Small Acts of Disappearance is a collection of ten essays that describes the author's affliction with an eating disorder which begins in high school, and escalates into life-threatening anorexia over the next ten years. Fiona Wright is a highly regarded poet and critic, and her account of her illness is informed by a keen sense of its contradictions and deceptions, and by an awareness of the empowering effects of hunger, which is unsparing in its consideration of the author's own actions and motivations. The essays offer perspectives on the eating disorder at different stages in Wright's life, at university, where she finds herself in a radically different social world to the one she grew up in, in Sri Lanka as a fledgling journalist, in Germany as a young writer, in her hospital treatments back in Sydney. They combine research, travel writing, memoir, and literary discussions of how writers like Christina Stead, Carmel Bird, Tim Winton, John Berryman and Louise Glück deal with anorexia and addiction; together with accounts of family life, and detailed and humorous views of hunger-induced situations of the kind that are so compelling in Wrights poetry. [Trove]
Epigraph:
I speak of those years when I lived
walled alive in myself, left with nothing
but the inward search for joy, for a word
that would ruffle the plumage of mind
to reach its tenderest down;
when consuming myself I endured,
but could not change.
GWEN HARWOOD 'Past and Present'
'Fiona Wright is shortlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize for her collection of essays, Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger. We spoke to Fiona about writing fellowships, her favourite cafés and the people who inspire and influence her.' (Introduction)
'Fiona Wright is shortlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize for her collection of essays, Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger. We spoke to Fiona about writing fellowships, her favourite cafés and the people who inspire and influence her.' (Introduction)