Body friend: a novel
Description
A potent novel about chronic illness and the circular nature of recovery-shortlisted for the major Australian literary award The Stella Prize.In the wake of a major operation, a twenty-eight-year-old woman with chronic illness has twelve weeks to heal, or rather, to acclimate to her new body and prepare herself to leave the routines, comforts, and interiority of her convalescence. In the hydrotherapy pool, she meets Frida, a young woman who looks strikingly similar to her and is also in a state of recovery. But Frida sees her chronic illness as something to overcome and her body as something to control. She adores the pool and pushes the narrator and herself toward an active life, relentlessly pursuing the prevailing narrative of illness followed by recovery.But the narrator also happens upon Sylvia, another young, convalescing woman, resting on a bench in a nearby park, which the narrator frequents on the days she is too ill to swim. Sylvia understands her body and the narrator's in a different way, gently encouraging her to rest, to perceive illness as something happening to her, but which does not define her.Throughout the narrator's recovery, these women shadow, overlap, mirror, and complicate one another, and what begins as two seemingly undemanding friendships is challenged by what each woman asks of the narrator, of themselves, and of their bodies.
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Publisher's Weekly Review
A woman convalescing from an operation considers her relationship to her body, in Australian writer Brabon's meditative U.S. debut. The unnamed narrator, a 20-something graduate student with an unspecified autoimmune disease, has a hip replacement to help her mobility. During hydrotherapy for her recovery, she meets Frida, a woman who is coping with a similar diagnosis, and sees herself in her new friend ("It was sufficient to be a body in pain and to know that about one another"). She begins meeting daily with Frida to swim, pleased with how the water makes movement easier. During a flare-up of her condition, however, she skips swimming and goes to the park. There, she meets Sylvia, another person with chronic pain. In contrast to Frida, Sylvia seems sullen and discourages movement in favor of silent rest. Over the next weeks, the narrator moves between these two extremes, torn between Frida's rejection of limits and her "soul-level alignment" with Sylvia. The novel's emotional core is heated by lyrical musings on the body and its relationship to language and narrative ("Often we deny the body its story. We don't believe it or we ignore it, because the body does not use words"). This is an illuminating reflection on what it means to live with pain. Agent: Mary Krienke, Sterling Lord Literistic. (July)
Publishers Weekly Reviews
A woman convalescing from an operation considers her relationship to her body, in Australian writer Brabon's meditative U.S. debut. The unnamed narrator, a 20-something graduate student with an unspecified autoimmune disease, has a hip replacement to help her mobility. During hydrotherapy for her recovery, she meets Frida, a woman who is coping with a similar diagnosis, and sees herself in her new friend ("It was sufficient to be a body in pain and to know that about one another"). She begins meeting daily with Frida to swim, pleased with how the water makes movement easier. During a flare-up of her condition, however, she skips swimming and goes to the park. There, she meets Sylvia, another person with chronic pain. In contrast to Frida, Sylvia seems sullen and discourages movement in favor of silent rest. Over the next weeks, the narrator moves between these two extremes, torn between Frida's rejection of limits and her "soul-level alignment" with Sylvia. The novel's emotional core is heated by lyrical musings on the body and its relationship to language and narrative ("Often we deny the body its story. We don't believe it or we ignore it, because the body does not use words"). This is an illuminating reflection on what it means to live with pain. Agent: Mary Krienke, Sterling Lord Literistic. (July)
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