This is an interview with Sydney author Fiona Wright.


 

Small Acts of Disappearance is a collection of personal essays by poet and critic Fiona Wright about her experience with an eating disorder which developed into life-threatening anorexia. A few pages into reading, it was clear that we were looking at something extraordinary. 

Each essay is about hunger, and deals with some facet of Wright’s experience of anorexia, as well as a host of other themes: guilt, ambition, class, race, literature, philosophy, mental and physical illness—all of which fold into each other to make the work a sublimely sophisticated collection.

It is brilliant in the most literal (and figurative) sense; a few pages in you realise you are working with a blindingly bright mind. Small Acts is fiercely cerebral, but better than that, startlingly good. A work of intellectual rigour and poetic discipline so tightly woven that every few paragraphs one must stop and re-read a sentence, first to grasp what the line is telling you, then to savour how the thing was put together. It explores the bridges between the mind and the body in ways both visceral and wonderful. We don’t think we’ve ever encountered such beautifully evocative prose built around the phrase ‘esophageal sphincter'.

If this book has a fault, it’s that the reader is afflicted with conflicting desires: to turn the pages hungrily, and to stop and delight at each in turn, a dichotomy that seems oddly appropriate. This is a work that explores the duality of mind and body, along with eating disorders, illness, woe, friendship and loneliness, and a million other shining and matte facets of the human condition.

Once we’d finished the book, we went back to the start and re-read it. Then, not content to keep our fauning praise to ourselves, we badgered Wright for an interview. Here, she speaks to Liam Pieper about her new book, illness, agency, poetry, and living life like Patrick White's magpie. 

Writers Bloc

The final essay in this collection begins with the declaration that you resisted, for a long time, reading any anorexia memoirs. At what point did you realise that you were writing a collection that was, in some respects, a memoir of anorexia?

 

Fiona Wright

I actually don’t think of Small Acts as a memoir. I’ve always referred to it as a collection of essays, but I do know that that is at least partly because of my own discomfort with the genre of illness memoir. To me, memoir implies a narrative, and I’m very resistant to the idea of trying to apply or affix a narrative to my experience, because it isn’t neat, it isn’t completed, it’s not linear and is not something that will ever completely make sense. And so much of the material is not standard memoir material - the sections on books, on miniatures, that kind of thing. So I think of the book as a series of essays, albeit very personal essays, that have hunger and illness as their central theme.

 

Writers Bloc

I understand that completely. I think I'll always remember the dismay that crept over me when I saw my first book filed under 'Misery Memoir' in an airport bookshop. I had no idea that was a genre, let alone one I had subscribed to.

 

Fiona Wright

‘Misery Memoir’, that’s awesome!

 

Writers Bloc

Let me reframe the question: At what point did the idea of this collection of essays, very personal essays with hunger and illness as their central theme, materialise? When did you realise that hunger and illness would be be the frame through which you would explore the disparate ideas in the collection? 

 

Fiona Wright

The first essay in the collection, ‘In Colombo’, I started writing in response to a themed edition of a journal, about 'travel writing in a post-colonial world’ or something like that. It provoked me into thinking about my experiences in Sri Lanka, which I had written about before, and how they’d been complicated by malnutrition. This was very soon after my first hospital day programme admission, the first time I’d really had to confront the idea of anorexia head on, so I was re-contemplating a terrible lot of things at the time.

I ended up performing the piece as part of a SWEATSHOP showcase at the Sydney Writers’ Festival that year, and I remember feeling defiant, as well as terrified, the whole time I was reading. I’d never written about my illness before, not once, even though I knew by then how deeply it had affected my very subjectivity. We’ve always talked a lot at SWEATSHOP about writing the stories that only you can tell, about writing as an act of self-determination, so I knew this was important. Ivor Indyk and Evelyn Juers both suggested after that reading that I should consider a book, and it all really came from there.

