Small Acts of Disappearance
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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 Wright’s poetry.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Australian poet Fiona Wright's anorexia emerged out of a mysterious stomach ailment that spiralled into a savage years-long battle with hunger, deprivation and food obsessions. Wright's keen observational powers extend beyond her internal struggle to the people and places around her, elevating Small Acts of Disappearance into a lyrical depiction of an intensely private crisis and an invaluable roadmap to a little-understood disease. Wright's disorder is all too common, but her writing—unflinching and brave—is anything but.