller coaster. Up and down and up again. It's a strange thing, but not an unexpected thing. 

Moving your life halfway around the world, far far away from family and friends, from the people that are significant pieces in the puzzle of your life, how can that not be an intense emotional experience? How can that not split you open, spilling nagging feelings of doubt and fear and sadness into the world around you? 

The very act of separation feels like the end of something. Like something irreversibly changed. And yet being in London feels like a beginning, an important and real beginning. I wrote about beginnings here. I thought that one thing had to end for another to begin, but now I'm not so sure. Why can't things go on simultaneously? Why can't I be here and there, too? 

And so I ride my roller coaster and I feel myself splitting open, spilling those feelings of doubt and fear and sadness - and hope and desire and something that might be happiness - onto the page. I'm scrawling the thoughts as they come to the surface with a blue pen on the lined pages of my composition book. 

I wonder if it is there, amongst the scratchings of my pen, the loops of my letters, the messy and seemingly unintelligible scrawl that is my handwriting, that I can find a balance to the wildness and unpredictability of this space I'm in. If, in amongst the words, I can find what I'm here for. 

kb xx

endings and beginnings

One of my cacti is dead. Well, dying at least. Its stem has lost the vibrant green of its youth and is now dried and twisted. I noticed it this morning as I pulled my bedroom curtains open for what will be the second last time. It caught me a little by surprise, as death is wont to do. And yet, the sadness is permeated by something else. Something that feels just a little hopeful. 

Does one thing have to end before another can begin? Maybe. In a way it feels almost necessary. If nothing ever ended, how would we ever begin something else? 

A little over twenty-four hours from now I’ll be boarding a plane for perhaps the biggest beginning of my life - save the initial one perhaps - and the cactus and its untimely demise feels strangle poetic. 

The past few months I’ve had a handful of dreams that featured snakes quite prominently. The dreams were vivid and I would wake from them and instantly push a mental rewind button to play them back as I lay in bed. Some cursory research revealed dreams about snakes can indicate change or transition.

The demise of the cactus, the appearance of the transition snakes - strange indicators of fate?

Relying on fate is nothing new for me. It’s the basis of my wardrobe and it’s served me well. Perhaps that’s why I’m comfortable taking the cactus and the dreams of snakes as signs from the universe that this decision to take my life from its comfortable space right here and drop it into one of the biggest cities in the world is the right one. That getting on that plane tomorrow night is the best choice for me right now. 

I am of course overflowing with feels that I cannot quite reconcile. Happiness and sadness, excitement and fear. Doubt, great big doubt. And yet, in part I know because of the snakes and now because of the cactus, I must get on that plane. I must do this. I can’t stay here. 

This part of my life is ending, this chapter in this safe and warm and comfortable environment is coming to a close. But there will be more chapters. Tomorrow marks the opening sentences of the newest, and so despite (or perhaps because of) the chaos of my current emotional state I will get on that plane tomorrow night and I will begin my new chapter. 

Wish me luck!

kb xx

comfort is a double edged sword

I’ve been trying to narrow down a list of possible suburbs to live in using a tube map from 2008 - the first time and only time I’ve been to London. On the back of the map is an advertisement for Ikea: ‘Travel is a means to an end. Home.’

I wonder if that’s really why we travel. If the reason we take ourselves out of the comfortable and force ourselves into the uncomfortable is to attempt to discover what home really is. 

For most of us home is more accident than careful planning. Home for me right now is the house my parents built in a smallish country town about an hour from Melbourne. It’s the place I feel most comfortable in the world. It’s the place I’ve lived most of my days in. It’s the place I’m leaving in a  bit under two months. 

Comfort is a double edge sword. Being comfortable equates to feeling safe, secure, generally happy. It’s a nice feeling, a warm one. One many of us spend years trying to find. But it’s also the reason why I find myself distracted, the reason why I leave projects untouched for months, why I don’t send pitches, why I wile away hours watching old episodes of Grand Designs or downloading old books from Project Gutenberg. Being comfortable can often be more of a hindrance than a help. Being comfortable makes it easy to not move, to not challenge yourself, to sit yourself in the safe, secure and generally happy space and just be. 

When I try to peer under my own skin, to scrape away at my desire to take myself out of this comfortable space I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in, the truth feels a little like freshly squeezed lemon juice on a paper cut. It stings. 

The truth is, it’s easy for me to not do the work, it’s easy for me to not challenge myself, to not put myself in positions that guarantee nothing but an almost certain failure. It’s easy to not do those things when you’re comfortable. 

I don’t think that Ikea advertisement is true for me. I’m not travelling to find home. Home is already established. But home is too comfortable, too easy. I’m travelling to find those hard, uncomfortable spaces. I’m travelling to fall over an edge not knowing what lays beneath me. 

I’m travelling because sometimes the only way to see if you’re good enough is to throw yourself into a deep pool, fully clothed, and see if you sink or swim. 

kb xx

forever a rookie

I stopped being a teenager nearly a decade ago. I am currently very much ensconced in the late-twenties age bracket. Which feels increasingly odd. It is a space in which I sometimes I feel like an outsider, removed from a life and lifestyle that doesn't fit. This feeling becomes stronger when I glance around at many of my contemporaries: long-term relationships, marriage, children, houses and mortgages dominate their landscapes. 