 

Writers Bloc

Why do you think you didn't write about your illness for so long even after you knew what an integral part of your subjectivity is was? It seems many writers seem to have some kind of deeply formative experience, often a trauma or illness, that they can spend years, a lifetime, not writing about. As working with words is often a kind of spiritual spelunking through which we work our shit out—I'm curious whether you'd considered writing about it before the SWEATSHOP showcase.

 

Fiona Wright

What I mean is, I hadn’t written about my illness before because I hadn’t been able to see it clearly before. It wasn’t until that first hospital admission that I’d ever considered that there might be a psychological element to my illness; it was also the first time I’d learnt about the physiological changes to the brain that acute malnutrition causes, and so I was thinking about my own cognition differently for the first time. Before that, I don’t think I’d really recognised the severity of the illness or its impact on my life, didn’t think of it as a trauma, as it were, so consider that it was worth writing about.

 

Writers Bloc

I'm fascinated that you are resistant to the idea of trying to affix a narrative to your experience. Isn't that an inescapable part of the practice of writing? Of human nature itself? Don't we all try to buttress our experience with some kind of narrative framework in which to make sense of the things we observe?

 

Fiona Wright

Absolutely. I think narrative is the most important tool we have to make sense of the world and of our lives, it’s how we order the chaos into experience, how we learn and how we understand our selves. But I think my experience of illness made me realise, more than anything else, how slippery and devious narrative can be, how arbitrary, sometimes, are the connections it makes between events.

For years, I thought my illness was simply physical, I couldn’t accept the idea that I might also have a mental illness, let alone one that I thought only afflicted the kind of woman that I really didn’t, and don’t, see myself as being – vain, silly, self-obsessed, somehow weak – so the narrative I told myself didn’t allow for the possibility at all. I know now that the biggest problem I had was misinformation about eating disorders and the kinds of people who suffer from them (they are, almost without exception, intelligent, thoughtful, exacting in their standards for themselves and overly concerned about the needs of others), but the depth of my own denial amazes me still. Getting better too seems to involve constant, minute shifts in perspective, and continual reframing of narratives, so what I’m resistant too, I think, is the fixedness of narrative, how it might pin something down which is morphing and changing all of the time.

I’m also very frustrated with the existing narratives around mental illness and recovery, that all seem to gloss over the very difficult and complicated processes of recovering in their hurry to get to the happily ever after kind of ending. It’s far too simplistic, of course, but it also does a huge disservice to those of us who can’t get better quickly, because the implication is that if your story isn’t that simple it’s because you aren’t doing it right, or don’t want to be better - and these are never assumptions that would be made about someone whose broken leg doesn’t heal neatly or whose asthma never quite goes away.

 

Writers Bloc

OH MAN! I probably shouldn't editorialise in an interview question, but don't get me started on the narratives around illness and recovery. It seems that for some reason—perhaps a confluence of reasons: publishing trends, monomyth narratology, publicity cycles, good-old fashioned optimism— that most stories about illness you read end on this uplifting, happy ever after, note which rarely rings true. Recovery is not a cut-dry ending, and if it was, it would be a bittersweet and ambiguous one. I know people like closure in their stories, and adults need fables as much as children, perhaps moreso, but to pretend that recovery is anything but a long, incremental process with few clearly defined victories or defeats seems dishonest at best, and dangerously reductive at worst. I guess my question is actually a compliment. Which is, well done on writing something as sophisticated and complex as dealing with illness. 

 

Fiona Wright

It was really important to me to resist solutions and endings, because that’s not what I’ve experienced at all. I’m still in this thing, still muddling my way through, and I know so many other people who are too, and the persistence of narratives that end so easily can make this a really difficult place in which to locate yourself.

 

Writers Bloc

You list intelligence, thoughtfulness, exacting standards and empathy as characteristics common to those with eating disorders. Aren't those exactly the attributes of a poet? In Small Acts, you mention Wallace Steven's idea that 'poetry is simply the expression of the mind, the violence within.' In another essay, you discuss the way writing is used to frame experience, and how the act of writing can bring clarity, in a similar way that hunger can. Is there a connection between the part of you that writes poetry and the part that craves hunger? Is poetry a means to catalogue, measure and metre the most nebulous parts of ourselves? 

