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'In Imperfect Lee Kofman dissects her life-long relationship to the scars on her body. She tells of the calamities that scarred her: a haphazardly administered heart operation in the Soviet Union when she was ten years old left her with ugly scars on her chest; a week later she was run over by a bus, leaving her leg stippled by scar tissue. She traces her relationship to her own scars and to a multitude of secondary texts; she interviews other people about their experiences, seeking to understand how what she terms our ‘Body Surface’ moulds our lives. Disentangling her flesh from metaphor in an effort to study her relationship with it, to redefine its paradigm beyond tired axioms of self-love. ‘Reality is messy, way messier than is possible to sum up in manifestos of pop-psychology advice,’ she writes.' (Introduction)
Notes
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Epigraph:
as a child
i wanted a scar just like my father’s
bold and appalling a mushroom explosion
that said i too was at war — Truong TranWhat are the ways in which our bodies, particularly imperfect bodies, shape us? … what can we do when this shaping isn’t in sync with our own designs? Lee Kofman — Imperfect.
If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love anyone else? — RuPaul.
A scar on my foot: I scraped it on a river rock. The Band-Aid kept moving when I took my shoe on and off. It got infected and I had to take antibiotics. I felt embarrassed about not being able to use a Band-Aid properly. — Me.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Sydney Review of Books