Society tells us that as we get older we're supposed to possess a greater understanding of who we are. We're supposed to know what it is we want and where we want to be, we're supposed to be confident and assured and articulate. We're supposed to be all these things we associate with adulthood. We're not supposed to be brimming with self-doubt, we're not supposed to be unsure of our place in the world, we're not supposed to be still figuring stuff out as we look down the barrel of thirty. But you know what, some of us are. 

I am. And I think it's why I love Rookie so much. 

Ostensibly aimed at teenage girls, there is something about the ethos of the site and the associated yearbook that feels like a welcoming embrace, despite the fact that I fall so far outside the intended audience. 

It's a space where it's ok to be unsure, to have doubts, to have questions. 

Perhaps a lot of that comes down to its founder, Tavi Gevinson, who while surely the most articulate and considered teenager you've ever encountered is still just that: a teenager. And with that teenage-hood comes the wrestling of the self as you attempt to find a place for yourself in a world that sometimes doesn't want to let you in. 

Much is made of the desire to describe something as serious writing, to place it above all other work, to point to it as the peak of the human consciousness poured out onto the page - or a website, it is 2015 after all. Generally we, to our own detriment, posit the work of adults, particularly white cis male ones, as this beacon, this peak, we must all aim for. But in doing so, we miss brilliance and vigour and enthusiastic interpretations of the world, we miss places like Rookie. 

We miss pieces like this one 'How To Deal When You're Caught Masturbating' and this on making friends, pertinent given my impending move. And we miss all of these videos, touching, heartfelt and brimming with actual real world advice, Ask A Grown Woman/Man is Rookie gold. And Tavi's monthly editors letters, a curious mix of personal and cultural that often just say shit that is kind of perfect, take this tidbit from this months letter: 

'I am wary of coming off as obnoxious or opinionated or in possession of any personality whatsoever. I don’t want to make other people feel uncomfortable or suffocated or imposed upon. But a full realization of this goal looks like: a chunk of air in a human-shaped outline formed by dust particles. It feels like: sinking into a La-Z-Boy that is not even that comfortable, then slowly folding into its brown flannel buttcrack and dispensing the occasional self-deprecating joke until I have vanished completely.'

The thing is, this writing is serious, in the way that serious means different things to different people. I think talking about sex and masturbation, particularly to young girls, is serious and something that doesn't happen enough. I think adults contemplating friendship, like teenagers do, is serious and something that doesn't happen often enough. I think young women too often become that chunk of air, too often sink into that La-Z-Boy, and we don't take that seriously enough. But serious doesn't have to mean staid, serious doesn't have to mean devoid of humour, serious doesn't have to mean without feeling and emotion. 

As I approach thirty, I don't see my appreciation for Rookie waning. Perhaps, if anything, as I'm about to throw myself headlong into some serious life upheaval, a safe and warm and reassuring space will be what I'll need more than ever. 

kb xx

one day, one sentence

Sleep in.

Wake up, finally. Curse yourself for sleeping in. Get up, have a shower and get dressed.

Make breakfast. Make a mug of tea. Eat and drink.

Sit outside to enjoy morning sunshine, ensuring daily does of vitamin D.

Sit down at desk.

Get up to make another cup of tea.

Sit back down at desk.

Check email.

Check Twitter.

And Facebook.

And Instagram.

Fine yourself typing youtube into browser. Watch episode of Grand Designs.

Open current project. Fiddle with pens. Realise desk is atrocious. Spend half an hour cleaning and tidying.

Open project. Decide you need tea, go make a cup of tea.

Check email.

Stare out the window for five minutes.

Google tips to counter procrastination. Read article on procrastination.

Wander down the rabbit hole of the internet. Lose an hour.

Watch another episode of Grand Designs.

Make lunch. And a fresh mug of tea. Eat. And drink.

Check Twitter.

And Facebook.

And Instagram.

Check email.

Open current project. Make some notes, write three sentences. Delete two.

Stare out the window.

Wonder if you can get those travel bags you want on eBay. Go to eBay.

Open project. Close project.

Sit at desk pondering direction of life.

Decide you need exercise: healthy body, healthy mind. Go for a walk.

Get home. Have a shower.

Check Twitter.

Check email.

Make a fresh mug of tea.

Sit at desk. Open project. Write one sentence. Delete it.

Stare into mug, watch the tea leaves floating at the bottom.

Google reading tea leaves. Discover it's called Tasseography. Wonder if you could write something about that.

Check Twitter.

Check email.

Look at open project. Feel guilty.

Close project.

Make dinner. And a fresh mug of tea. Eat. And drink.

Watch an episode of Grand Designs. Wonder if you could write something about that.

Read three short stories.

Check Twitter.

Check email.

Scroll through Instagram. Lose one hour of your life.

Sleep.


Total written for the day: One sentence. (And this, I guess)

kb xx

the pursuit of perfection

Two years ago I bought the most delicious fabric. A shiny burgundy with a gold and white paisley design swirling across it. Delicious. My plans for it involved a simple bomber jacket, something easy and casual wrought in the most detailed and intricate fabric I could find - it felt like the perfect reflection of my sartorial leanings. Last weekend I finally cut that fabric. I pinned the deftly trimmed pattern to it and carefully snipped out the pieces for the jacket it had always been intended for. As I cut, first the pattern pieces and then the fabric, it occurred to me how similar my sewing is to my writing. 

In a conversation with a writer friend recently we mused on the pursuit of perfection, the fear that filled us both that our words could not fall perfectly from our pens. And how this fear stopped us from writing. We were filled with ideas, with ways we wanted to tell our stories and yet this pursuit of some idealised version of perfection acted like a obstacle we lacked the skills to pass. If it cannot be perfect, it cannot be written. Madness, folly; and yet, surely we are not alone?

