'What to do with the intensity of longing that occasionally arises? Sometimes I hug my pup so hard he growls. When my pup growls, I realise I need to find some other way of letting off steam. It’s easy to imagine I could just touch myself and be done with it, but no matter how many times I make myself come, that feeling of wanting doesn’t subside. A friend has a term for the need for touch—‘skin hungry’. Lots of people live without sex, but I find it a kind of deprivation.
'What does it mean to be awakened? To want? To love? Jessie Cole is in her late thirties when she meets a man twenty years older than she is. They become lovers. Both passionate and companionable, fraught and uneven, their relationship tests her fears and anxieties. Through their interstate affair, through bushfires and the pandemic, she learns about herself, how her initiations into womanhood shaped who she is now, and how the shadow of family trauma still inhabits her body.
'Jessie Cole has written an unabashed, thrilling exploration of the very nature of desire, a story about vulnerability and strength, loss and regeneration. A memoir of the body, Desire is a visceral book in which feeling and longing are laid bare.' (Publication summary)
'A memoir written in real-time with echoes of past-on-present.'
'Desire: A Reckoning is a remarkable contemporary memoir. Its author, Jessie Cole, is unafraid to be vulnerable – in her life and her writing. This, her fourth book (and second memoir) is an extraordinary exploration of both physical and emotional desire, and the fraught limits of passion, need and want. Cole’s romantic desires are set against deep family tragedy: the suicide of her sister, and then, some years later, the suicide of her father.' (Introduction)
'Desire: A Reckoning, Jessie Cole’s second memoir and fourth book, is a leafy work. Leafy for its setting in the northern New South Wales forest where Cole grew up and still lives, and also for its delicate interleaving. The work’s terrain is desire, which it evokes through connections with place, and how solitude, connection and attachment are woven through our lives and torn by detachment.'(Introduction)
'For fans of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, Cole’s second memoir deals with the pain of an ambivalent courtship – while exploring her visceral need for love'
'For fans of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, Cole’s second memoir deals with the pain of an ambivalent courtship – while exploring her visceral need for love'
'Desire: A Reckoning, Jessie Cole’s second memoir and fourth book, is a leafy work. Leafy for its setting in the northern New South Wales forest where Cole grew up and still lives, and also for its delicate interleaving. The work’s terrain is desire, which it evokes through connections with place, and how solitude, connection and attachment are woven through our lives and torn by detachment.'(Introduction)
'Desire: A Reckoning is a remarkable contemporary memoir. Its author, Jessie Cole, is unafraid to be vulnerable – in her life and her writing. This, her fourth book (and second memoir) is an extraordinary exploration of both physical and emotional desire, and the fraught limits of passion, need and want. Cole’s romantic desires are set against deep family tragedy: the suicide of her sister, and then, some years later, the suicide of her father.' (Introduction)
'A memoir written in real-time with echoes of past-on-present.'
