Fiona Wright probes hunger in Small Acts of Disappearance

Award-winning poet Fiona Wright brings her gift for lyricism and an ear for rhythm to these remarkable essays.

Small Acts of Disappearance

These days, narratives about food are invariably linked to excess, be they novels that celebrate pomegranate soup or chocolate, reality television shows featuring amateur chefs, cookbooks flaunting recipes for 10-course degustations, or films such as Ratatouille,Julie & Julia and The Trip.

Add to this trend the paddock-to-plate movement, the multitude of lifestyle eating regimes and the rise of cult ingredients such as activated almonds, organic quinoa and coconut oil, and it’s not hard to conclude that the Western world’s default religion has become unthinking gluttony.

This is one of the reasons why it is so refreshing to read Small Acts of Disappearance, a collection of 10 essays that discuss, from various positions, the author’s ambivalent relationship with food and nourishment — beginning with a seemingly harmless diet in her teens and progressing, over the years, to severe intolerances and allergies, ongoing nausea, a diagnosed eating disorder and eventually anorexia and its accompanying mental illnesses.

Fiona Wright, a doctoral candidate at Western Sydney University, is an acclaimed poet, winning the 2012 Mary Gilmore Prize for her first collection, Knuckled. It’s evident in this first work of prose that her background has served her well. Wright has a gift for compression, lyricism, and a poet’s ear for rhythm, all of which animate even the most heartbreaking passages:

One woman hadn’t had a bath in seven years, and always showered in the dark. Another would spend eight hundred dollars every week for groceries, and seven hours vomiting each night, the blood vessels beneath her eyes bursting with the pressure. One had permanent callouses above the knuckles of her right hand, where they crashed against the backsides of her teeth ... One would eat undercooked chicken once a month in the hope that she’d get salmonella.

Small Acts of Disappearance, however, is neither a misery memoir nor yet another example of “sick lit”, but 10 compelling and thoughtful meditations on absences, both literal and figurative, that haunt the author’s life. The most obvious absence, of course, is food, but Wright also writes compellingly about the absence of self-awareness (in the form of an anorectic’s denial); the loss of emotion and desire during the depths of self-starvation; the grief she experiences at the death of a close friend; the double-consciousness of the writer in social situations, always an outsider looking in, a silent observer rather than an engaged participant.

While all the essays are grounded in autobiography, Wright employs her eating disorder as narrative occasion to explore larger connections and comparisons, from studies of 18th-century miniatures to the Sri Lankan civil war, to the Minnesota Project (an experiment in forced starvation), to the German labour camps during World War II: “ ... it was discovered that hungry inmates are less likely to have the energy to rebel”.

The objective, clinical explanations of what happens to the anorectic nervous system are both chilling and shocking: the brain, for example, begins to change radically when it is starved, shutting down so much that the patient no longer experiences a cognitive reward for eating anything at all. On the other hand, Wright also describes, with wistful nostalgia, the alertness and near-ecstasy that can be a side-effect of malnutrition: “The world glistens in this state of apprehension.”

In the second half of the book, she widens the discussion further, re-reading texts of Australian literature that feature anorectic female protagonists — long before a name, let alone treatment, had been found for the illness: Christina Stead’s Teresa, from For Love Alone, who starves herself constantly, and who walks for miles a day to avoid paying bus fares so she can save for a passage to London; Carmel Bird’s Virginia, from The Bluebird Cafe, whose lack of interest in food underscores her desire to remain in the body of a teenage girl; Tim Winton’s Rose Pickles from Cloudstreet, a rebellious 16-year-old who revels in her wanness: “Rose doesn’t own her time, her space, her body; but her hunger is her own, and preciously so.”

Wright also finds solace and understanding in contemporary poetry, including that of Dorothy Porter and Emily Ballou.

In one of the most accomplished essays, In Increments, Wright admits that language, like food, can often fail her, particularly when it comes to cliched metaphors of recovery that are repeated in rehab: “It’s like breaking up with an abusive partner ... Paddling a canoe against the current ... A CD jammed on a track”. The endless platitudes are about as welcome and helpful as the force-fed hospital gruel.

Fortunately, these essays are placed in non-chronological order, resisting the linearity of a conventional memoir, and thus avoiding ­conclusions, epiphanies and last-page redemptions. In fact, the book asks more questions than it answers, as if the author is still pushing competing ideas around in her head as she continues to play with the food on her plate.

Small Acts of Disappearance is a fine essayistic debut. It left this reader hungry for more of Wright’s spare and elegant prose.

Mandy Sayer is a novelist, memoirist and short story writer.

Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays
on Hunger

By Fiona Wright

Giramondo, 193pp, $25