Sewing, like writing, is an art. The only difference is that the pieces that must come together, the ones that must be joined by careful stitch after careful stitch, are clearly identified. Unlike writing, sewing provides instructions, pictures, clearly outlined courses of action; pin this to here, stitch that to this, trim here and press that. But, still, this pursuit of perfection permeates my sewing, too.

My sewing, like my writing, is constantly second guessed. I question my own skills, my ability to sew through a problem, to fix a mistake, my comprehension of a pattern and its instructions. I wonder every time I reach for my pins and my scissors and my sewing machine if it is all a pointless exercise in nothingness; if the time spent head bent over a machine, pins held in my mouth with pursed lips, eyes focussed intently on the task at hand, is time wasted because surely I will never be able to create anything like the picture in my head. Surely I will never be able to create something perfect. 

And yet, I still sew. I still write (as evidenced by this space). Aristotle said that taking pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. So perhaps the point is to want to sew, to want to write, more than that to thoroughly enjoy the process. To take pleasure in a nicely stitched and pressed seam or a handful of words that smoothly push against one another.

Perhaps the how in overcoming the fear is simply doing. With every stitch, with every word, with every project that nears its end, we realise that the mistakes we so desperately do not want to make, are only visible to ourselves. And not just that, but that it is these very mistakes that makes our work uniquely ours.

Perhaps it's both? 

I've decided that the jacket I imagined two years ago in that delicious burgundy paisley fabric must come overseas with me. I've decided that despite my doubts, despite the hopeless pursuit of perfection, this jacket will get on the plane with me in April. I'm sure there will be mistakes, stitches in the wrong place, problems masked with the adeptness of a sewer accustomed to doing so; but, like the sentences I write, they will be noticeable only to me and they will be exactly what makes it unique to me.

kb xx

89 days

3.17 months

12.71 weeks

89 days

The closer I get to leaving, the further I feel from ready. What is that about? The abstract is most certainly a landscape now. The details become clearer every day, the reality more potent.

I wondered about cold feet. And turned to the internet. And Italian proverb? American writer Stephen Crane's 1896 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets? Change is daunting, not least because routine is comforting, but it's also really ridiculously exciting, too. Well, at least when it's planned. 

2136 hours

128,160 minutes

Too many seconds

Time seems like such an arbitrary measurement sometimes. Because it feels so strange sometimes, it doesn't make sense: too quick, too slow, too much, not enough. 

There is so much I have to do before I go. And yet I want to really enjoy these last few weeks. I want to soak up the warm Australian sun as summer rolls on. I want to imprint the sound of the cockies as they settle in for the night in the pine trees the border the boundary of my backyard. I want to lay in my bed and watch the sky change colour as the sun rises. I want to create new memories with the people that matter, ones that will stick. 

And yet it's not like I'm going away forever; like I'm catching that one-way flight to Mars and will never return. It's a strange contradiction of thought and feelings that are running through my mind. 

89 days. It's nothing and everything. 

kb xx

goals, not resolutions

I've never been one to make new years resolutions. They've always felt arbitrary and pointless - their timing probably contributes to most of that. Why do we wait for this one specific day to make change? Or, at least, to resolve to make change. 

Goals, however, I like. 

Especially ones that are in some way measurable, ones that are specific enough that they don't allow any wiggle room. Next year is going to be a significant year for me. I'll be finalising my dual citizenship and not long after that taking my shiny new EU passport overseas. I'll be moving halfway across the world, thousands of miles away from everything that is familiar and comfortable and easy. I'll be stepping far outside my comfort zone, a concept that is simultaneously terrifying and thrilling. Seems as good a time as any to set myself some goals that also push me outside that comfort zone. 

As any good goal-setter knows, writing yourself a list and tacking it to your wall is one thing. Publicly announcing said goals is a whole other kettle of fish. Hence, I wasn't sure I wanted to actually publish this. I mean, what if I fail miserably and achieve nothing next year? What if all my abstract non-concrete plans disintegrate around me and I find myself slinking home with my theoretical tail between me legs?

Sylvia Plath said the worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt, so I guess it's all fodder for the work, right?

In that, somewhat, optimistic spirit, on this the last day in 2014, I'm going to list a couple of my writerly goals for 2015.

- Finish my tbr pile before I leave for London: there are probably about twenty physical books to be read before I hop that plane for Europe. Maybe it's about tying up loose ends, I'm not sure but this feels like a really important thing to do. It's doable - I'm sure.

- Work on some strategies for organising my work: that is organising my completed work, in progress work and random snippets of thoughts and ideas into a system that at least looks tidy from the outside. (Open to ideas and suggestions from far more organised folk than me!)

- Experiment more with form: lyrical essays, the merging of creative narrative and journalism, poetry, micro and flash fiction. If you're going to push yourself, push yourself as far as you can, right? There are so many styles and genres that I feel I've yet to fully explore. And considering my impending adventure, it feels like exactly the right time to do it.

- Submit my work to journals/magazines/sites: if a writer writes and no-one sees their words, are they still a writer? Maybe. For me, part of the joy of writing is sharing it with others and to do that I need to put my work into the world. I need to open my work, and myself, up to critique and questioning and criticism. And that is a scary proposition. Rejection is a real, and sometimes horrible, thing. But rejection is countered by just one person, just one, telling you they liked or loved or understood or appreciated what you wrote.

