The follow-up to Fiona Wright’s essay
collection Small Acts of Disappearance
– winner of the Nita B. Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for Non-fiction,
shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the NSW Premier’s Award for Non-fiction.
Our bodies and homes are
our shelters, each one intimately a part of the other. But what about those who
feel anxious, uncomfortable, unsettled within these havens? In The World Was
Whole, Fiona Wright examines how we inhabit and remember the familiar spaces
of our homes and suburbs, as we move through them and away from them into the
wider world, devoting ourselves to the routines and rituals that make up our
lives. These affectingly personal essays consider how all-consuming the
engagement with the ordinary can be, and how even small encounters and
interactions can illuminate our lives.
Many of the essays are set
in the inner and south-western suburbs of a major Australian city in the midst
of rapid change. Others travel to the volcanic coastline of Iceland, the
mega-city of Shanghai, the rugged Surf Coast of southern Victoria. The essays
are poetic and observant, and often funny, animated by curiosity and candour.
Beneath them all lies the experience of chronic illness and its treatment, and
the consideration of how this can reshape and reorder our assumptions about the
world and our place within it.
Praise for Small Acts of Disappearance:
‘Wright has a gift for compression, lyricism, and a
poet’s ear for rhythm, all of which animate even the most heartbreaking
passages.’ – The Australian
‘Each essay works as a kind
of poetic auto-ethnography, moving between inexplicable realities of the self
and those of the world-at-large; between life’s surfaces and interiors.’ – Sydney Morning Herald