 

Fiona Wright

I definitely think the two things come from the same place, they’re both about understanding the world, about finding or making patterns and meaning, about measuring a life. Which is to say, perhaps, that they’re both a kind of control. It’s just that one is the destructive expression, and one the creative, of the same impulse. But they aren’t dependent on each other, I’ve come to learn. I was worried for a while that I needed hunger in order to have poetry, but I know now that’s simply not true.

 

Writers Bloc

The idea  that creative expression is dependent on destruction is so pervasive in our culture, that to be a good artist, one has to be an above-average sufferer. It wasn't always so.  Susan Sontag has a joint where she points out that this a very modern creation derived from an essentially American puritan sensibility, where suffering puts the pilgrim in touch with their soul, and therefore a suffering soul is more attuned to the nature of reality, ergo a suffering artist is at the coal face and the more they suffer the better their art. 

This is a paradigm we retrospectively apply to great artists through history, not always quite truthfully. I mean, look at Flaubert, Flaubert had more fun than anyone should. In lifestyle he was essentially a syphilitic Third Republic Kardashian, but for some reason he's remembered as somewhat tortured by his hedonism when by all accounts, he was just fine with it. 

Perhaps writing about suffering is a reflex against it, not a creation inspired by it. Have you found that in writing this book, in reframing your suffering as essays, and again through the publicity after the collection's launch, that it helps to objectify what was once impossibly subjective? Many talk about writing as therapy, but perhaps it's closer to being a lepidopterist—pinning your demons down under glass so you can study them, and work out where the beauty is. 

That's a very overworked metaphor for a simple idea, sorry, but do you have an opinion on the subject? 

 

Fiona Wright

Susan Sontag’s book Illness as Metaphor was very important to me as I was writing the book, because of her argument that it’s diseases that we don’t understand the causality of - her examples are consumption, cancer and AIDS - are the ones to which we attach metaphoric meanings, such as ideas about worthy suffering, or artistic temperaments. I like this argument because it translates so well to my experience, and to the ways that I’ve tried to understand it as I muddled through.

I don’t like to use the word ‘suffering’, in part because it feels melodramatic, somehow, when so much of the day-to-day experience of illness is, or maybe just becomes, banal - you just do what you have to do to get through. But I also don’t want to undersell the effects that my illness had on my life, or that eating disorders have on the lives of others, because that does everyone a disservice.

Writing about my illness didn’t make it better, but I don’t think it made it beautiful either. It helped me understand it, but what’s important is that it let me finally feel like I had some agency within it.

 

Writers Bloc

On the subject of writers important to writing this book, I was struck by the essay 'In Group', where you talk about finding John Berryman's Recover/Delusions and the relationship between those two concepts, the push and pull of delusion in recovery, and the various binaries which always seem to be at play between various facets of the mind and body.

 

Fiona Wright

That’s a really interesting point. One of the doctors at the clinic that I wrote about in that essay would often talk about anorexia as being borne of the Cartesian mind/body split, in that it’s a kind of refusal of all things bodily, a denial of the body, and an attempt to live purely according to the mind. I do see his point, but also think that it’s too simple a metaphor, because so much of the disease is not rational, and resides in the animal part of the brain. But it is true that almost all mental illnesses have physical symptoms or effects, just as all physical illnesses also affect the mind. I’ve always been fascinated by how complex these relationships are.

 

Writers Bloc

That part where you discuss Berryman's 'double consciousness' as a writer was the first time I've read something that articulates that state of mind peculiar to writers; of spending half of life participating in the world and half analysing it. Over the years I've come to think of writers as some kind of aquatic organism, not pond scum exactly, but some kind of sensate insect that skims over the surface of life without ever really submerging oneself. At various times I've wondered if it is an affliction, rather than a talent.

 

Fiona Wright

I’m not sure that it’s either an affliction or a talent. It’s not an easy way of living your life, I know that much, and I do often think that I’d be a better, more functional human being without it - but then, I don’t know anything different, so it’s impossible to judge.