I published my first piece outside of this blog only a few short weeks ago (this on the idea of two literary families in light of my soon-to-be dual citizenship for Writers Bloc, in case you were wondering) and there is no doubt there is some connection between that moment and my growing feeling that I'm ready to be more open with my work. In an email to a good friend a few weeks ago I wrote about how the publication of that piece felt like a thumbs up from the universe; like fate giving me a not-so-subtle shove towards my future. 

As real as rejection is, doubt is much more tangible (in that way something completely intangible can be tangible) for me. But the only way to counter that doubt is by pushing my work into the world. I guess I'm starting that not only with the Writers Bloc piece but also with pushing these goals into the world.  

I have more writerly goals than those listed above, but I'm going to keep those to myself. Sometimes it's good to keep a little something under wraps, close to your skin and secret from the big, bad world.

So here's to a new year, to reading that tbr pile, getting organised, experimenting and pushing back against the self-doubt. Here's to 2015. 

kb xx

my favourite words of 2014

I wasn't going to do one of these posts. Mostly because they are so ubiquitous this time of year. And you know I lean away from the zeitgeist more often that I lean in. 

But, I guess start - or in this case end - as you mean to go on and seeing as I intend for 2015 to be the year of words, specifically my own, I figure ending this year with some of my favourite words from others is apt. 

I don't think I read an especially inordinate amount of books this year. But when I started compiling this list it occurred to me that I'd read a number of books that I genuinely loved for so many different reasons. Books that I feel will stay with me. I've written before about my disparate style of reading: from fiction to non-fiction across genres and separated sometimes by decades. And as I worked on this post it became clear that the books that stood out for me this year don't fit into a style. They aren't of a type or a specific literary area. They are different, in some cases remarkably so. Nonetheless, I loved them.

In no particular order, except maybe for the order I spotted them in my bookshelf, my favourite words of 2014:

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)

A dystopian novel set in a United States that has been taken over by a totalitarian Christian theocracy in which women and their rights are severely oppressed. Does this one need explanation? Probably only why it took me so long to read it. 2014 really has been the year of Margaret Atwood for me, I've read a little of her work, added much more to my list of books to read, and fell more in love with the way she writes. 

Men Explain Things To Me, Rebecca Solnit (2014)

After only discovering Rebecca Solnit, the creator of the term 'mansplain', in the latter half of the year, I found myself searching out her work online and bought this collection of essays as a starting point. Featuring seven distinct essays, from the title essay to pieces on Virginia Woolf, doubt and ambiguity, violence against women and marriage equality, Men Explain Things to Me has quickly become a feminist touchstone. Which is undoubtably due to Solnit's writing, a style that merges narrative and journalistic reporting incredibly successfully. 

I Heard The Owl Call My Name, Margaret Craven (1967)

A young vicar, with a terminal illness, is sent to an Indigenous parish in British Columbia where he forges genuine trusting and loving relationships with the residents. One of my university tutors recommended this book to me. While it's not an overly long story, I read it from cover to cover in one night and as I closed the last page I was crying. Margaret Craven writes in such a beautiful way, I only wish she'd written a hundred novels. I could read this story constantly for the rest of my days and be perfectly happy. 

Overdressed, Elizabeth Cline (2012)

Fashion has always been an important subject for me. But in the last couple of years the sustainability of the industry and its impact on people and the environment has become a larger part of the story. I read this book very early in the year and it more than likely had some impact on the changes I've made in my sartorial habits. Cline investigates the fast fashion industry from the high street retailers to the manufacturers in China and Bangladesh, to the impact of cheap fashion on the second hand clothing industry. The subtitle is The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, which is fairly self-explanatory. 

I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith (1949)
A coming-of-age story of a young woman from an eccentric English family living in gentile poverty in a broken down castle. I discovered this lovely gem of a story though a blog I read somewhat semi regularly. If it was published today it would be unashamedly marketed as YA, a genre that didn't exist in 1949 when it was originally published. Regardless, it's a wonderful read with complicated, and often humorous, characters. 

The Journalist and The Murderer, Janet Malcolm (1989)

After doing a lot of dry journalistic ethics study this year, Janet Malcolm's seminal work on the subject was a refreshing and thought provoking read. The journalist in the title is Joe McGinniss and the murderer Dr. Jeffrey McDonald and the book examines their relationship, McGinniss's resulting book and where the morals and ethics of journalism lie.

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)

As an entry to the work of Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking is so good. An account of the year following the death of Didion's husband, a year in which her daughter faced her own serious medical issues, there is much in the way Didion works through the death of her husband that was at times confronting and at others so tender. 

The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)

I bought this book after seeing Elizabeth Kolbert at the Melbourne Writers Festival. And it floored me so many times. The book covers the phenomena of mass extinctions and posits that we are in the middle of a sixth extinction. Kolbert knows the science, that is clear, and has a way of putting it together that makes a potentially difficult subject digestible for the layperson. 

A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride (2013)

I'm ending with A Girl because it is the book of 2014 for me. I wrote about it a few weeks ago and it continues to linger. It was difficult to read, hard and rough and almost like it was pushing you away, but it was and is beautiful, too. I borrowed it from the library, so I'll be buying myself a copy in the new year. This one needs to come overseas with me. 

So, that's my list. All women, which I've only just realised and wasn't something I'd planned, but I'll embrace it anyway. 

kb xx

a hundred days

It is a hundred days until I fly out to London. A hundred days until whatever this is that I’m doing begins. 

