'Late in the summer five years ago, when I was recovering from a surgical procedure, I met two women within a few weeks of each other and I saw both of them regularly, always separately, for some months afterwards. Summer did not give way easily that year, and even so we must force our bodies down to sleep in the heat, and even if experience does not give itself up easily to representation, I will lay it down anyway; frame the raw and exigent weeks, the untrustworthy months after the hospital, render it and them, Frida and Sylvia, as closely as possible to reality—or whatever is the feeling of a life and mind lived inside a body.
'A woman leaves the hospital after an operation and starts swimming in a pool in Melbourne’s inner suburbs. There she meets Frida, who is uncannily like her in her experience of illness. Soon after, she meets another woman in a local park, Sylvia, who sees her pain and encourages her to rest.
'The two new friends seem to be polar opposites: Frida adores the pool and the natural world, Sylvia clings to the protection of interior worlds. What begins as two seemingly simple friendships is challenged by what each woman asks of her, of themselves, and their bodies.' (Publication summary)
'For more than a decade now, the Stella Prize, an award celebrating Australian women’s writing, has been changing Australia’s literary landscape. It has taken a monkey wrench to the way literary esteem is bestowed in this country. Its annual whack has shifted the calibration of what kinds of books are valued.' (Introduction)
'A tenderly written exploration of the body through the lens of living with chronic illness.'
'When I was 19, I had my ankle fused. To fix it, I underwent a procedure called a subtalar fusion, which used a bone graft from my shin and two huge screws to put the joint in place. In the unnamed narrator of Katherine Brabon’s Body Friend, I saw a mirror of myself from that point in my life. Someone young, suffering with pain from a source that no one can identify, hoping that surgery will ‘fix’ her. Likewise, the narrator sees a mirror of herself in two women she meets in the aftermath of surgery. Through these three women, Body Friend explores concepts of pain, illness, the self and recovery—how they influence and are influenced by one another.'(Introduction)
'Three women inhabit the space between illness and recovery in a novel that moves with a syrupy slowness, refusing our thirst for plot' (Introduction)
'Three women inhabit the space between illness and recovery in a novel that moves with a syrupy slowness, refusing our thirst for plot' (Introduction)
'When I was 19, I had my ankle fused. To fix it, I underwent a procedure called a subtalar fusion, which used a bone graft from my shin and two huge screws to put the joint in place. In the unnamed narrator of Katherine Brabon’s Body Friend, I saw a mirror of myself from that point in my life. Someone young, suffering with pain from a source that no one can identify, hoping that surgery will ‘fix’ her. Likewise, the narrator sees a mirror of herself in two women she meets in the aftermath of surgery. Through these three women, Body Friend explores concepts of pain, illness, the self and recovery—how they influence and are influenced by one another.'(Introduction)
'A tenderly written exploration of the body through the lens of living with chronic illness.'
'For more than a decade now, the Stella Prize, an award celebrating Australian women’s writing, has been changing Australia’s literary landscape. It has taken a monkey wrench to the way literary esteem is bestowed in this country. Its annual whack has shifted the calibration of what kinds of books are valued.' (Introduction)
