For the past year, I’ve been buying most of my books from a second-hand bookstore above a wine cellar on Sydney Road. When open, they line the street below with a small sampling of stock, a taster to beckon passers-by upstairs to the main collection. There’s a couch in the centre of the entry room; the walls are almost completely covered in posters of well-known titles. Stacks of uncategorised books sometimes conceal other stacks of uncategorised books. I awkwardly nudge and push these around as I browse, hoping to stumble across a hidden, well-priced gem. My favourite shelf, unexpectedly, is the one labelled ‘General Interest’, where there can be anything from academic cultural studies texts to The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. I’ve come to prefer the process of searching without expectations about what I might find, sorting through titles I’d otherwise miss (and some I won’t give a second thought to). It’s like the early stages of researching a new idea, when anything could fall into your lap.

On my first visit, I take home a modest stack that includes Kate Zambreno’s Appendix Project, a collection of talks that respond to, build on, and circle Zambreno’s previous book about her mother. A new mother herself, Zambreno is often sketching out the places she’s writing from, the fragments of time she’s stolen from her schedule to write, or else the times when she can’t bear to work on anything else. From bed, the couch, hunched over in the dark, while breastfeeding. Detours and intrusions like emails from friends, a bad haircut, or the same piece of music that repeats throughout the house to soothe the baby, infiltrating the work in known and unknown ways. The book becomes so much about the conditions and encounters—with texts, artworks, people—that produced it, so that the writing is always, in some measure, about a body in a room.