I wanted to write a post about it. About my move overseas and about the plethora of emotions that are along for the ride: the excitement, the sadness, the fear. About how all these things are spinning around me and crashing into each other and how strange it all is. 

But all I can think about is how a hundred days is really not a long time. 

It’s a hundred sunrises and a hundred sunsets. At least as many hot showers in my own shower with the water pressure and temperature set perfectly (is it strange to think you’ll miss a shower?). A hundred nights in my own bed. A hundred nights in my family home. A hundred nights in my home town. A hundred nights laying awake at night wondering if I'm doing the right thing. 

A hundred days is nothing. Two thousand four hundred hours. One hundred and forty-four thousand minutes. Eight million, six hundred and forty thousand seconds. Nothing. 

Amongst the excitement and the fear is a restlessness that has only reared its head in the last few days. Which I guess makes sense, this is generally a time when people feel restless for something different, something new. A new year, a fresh start. A chance to get right what we’ve been getting wrong. 

Except my restlessness feels a little different. It’s almost like these last hundred days are a test. A test of my will to do this, my desire for exploration and change and a life I cannot find here, my strength to do this even when I’m not sure I can. Because as the day draws closer it becomes clearer exactly what I’m leaving by going. Of all the things that form the kaleidoscope of my life, a great many are here in this wide brown land. And in a hundred days I’ll be very very far away from them. 

They say that familiarity breeds contempt and I’m sure there is truth in that. But familiarity breeds other things too. And sometimes the familiar is the closest thing you can have to knowing who you are. 

Despite the restlessness I find myself trying to savour moments. Trying to capture things and fold them up and put them somewhere where I’m sure I won’t lose them. 

Those warm Australian summer nights that are just beginning to appear in my part of the world. Listening to the sounds of the cockies that live in the pine trees that mark the back border of my parents property as they settle in for the evening. The smile that dances across my nieces face, the laughter that spills from my nephew, the smell of home, the noise of my family - smells and sights and sounds I'm trying to burn into my memory. All these pieces of my life that are so familiar will, in a few short months, be replaced with so much that is not. 

A friend told me recently that many of these things, and even some of the people in them, will recede once I leave. And that this happens more easily that one could anticipate. I’m just not sure I’m ready for that. Yes, there are parts of my life that I would happily see recede, to a point where they become ornaments in a past not worthy of examination. But there are parts of my life that I feel the urge to hold on to tightly. Things I don’t want to recede. 

I wasn’t sure I was ready to write this. The past few hours have been spent writing and deleting and writing and deleting. And thinking about those familiar things receding, even when I don’t want them too. And wondering if maybe the restlessness is a way to ignore the sadness that is increasingly a part of my emotional response to moving. Sadness for the people that mean the most and the way I won’t be a part of the landscape of their everyday existence. The way I will recede from them. 

And then I think about spending time in Ireland and seeing family in England and friends in Scotland and being so close to Berlin and Barcelona and Prague. And all the newness and exploration and adventure that awaits. I think about how important this is to me, how so much of the past few years feels like preparation for this. And suddenly a hundred days feels like forever. 

Someone asked me the other day what my plan was. I haven’t really figured that out. I have some abstract notions, some ideas about the first few weeks and maybe some possibilities about the months that follow. But it’s really quite fluid. There is every chance I’ll be back in a few months, that I’ll fail miserably at whatever it is I’m trying to do and come home. And there is every chance this is it. I don't know and I think that's a big part of both the excitement and the fear. I just don't know. 

What I do know is tomorrow will be ninety-nine days.

kb xx

to be read

Tsundoku is a Japanese word meaning buying books and not reading them; letting them pile up unread on shelves or bedside tables or floors. It is a word that is at once beautiful and tragic. 

It's also something I'm guilty of. Buying and borrowing and stacking and rearranging. Telling myself that I'll read that next, but then quickly finding something else instead. It's not something I do intentionally. I'm not hoarding books, I'm not deliberately not reading them. It's just, there are so many stories I want to read. And I find myself adding names and titles to the bottom of my must read list quicker than I seem to cross them off as read. 

And so what I end up with is a tbr pile. Tbr, of course, standing for 'to be read'. Mine sits on my bedside table, though I must admit it has now spread across two piles - safety reasons you see. And amongst the titles are such gems as Graham Greene's The Quite America, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Margaret Atwood's Stone Mattress, a half-read textbook on anthropology and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Well, I mean, I assume they're gems - I haven't read them yet. 

A tbr pile is a distinctly personal thing. It's says something about who you are. When I glance at mine, as I do many times a day, I see my disparate style of reading. Switching genre and era and wandering from fiction to non-fiction and back again with plenty of enthusiasm. 

Over the past few months I've taken to capturing the tbr piles that people post to various social media channels. And I'm quite fascinated. Not just by their choices, but by their willingness to share something which feels so personal.

It's easy to talk about books you've read once you've read them. At that point you can form a, somewhat, coherent opinion. But while it remains in that pile you cannot do that. So sharing that tbr pile feels like exposing yourself before you've had a chance to think, to wonder why and how and to come to any real conclusions. But then, maybe that's ok. 

Maybe the beauty of the tbr pile, and in its sharing, is that you are revealing yourself. Telling the world what you want to read feels akin to telling the world who and what and how you are. And maybe even what you want to be. 

When I cleared the debris from my bedside table to take the picture above I wondered for a moment what anyone seeing the picture would think about me. When they looked at my wide-ranging choices, what would they see? 

