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 […]

While reading Jessie Cole’s Staying: A Memoir, I found myself stuck, fish-hooked by one particular sentence. I’d picked it up at my local bookstore knowing it would likely stir something up in me. This sentence held within it something a little bit catastrophic. Catastrophic as in involving a sudden and large-scale alteration in state, as in furiously underlining three lines of page 113 and waiting a while. And ever so slowly Zoe—the actual person—disappeared from our lives, drifting around in the depths of withered memories until she became an event, instead of a person. ‘An event,’ Cole writes. A thing […]

I began reading Joshua Lobb’s The Flight of Birds (2019), a novel in 12 stories, while on a writing retreat at Bundanon, New South Wales. I was sitting on a bed in one of the monastic rooms that overlooks the Shoalhaven River, window open to the breeze and birds. Here I slipped into the sensitive and intricately woven storyworld and was transported across time to meet birds in bushland and on beaches, on busy roads and bridges, in household cages or chicken yards, in gardens and on front verandahs. I encountered birds close up and far away; they were nesting, […]

When I got home from the hospital after giving birth to my daughter in February last year, the first thing I did was sit in the rocking chair in the room that would become hers—where some of the most intense hours of the labour had taken place—and desperately write down everything I could remember about my first experience of childbirth. I did this partly because I’d been told hormones would soon alter or erase my memories of the experience—and I definitely wanted to keep them—but also because I was trying to make sense of what had just happened to me. […]

Reading finds you. It was jet-lag-induced sentimentality that caused me to slide Prospero’s Cell from the shelf in the first place. It caught my eye. Spine stained with damp, the pages pock-marked and soft to the touch. On the inside cover, my mother’s name in a deliberate ornate cursive, and the year ’79. A second hand in darker pencil read 39c. The book was a relic. Nine years earlier I had left Australia for England to write a thesis on The Tempest, never intending to stay away so long. I liked the title. I had never heard of Lawrence Durrell […]

In My Defence The shelf was empty. Alarmed, I checked atop drawers and desks; the kitchen bench; the arms of chairs in the living room; in backpacks and cupboards. Nothing. I sifted dirt in the backyard, climbed the lemon tree to scan the horizon, pawed through the dimness behind the couch. The books had gone.    I crept to the back shed. It was the last place they might expect me to look. Inside, I witnessed the final stages of a mutiny, a scene from Jacques-Louis David’s The Tennis Court Oath. From the disparate territories of my house, dozens of […]

Our prized 1943 edition of the Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language—a book about the size and weight of a car battery—does not contain the term ‘photocopier’. The almost as cumbersome World Book Dictionary of 1973, however, provides definitions of both photocopier and ‘Xerox’, the corporation that in the intervening three decades developed the first office copying machines. Also included is a virtual advertisement masquerading as an example of usage: Microfilm takes weeks and is costly. Positive photostat takes time. What about Xerox? It is easy to imagine an 18-year-old today being totally flummoxed by that […]