'I have always thought of myself as emotional to a fault, unable to suppress all the feelings I have. But I’ve realised recently that’s not true. For 29 years now, I have been completely unable to feel or express anger. Every week, my therapist and I have a version of the same conversation.' (Introduction)
'The pandemic has been a brutal reminder that disabled people don’t matter. Living through this, as a disabled person with a wonky immune system, has been a reminder that my life doesn’t matter to most.' (Introduction)
'For more than two years now I have been receiving welcome phone calls from a woman, whom I barely know, with an attractive voice. After some polite preliminaries, she asks me a lot of personal, anatomical questions—the sort one’s partner would likely also be able to answer for her. My responses to her enquiries are in no way shielded; in fact, I have been unabashedly open with her. We have a few laughs. No longer. These quarterly exchanges have now come to an end. Though I could take some comfort in knowing she’ll give me another pre-arranged call in about a distant six months’ time, as is the routine.' (Introduction)
'I still remember so much of that time. The author—diffident, angled just so—perched off to the side of the woman interviewing him (and the interpreter beside her). My own body, tremulous and eager, hitching forwards—because I did not want to miss a word, W, that day. You were completing your PhD on the response of the reading public to those early-twentieth-century poets working outside Modernism, and you were being supervised by another poet Dennis Haskell, and you had asked me to be there. A few years back you had completed some translations, Chinese translations, of Joyce Carol Oates—Wild Nights!, a short story collection about the final days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James and Hemmingway. And you were living them, living those short stories, W, I think. Looking back, maybe you were more invested in the talk than I was.' (Introduction)
Epigraph: I want to write with ‘true emotion’, not just technically well. I want to write from the heart. I want to make people feel something.
—Shu-Ling Chua
'Australia’s national anthem begins, ‘Australians all let us rejoice,/ for we are one and free’. Few now reflect on the Enlightenment presumption of a racial ‘oneness’ that led to the first colonial naming of the people inhabiting this land, the ‘Australians’. That the name was given to the land’s first inhabitants, and not its recently arrived colonists, now seems an unspoken irony. For contemporary Australians, the very name stands as a symbol of colonial appropriation. In Australia’s name lies a perennial legacy of race, colonisation and Europe’s Enlightenment.' (Introduction)
'John Dunne, husband of American writer Joan Didion, died suddenly one night at their dinner table. Didion was struck by a grief so overwhelming it left her winded and struggling. Not only was her husband gone, her work colleague, collaborator and daily confidant had disappeared in a moment. The silence of his absence gave way to strange thoughts and preoccupations for Didion. Famously, she believed that she could not give away her husband’s clothing and shoes as he would need them when he came back.' (Introduction)