Would de Beauvoir indicate my feminist leanings? Joyce my desire to explore my Irish heritage? Would books on Wikileaks and international sex trafficking correctly indicate my interest in the world I live in, a desire to understand as much as I can? What does Margaret Atwood say, or Susan Sontag or Virginia Woolf?

And then after the picture, I thought maybe it doesn't really matter. Maybe the point of sharing our tbr piles is not so much about who and what and how we are but about the importance if stories in our lives. Maybe constructing those piles and sharing those pictures is a way to demonstrate your appreciation for stories. and for the writers that put them into the world. 

I don't know. Maybe it's a little of both. Maybe I'm trying to find something where there isn't really anything. Maybe a tbr pile is just that, books you're going to read. 

kb

Meredith, oh Meredith

Memories have a way of blurring. Of becoming fainter and less reminiscent of the reality that originally bought them to being. Often the details leave, off to take hold somewhere distant and untraceable; it’s the basics that stay. 

This year marks the 24th Meredith Music Festival and as the second weekend in December approaches I’ve been enjoying those blurry memories that have floated to the top of my consciousness, memories of the seven festivals I’ve been privileged to attend. A few of them follow. 

In 2012, on the second weekend in December, I watched the then 85-year-old American musician Big Jay McNeely make his way from somewhere near the top of the natural amphitheatre that makes the Meredith Music Festival to the bottom, where the stage lay, where his near dozen or so bandmates waited for him. He carried his saxophone and at intervals stopped and played. We cheered him on, clapping and moving to the music he was playing us. 

I can’t give you too many more details than that. What I can tell you is that moments like that are the sweet spot of Meredith Music Festival. It’s the place where the unexpected becomes the significant. Where seconds can feel like hours and people you’ve just met can feel like something even closer than blood. For me, it’s also the place where seven years of music and faces and feelings and cold cans and hot food and unexpected weather and unnatural highs merge to become something you hold close to your chest, checking regularly that it’s still there, like a secret you're not quite sure you want to share. 

My first Meredith was in 2007. Back then they still did two types of tickets and we’d only got the Sat/Sun type so we missed out on Amanda Palmer. But we saw Andrew WK, writhing around the stage dressed in white jeans and a white t shirt, telling us that we were all together, at Meredith, in the world, together. 

The Gossip was scheduled to play that night. Before they hit the stage my friends and I graciously accepted a puff on a joint from a stranger. One friend couldn’t handle this funny smoke and as Beth Ditto made her entrance onto the stage, I found myself helping her into our tent. I lay beside her as she slept, hearing Beth’s voice as it blew from the amphitheatre. Loud and real and urgent. Resentment tastes bitter, as I always imagined it would. We’re not friends anymore. But I don’t think it has anything to do with missing Beth. 

Before going to Meredith that year I’d discovered Paris Wells, who was scheduled to play on the Sunday afternoon. We pushed to the front of the stage for Paris and after she’d played she jumped down from the stage to sit at a table and sign copies of her CD. We bought copies and watched her scrawl with black marker across the face of them. Later, we sat on the roof of our car at the entrance to Meredith, waiting for someone’s parents to come pick us up, Paris drove out, her window was down and we called to her, waving madly from our perch. She waved back. Her arm extending out the window as her car drove around the bend. 

 

By 2008 the two types of tickets had been scrapped. It was in for one in for all. And we were in. It rained that year. Hard and heavy, but then as I know now, Meredith isn’t Meredith without a little damp. That year the dust turned to mud, people dived head fisrt, sliding across the wet dirt on their bellies. People tripped, hitting the mud with their arses. Bales of hay were spread across the ground. We wore ponchos and let the rain hit our faces and as the weekend wore on, we let the wet seep into our bones. 

We saw Violent Soho, Architecture in Helsinki, Beaches and The Bronx. It was the year I fell hard, musically at least, for the boys of Little Red. The year Kram played his first solo gig. Night had fallen, the crowd had descended and as those first strains of harmonica began, it was at once a moment of time charged with energy and brimming with tenderness. MGMT played that year, I heard them from the top of the Meredith Eye. They weren’t great, I could tell from the top of the wheel. My friend had a bag of mary j. She dropped it from the wheel that night. 

Meredith always starts early. Not the music, which kicks off around 4pm on Friday afternoon, but the whole weekend. It’s an early rise Friday, followed by a half hour drive from home (we always felt blessed to live so close) to the line to get in. Which is almost like a pre-party to the actual party. The first can is generally cracked in the line and it’s on from there. Down hill or up hill, depending on your point of view. And what’s in your can.

By 2009 we were almost old hands. We saw Jarvis Cocker, Sia and Kitty, Daisy and Lewis. We jumped, hands in the air, for Pharoahe Monch, soaking up the energy they threw from the stage. But 2009 belonged to Paul Kelly. 

We’d made our way towards the front of the stage, and it was that heady time of day when it’s not yet night but it’s not still day. Dusk, I guess. But that word doesn’t feel quite adequate enough. We were standing in a natural amphitheatre with ten thousand other people in what can only be described as a sing-a-long with Paul Kelly. Ten thousand people packed in tightly together, swaying, arms draped across the shoulders of friends and strangers alike, all singing along, all asking the same question: whose going to make the gravy?

