There’s a moment in Patrick White’s Voss when Tom Radclyffe remarks that he would be ‘curious to read little Laura’s thoughts’. Little Laura responds, mischievously, if not maliciously, that she has been thinking ‘of nothing in particular. Which is another way of saying: almost everything.’ This is almost certainly the recognisable condition of those currently in possession of an internet password and the hardware to put it to work. We are mushroom people now, our mycelium constantly interacting with countless threads that have been sent out by others to find, lose, or avoid us. We are novelists now, too, digging […]

I guess since I heard Sheila Heti ask, How Should a Person Be? in 2012, the question has been on my mind. I read it when I was depressed and living through a Canadian winter a long way from home. I was 20. The book changed the nature of my self-awareness. The ache inside myself was no longer an immovable weight but was something to be interrogated. How did I want to be? How did I want to function in the world? What did I need to do? I’ve looked at my time since then as a project of efficiency. […]

It is mid-morning on a blue-bird day and I am coughing my way up the side of a mountain, suffering from what I will later decide must be bronchitis—constant coughing, weariness, shortness of breath. I’m on the west coast of Tasmania for a writing job, and there’s just enough time to hit the hills on the way home. I don’t have proper boots or gaiters here, so my feet are covered in mud; after pushing through the early patches of overhanging bush, the pad opens up and I scoot up the track as quickly as I can. I feel pretty […]

There are no good novels about the internet because the internet itself is too powerful a text, it’s rife with ambiguities and inconsistencies and bracing shocks, hidden meanings, fathomless mystery. It’s not the role of the novel to dilute anything, and I doubt you can write the internet without diluting it in some way. You can watch teens eat Tide Pods on it, you can watch people die on it, you can sign a petition to change the ending of a videogame on it. On Amazon, you can buy print-on-demand books beloved by white power terror groups (but why would […]

When I was about 36 weeks pregnant, my workmates threw me a little goodbye party on the last Friday afternoon before I began maternity leave. There was cheesecake and Twisties and everyone else downed brimming glasses of sparkling wine. I remember being so relieved that I’d made it through eight months of pregnancy while working. The vomiting, the constant need to wee, the pain of being regularly kicked in the ribs and bladder from the inside. And I was proud, because even though any little error I made was instantly attributed to baby brain by my colleagues, I didn’t think […]

i. The most I’ve ever dreamt is seven dreams in one night, back to back. I remember the first three dreams. I bothered to get up and write them down. It happened after I read Natsume Soseki’s Ten Nights Dreaming, a book of ten short stories based on ten dreams set in different time periods. Four of the ten stories begin with ‘This is what I saw in my dream.’ This is what I saw in one of my seven dreams, scribbled down half-awake/asleep: ‘Cars slowed to a crawl. Hazard lights on. Lights that do nothing. Penetrate nothing. A dust […]

I’m 11, 16, 21, sprawled across Nanna’s dusty rose velvet couch with my head resting on her lap watching Midsummer Murders or A Touch of Frost. Hetty Wainthrop Investigates. Inspector Rex. Her lap is the easiest place to relax, my safe space since I was a kid. I learned about fairytales rocking on her knees. I learned obsession from her, the art of getting lost, and the art of reading. Crime stories—better if it’s a series, better still if it’s British or Scandinavian (although recent Australian contributions by Emma Viskic and Jane Harper have similarly hit the spot)—have always been […]

What it’s like to read something you’re not engaged with if you have ADHD? Read one line. Don’t absorb it. Read again. Skip down to where a word you like jumps out at you. The word is dancing, skittering on the page. Read me, it says. You like me. NO! EYES UP! Go back up to the first line and read it again. It sinks in. Read the next line, and the next. Finally, you’re paying attention! You can do this. Now you’ve reached the word you like. Read it over and over. Think about how it doesn’t seem like […]

I was at a dinner party a few weeks ago at the home of an impressive reader and amongst other impressive readers. At some point my sense of inadequacy got the better of me and I made a joke about how I don’t really read much at all. Another dinner guest exclaimed, ‘Me too!’ and we raised our wine glasses like we’d seen done in television shows and movies. Later that evening, the conversation turned to some books that were published recently and, of course, I had a liquored opinion on every single one. The person sitting across from me […]

it’s been pretty bleak these past few years—for those of us privileged enough to feel the relative shift, the prevailing fatalistic mood—&the apocalypse has been on my mind. perhaps it has been on yours too? &what does it mean to consider the apocalypse at this moment? oscillating between a joke on twitter &a real fear that grips you in the moments between sleep &waking; an ambivalent attachment, dread, acceptance, entertainment, hope, a kind of giving up, a withdrawal, intellectual, or pragmatic; i’ve been reading writing that clicks into some familiar temporality, a sense of impending doom—speaking to this moment where […]

Of all the things an author can admit to, ‘I haven’t been reading,’ is among the most shameful. A writer who doesn’t read is the literary equivalent of a skinny chef: untrustworthy, their tastes and motives questionable. Admitting to not reading feels equal to outing myself as an imposter. ‘Why should anybody read my work, if I’m not reading?’ I wonder, when I find myself in a reading slump. ‘Why write at all?’ Yet the relationship between reading and writing isn’t always a harmonious exchange of language, ideas, and inspirations. At times, my reading-self and writing-self seem like conjoined twins, […]

When I tell people that I’m in the home stretch of my PhD, empathy creases their face. ‘Let me get you a vodka,’ they say, and then they tell me stories of their own doctorates, when they almost joined a cult of white-clad fruitarians who worship Keanu Reeves, or their friends, who tossed it in to move to Peru and volunteer at a shelter for abandoned alpacas. ‘I’m loving my PhD,’ I tell them. They pat my shoulder, mutter ‘Stockholm syndrome’, and slip the business card of their therapist into my purse. But I am loving it, which I put […]