I think that it is tied to this endless search for meaning, for the symbolic and poetic as we move through our lives, and I think that everyone does this to some degree, it just seems that it’s sharper in writers, and other creative people too. So it’s too common to be a talent. I think it was Patrick White who talked about this kind of thing as a 'magpie-like tendency’, swooping down and picking things up as they catch your eye; and I like this image because there’s a cruelty to it as well that seems quite fitting.

 

Writers Bloc

I'm reminded of the part in one of the essays when a therapist once told you 'to get out of your head and into your body'.  Isn't writing this intellectual/visceral work about your mind and body run contrary to that advice? Isn't becoming a writer a kind of surrender to the cerebral?

 

Fiona Wright

Yes, it’s absolutely contrary to that advice. But it’s the brain-work of writing that I love so much, and I do think that at it’s best, writing can be a very sensual, bodily act, so I’ve decided the point is moot anyway!

 

Writers Bloc

I'm struck that you refer to hunger as a sensual act. I've read previous interviews with you where you describe both writing and hunger as highly ambitious acts—and it occurred to me that one doesn't often find hunger described as an act. A state of being, perhaps, or an affliction, or a surfeit of nourishment, but rarely as an act. I've read few writers as careful with their words as you, so I'm impelled to ask, what is hunger an act of? 

 

Fiona Wright

Haha, I want to be glib and say that it’s an act of disappearance and leave it at that, but you’re right, it is a lot more complex than that. It strikes me now that the word choice is odd, because it implies agency, and I have to keep reminding myself, even now, that eating disorders are not a deliberate act, even though it often looks that way from the outside. So that may well be an unconscious oversight on my part! That said, the impulse towards hunger, I think, is driven by a number of things that it may well be seen as an act of - self-sacrifice, a longing for some kind of meaning or transcendence, ritual, self-assertion, individuation, control. The important thing is that it’s never an act of vanity. It’s never really about the body at all.

 

Writers Bloc

At the top of this conversation you stressed that this is not a memoir, even if the essays were of a personal nature. The critical response to Small Acts has been deservedly rapturous, but I'm curious how your book has been received closer to home. At times you reference your relationship with family, with friends, with lovers in relation to your illness. Did writing such an honest and visceral discussion of your experience have any repercussions?

 

Fiona Wright

At this stage, I’m hesitantly saying no, which is a great relief. Which is not to say that it hasn’t been hard going, especially for my family. One thing I hadn’t realised, until my family started reading it, was that the four years I’d spent working with the material, writing and rewriting and turning it into an object, as it were, they hadn’t had; and they were instead essentially reading about horrible past experiences that they didn’t really want to relive. Writing gave me distance, that is, but my family didn’t have that, so I can only imagine how upsetting that must have been.

My mother in particular was very affected, and very worried for me, and didn’t think she’d be able to finish reading the book, but she did, and I think that’s incredibly brave. And my parents in particular have been incredibly supportive of the book, even attended all of the events, despite what it costs them emotionally. Aside from them, it was the people I call ‘sisters’ in the book, the other patients I’ve met along the way, who I was most worried about - but they’ve also been wonderful, and are mostly just pleased that the book is talking about things that we all felt were unspeakable for a while.

Personally, it has been strange meeting people for the first time who feel like they already know me, or who know a lot about my interior life, it always makes me feel a bit vulnerable, but that never lasts long. The most amusing repercussion, I think, is that I’ve been to a few readings and literary events lately, where someone has been circulating with the canapes, and swerved away as they've approached me and apologised for almost offering me the tray! So it’s become harder for me to get my share of the free cheese at launches, which is obviously tragic.


Fiona Wright is a doctoral candidate with the University of Western Sydney Writing and Society Research Centre. Her poetry collection Knuckled (2011) won the Dame Mary Gilmore Award for a first collection in 2011. Her latest book, Small Acts of Disapearance is out through Giramondo. 

BUY


This is a Writers Bloc Interview, part of a series of discussions with some of the most exciting writers from Australia and the world. To read more like this, click here. 

 

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