I remember looking around me, feeling goosebumps creep all over my body. It was at once one of the most amazing things I’ve ever been a part of and also one of the oddest. All of us thrown together singing words like a musical army. Maybe it was because it was Paul Kelly. Maybe we had drunk enough by then to be in the blissful tipsy stage of mutual love and acceptance. Maybe we were all feeling those goosebumps. Maybe it was the natural and unnatural substances coursing through many of our bodies. Whatever it was, it was magic. 

Like 2009 belonged to Paul Kelly, 2010 belonged to Neil Finn. 

We saw Kimbra and Cloud Control and the inimitable Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Little Red preformed again, cementing my love for them. But Neil Finn pulled us close to the stage, drew us down the slopes of the amphitheatre. It was another one of those ten thousand strong sing-a-longs. It was magic and oddness all rolled into one. It was another Meredith thing that you probably wouldn’t get if you weren’t there. 

I almost died at Meredith in 2011. And that is such a dramatic exaggeration. When Barbarian took to the stage I was at the front. Then their fans began to move and things got a little crazy. I could feel the crowd pushing forward behind me, could feel my body being crushed against the metal fence. We ended up jumping the fence at the front of the stage, being hauled over the metal by security guards. It was a moment that was terrifying and exhilarating. It was Meredith.

We saw Cut/Copy that year and Ladyhawke and Icehouse. Adalita played and sat down on the stage with the children of her Magic Dirt bandmate Dean Turner. At one point she lay down on the stage and they jumped over her legs. 

There was a total lunar eclipse that year, which kind of makes sense because Grinderman played. Nick Cave stalked the Meredith stage in perhaps the most beautiful pair of gentleman’s shoes I’ve ever laid eyes on. It was Grinderman’s last performance. 

We’d set our camp up fairly early in 2012. A product, no doubt, borne out of the fact that we were veterans. We’d been and done it so many times before. We were old hands. 

By now the second can was well and truly open and we’d reclined in our folding chairs out the front of our campsite watching the goings on around us. A group of about twenty started pulling six metre long pieces of timber from the roof of their car. We watching them stand them up into a crude triangle and throw weighted ropes around the apex. They then dragged a tarp over their makeshift teepee. We’d never seen anything like it at Meredith, but we nodded along, encouraging their quite foolhardy behaviour. The teepee came down by Saturday night when the weather, predictably so, turned nasty.

That year was the year of the aforementioned Big Jay McNeely. I hadn’t expected the highlight of 2012 to be Big Jay and his saxophone. Perhaps I’m making assumptions, but I’d bet most of the 10,000 strong Meredith crowd hadn’t heard of Big Jay prior to seeing him that sweaty Saturday afternoon. And I bet none of them have forgotten him.

It was also the year of Grimes, The Sunnyboys, Saskwatch and Regurgitator. Chet Faker played sitting down with a broken leg. Primal Scream were amazing, I found myself transfixed by Bobby and the shirt he was wearing. I tweeted the band later, asking about the shirt. I never got a reply. 

We saw The Smith Street Band in 2013 and Stonefield and Courtney Barnett. We saw Beaches and Dick Diver and Spiderbait. And when Neil Rodgers and Chic hit the stage we were front and centre. Rodgers played an amazing set. I guess time just doesn’t weary some people. He told us about his battle with cancer and talked about all the amazing people he’d worked with. He was dressed in an immaculate white suit with a white beret. He smiled a huge smile. It was dark when they hit the stage, and Meredith and her ampitheatre became a giant disco. 

Meredith 2013 is the freshest in my mind, the cleanest. The one least soiled by time and the romance of smudged memories. And yet, it doesn’t feel like the biggest as you might expect it would. It just feels like another piece. An addition to an already established picture.

This year, for the first time in seven years, I won’t be going to Meredith. I missed the ballot. A devastation all on its own that feels a lot like rejection.  But I’m also packing up my life to run away to Europe in a couple of months. Maybe Aunty Meredith knows that. Maybe that rejection is actually giving a shit. Who knows. I know I’ll miss her. This year. And maybe forever, because I don’t know when I’ll be back. When I’ll next find myself in the line, drifting through that amphitheatre, feeling that music wash over me. 

I know I have seven years of memories. And maybe that’s enough.

kb xx

space, man

Sometimes you read something that just sticks with you. That lingers long after the last syllables are uttered in your mind, long after the last page is turned or you've scrolled until you cannot scroll any further. Something about those stories, maybe it's the subject, more likely it is the way they are told; the language, the style, the way the words fit and move together - all of this makes it stick. 

When I read this piece by Elmo Keep on Medium a few weeks ago, I knew right away it would be one of those pieces. 'All dressed up for Mars and nowhere to go' is a fascinating tale of space exploration, of a one way journey to Mars and an Australian man who has signed on the bottom line. 

But, more than that, it's about something that I find myself as intrigued by as I am terrified. Maybe terrified is the wrong word. 

I live in a part of Australia where at night, after the sun has set, the sky is alive with specks of light we know to be stars. I'm fascinated by these specks of light but if I stare at them too long, if I find myself thinking in too much detail about space, about how far away those stars are, about the Moon and the planets and the Sun and everything else that constitutes the universe we live in, my head starts to hurt. It's too big for me to think about in any real way.

I've often thought about why this is so. Why contemplation of this universe feels so impossible for me and after reading Elmo Keep's piece I think I've finally figured it out. When you think about the realities of space, the distance, the hugeness of it all, it makes this life I'm leading on this planet that I live on so minuscule in comparison. So tiny as to almost not deserve thinking of. Who am I but a tiny person, living a tiny life on a tiny planet in this giant universe? 

