Small Acts of Disappearance
by Fiona Wright
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Small Acts of Disappearance?describes the author’s affliction with an eating disorder which begins in university, 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 motives and actions.The essays offer show more 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 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, the observation of detail and the humour which is so compelling in Wright’s poetry. show lessTags
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A beautiful series of essays dealing broadly with the authors anorexia. Wright is an exquisite writer and refuses to take easy narrative paths or fall back on sentimentality. It's a short, powerful and lyrical book that deserves to be widely read.
It would be a rare person these days, from Western cultures anyhow, who didn’t have some brush with an eating disorder, whether through a friend, a family member, or personal experience. And yet it is one of our most misunderstood afflictions, which is where Fiona Wright’s Small acts of disappearance: Essays on hunger comes in. Wright, born in 1983, is a published poet. However, in her mid twenties, in her first hospital day program for her seriously low weight, she had to admit to herself that she was, indeed, one of “those women”, one of those women, that is, whom she’d always thought were “vain and selfish, shallow and somehow stupid”.
For my fill review, please see my blog: show more target="_top">https://whisperinggums.com/2016/03/17/fiona-wright-small-acts-of-disappearance-r... show less
For my fill review, please see my blog: show more target="_top">https://whisperinggums.com/2016/03/17/fiona-wright-small-acts-of-disappearance-r... show less
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Top Five Books of 2016
795 works; 229 members
Author Information
4+ Works 74 Members
Fiona Wright is an Australian writer, critic and poet, born in 1983. She published her first collection of poetry, Knuckled, in 2011. She is one of the winners of the 2016 Kibble and Dobbie Literary Awards for her second book, Small of Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger. That same book also won the 2016 Queensland Literary Award in the show more nonfiction category. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Genres
- Nonfiction, Biography & Memoir, General Nonfiction, Sports and Leisure
- DDC/MDS
- 362.25092 — Society, government, & culture Social problems and social services Social Welfare Mental illness
- LCC
- RC552 .A5 .W754 — Medicine Internal medicine Internal medicine Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry Psychiatry Psychopathology Neuroses
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- 38
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- 761,396
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.27)
- Languages
- English
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- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 1