The nature of the human existence means questions like that hit right where it hurts. How can we mean so much, yet so little? How can our impact be so great, yet disappear so soon? How can we be here, now and be gone in an instant? How can we exist?

In her captivating piece, Elmo Keep chronicles a timeline of the earth towards nothingness. 

"If all human life were to disappear from the Earth tomorrow, it would take the planet only 100 million years to completely reclaim the surface, leaving no single trace of proof that intelligent beings ever existed here. All the satellites orbiting the planet will, untended, fall, many coming to rest at the bottom of the sea. 

The last manmade structures standing will be the Pyramids and Mount Rushmore; its granite resists erosion at an elevation that exposes it to little wind, leaving it recognisable 10,000 years from now. In five million years it will be gone."

"Five billion years from now our sun will enter its red giant phase and expand to at least 200 times its current size, enveloping Mercury, Venus, and quite possibly Earth in the process.

One hundred trillion years from now all the hydrogen of the universe will be exhausted, and so all remaining stars will die. In one hundred vigintillion years quantum tunneling will turn all matter left in the universe into liquid.

In 10^10^120 years (zeros are now added in septillions, numbers too big for our minds to grasp) our universe will experience its heat death, encountering maximum entropy when there is no longer enough thermodynamic free energy to sustain processes that consume energy—like life.

By this point, time itself will have ceased to exist."

It is brutal in its truth. But it is also strangely beautiful, like things that exist outside of human intervention often are. 

It's cloudy this afternoon, the sky a sobering shade of grey that makes me think of the Earth pulling a blanket over itself, hiding from whatever it is that it doesn't want to see. I'm hopeful the clouds will clear by this evening. I'd like to look at the stars. Maybe, just maybe, I can think a little longer about them tonight. 

kb xx

P.S. If you want to ponder the future of the universe, check out this Wikipedia article, which Elmo Keep links to in her piece. Warning: it may do some very strange and scary things to your mind.  

reading: a girl is a half-formed thing

I think I vaguely knew this book existed, that it was out in the world. But when I saw it at the library the speed at which I snatched it from the shelf perhaps indicated that my vagueness masked something a little stronger. And when I put it down three days ago I felt full with something that I could not yet articulate. 

You know those puzzles you often see online, the ones that appear to be a jumble of letters, nothing quite making sense. But somehow you can decipher the message, something to do with the first and last letter being in the right spot allows your brain to reorganise the letters within each word until you see the message. Until you can read it as clearly as if it were never jumbled in the first place. Over the last few days, as I've let this story wash over me I've thought more and more about those puzzles, about our ability to find what is clear beneath what is not. 

Eimear McBride writes in a stream of consciousness style, but there is nothing smooth here. Her words are sharp, jagged even, torn and rough and sometimes difficult to read - difficult because of both the style and the subject matter. 

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a story about family, about faith, about death, about desperation. It follows the narrator, an Irish girl, from about the age of two as she grapples with the world. With a pious mother, an older brother living with a brain tumour, an absent father, a sexually abusive uncle who rapes her at thirteen - a trail of destructive relationships that leads to an ending not wholly unexpected. 

We follow her as she grows out of her small country hometown, as she moves to the city and starts college, as she follows this path of using sex as a salve for a wound that gapes at the edges. As she continues to engage in a toxic, abusive relationship with her uncle that becomes increasingly violent. As her brothers brain tumour returns and she watches him die. She is falling apart, piece by piece, from the very first pages. Her destruction catalogued across a landscape whose brutality matches her existence, in a family who is saved only from complete failure by the relationship of the girl and her brother - the you in the story. 

No characters are named, descriptions are painted in broad strokes and sometimes not at all. The staccato language, the unformed thoughts, the lingering feeling of reading one of those puzzles, the ones with the jumbled letters, and yet as I turned page after page I understood this story. I grasped these characters, I began to see what was clear underneath what was not. 

There is something about this story. I'm not sure if it's the style, the characters, the ending I had almost hoped for but that still hurt. I don't know, but when I turned that last page and realised that was it, it was a sharp hit to the gut. There wasn't anything else. 

It's taken me a couple of days to sit down and write this and I've barely read anything since I put this book down. Maybe I needed the time to process it, needed the time to get what was in my head and put it into words. And even now I don't feel like I'm doing this story justice. I don't feel like I'm getting this down right. 

Eimear McBride is an Irish author and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is her debut novel. It took six months to write and nine years to publish. Let that wash over you. It has been almost universally praised, an instant classic. A work of genius and just damn good storytelling. Something that works at you until it gets under your skin and you find yourself wanting to reach into the pages and grab the hand of the narrator and hold onto her tight. 

But something else about this story, apart from the Irish girl at its heart, has grabbed me, has allowed me an insight into my own work that feels overwhelming. McBride's story helped me realise my reluctance to paint my own characters in minute detail, my own preference for broad strokes. It helped me to understand why I place thoughts and feelings above specifics and why sometimes that is not just a way to write, it's the only way. 

Some stories are better when you have to fight for what is underneath, when you have to do some of the work of clearing the dust and dirt and rubble of words to decipher the message. And when you let that message settle into every corner of your mind, when you wait until it bubbles to the surface, maybe that's when you get to be a part of the story, even if only in the smallest way. 

This is not an easy read. But then, why should it be? What it is, is a book worth your time. A story worth working for. The narrator is a character worth knowing, worth remembering. Eimear McBride is an author worth the praise. 

kb xx