Artwork by Yifei Wu
Katherine Brabon is the award-winning author of The Memory Artist (Allen&Unwin, 2016) and The Shut Ins (Allen&Unwin, 2021). She has a history degree from Oxford University (University College), as well as a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from Monash University. Her writing has been supported by Art Omi New York and the UNESCO Cities of Literature International Residency. She lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Body Friend (Bloomsbury, 2023) is her third novel and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize 2024.
I was more interested in finding voice for an interior experience - capturing something of the mental experience of being in a body in pain and recovery - rather than recounting something that had happened to me.
Body Friend is a novel about the experience of chronic illness and pain. It is also a novel about self-understanding, self-overcoming, and self-identity. With delicate and tender prose, Kate takes us on a moving journey exploring all these themes and their various interconnections. In the following interview, she answers some specific questions about the book.
This is your third novel. Is it fair to say that this one is much more autobiographical than the first two? Would you call it a form of auto-fiction?
Body Friend is certainly more recognisably drawing from parts of my own life: a woman from Melbourne, who has a chronic illness. My first two novels (The Memory Artist and The Shut Ins) are stories set in other countries, exploring cultures and histories not my own, and so questions about the books have often centred around why I would want to write about those topics. The experience with this book has, of course, been so different because of those recognisable connections to my own demographic or appearance. But I think there is ‘too much’ fiction for it to be categorised as autofiction, which I understand aims to be very, very close to representing an actually lived occurrence. I was more interested in finding voice for an interior experience - capturing something of the mental experience of being in a body in pain and recovery - rather than recounting something that had happened to me. Of course, the experience of pain and illness have ‘happened’ to me, but I think pain resides somewhere in what we see as ‘unsayable’ or ‘inexpressible’, and so it needs something more than pure narration in order to represent it.
A word that keeps coming to me is transformation - I think of the transformation of experience through the text. A quote I probably repeat too often but still find so instructive is from Ocean Vuong, who has said, of his novel that’s often read as a memoir, “I wanted to start with truth and end with art.”
I also think of Elena Ferrante discussing the difference between authenticity and verisimilitude and her pursuit of the former: the literary skill that interests her is ‘not as virtuosity in the reproduction of what is right before our eyes but as the capacity to adopt expressive means suitable for giving form to what is intimately ours and is difficult to say even to ourselves.’
The novel is also highly philosophical, with one of its central themes being pain—the meaning of pain and suffering, the nature of illness, the nature of recovery. Is there a particular thesis here that you wanted to convey?
As a reader, I definitely enjoy a reflective, philosophical novel, so perhaps I am really writing for myself! This style also reflects my interest in perhaps less novelistic novels. Sometimes a novel can be criticised (or praised) for having parts that read like an essay, digressions in which a narrator is thinking through a question. When done well, as with a writer like Rachel Cusk, this can be absolutely thrilling and just as propulsive as any heavily plotted work.
With Body Friend I wasn’t pursuing any particular thesis or hypothesis, but this kind of philosophical inquiry seems inherent in the narrator’s way of dealing with her experience. At times, she wants to find ‘meaning’ in the experience of illness and pain - which is a view I wanted to both explore and problematise; does it need to have meaning? Probably not, but this is what we pursue as humans.
On interesting theme that emerges in connection with pain is taking ownership of it. There’s this interesting passage referencing a discussion between the protagonist and a friend of hers from graduate school, which goes as follows: When I was first unwell, I’d rarely take a single pill...Surely there was something, some truth to be learned, that would be lost in the absolute numbing he sought...(p. 27)
(i) What is it that you think pain can teach us?
This question of ‘renunciation’ really interests me. The relationship with, or disavowal of, painkillers seemed to mean a lot to me when I was younger and to some extent it still does.
In the novel, the character of Frida has a very fixed mindset around how to deal with her chronic illness: she swims regularly, quite obsessively, tries to control her illness through physical activity, and the idea of control, in general, is very important to her. Sylvia, on the other hand, advocates for rest, for reflection, for taking painkillers as a way to get some relief. I didn’t want to represent either woman as taking the ‘right’ approach, but to show the complexity of this experience and how it can be hard to know what is the best way to be when you’re unwell and in pain.
In this sense, I wasn’t looking for any lessons from pain. I think the narrator eschewing painkillers relates to your other question about philosophical inquiry in novels: she thinks her pain means something and that it is something she needs to confront and control, rather than mask. She doesn’t see that painkillers might just be one form of control. Sylvia, on the other hand, ‘lets’ herself have them, without guilt, and the narrator vacillates between the two women and the two approaches.
(ii) Is the novel itself a way for you to take ownership of pain?
It hasn’t felt that way to me, but it has been a nice experience to hear from readers who felt understood and validated through this work. If anything, writing about experiences close to you can bring about a sort of examination and subsequent unsettlement of identity - writing things down seems to fix certain elements and make your identity seem associated with certain experiences or themes, which can either reassure or both.
The pool itself plays a key role in the novel – almost functioning as an additional character. Can you tell us a bit about the role that it plays, and how it helps to convey the protagonist’s relationship with pain, illness, and recuperation?
It does feel like a strong presence in the book for me, perhaps because of how it preoccupies the narrator and figures so deeply in how she sees herself and her illness. On the days that she swims, she feels more in control of her body, she feels ‘good’ in a moral sense, her illness feels like something she can confront through action. On the days she doesn’t feel well enough to swim, she feels that the illness has the upper hand, that she has lost control. The pool, and water, become things she loves and fears.
A word that keeps coming to me is transformation - I think of the transformation of experience through the text.
It is interesting, too, that you say ‘good in a moral sense’. I guess this connects with the thought, which the novel does such a good job of bringing into focus, that there are often feelings of guilt associated with being ill, and with recuperating. What do you make of this strange feeling of guilt? Where does it come from, and what exactly is the convalescent feeling guilty about?
I’m glad you brought up ‘this strange feeling of guilt’, as it relates to so many aspects of illness, not only the internal or mental experience of it, but to broader realities of healthcare and inequality. In part, the guilt the narrator experiences is tied to her sense of the expectations she perceives of what the ‘able-bodied’ should do: work, socialise, be active. I was conscious of this in writing a character with a chronic illness, and in naming the very real structural supports that enable her period of recovery: she is a doctoral student, she’s entitled to paid sick leave, but there is an expectation that she’ll ‘get better’ and return to her work and studies after her period of recovery. Chronic illness, of course, complicates this linear narrative of illness progressing to recovery, which then muddies the experience of convalescence.
But the idea of rest, distinct from recovery or convalescence, is also important here. Sylvia encourages the narrator to rest, and to me, this was the counterpoint to the other character, Frida, who encourages movement, exercise, etc, as a way to help control the symptoms of her disease. Rest is often associated with luxury and indulgence, with new terms like ‘self-care’ becoming a refrain in the online world. In the book, from Sylvia’s perspective, I wanted rest to just be the simple necessity that it is: she doesn’t feel guilty about it, she doesn’t question her rest as a right and need— which I think is in contrast to a lot of people with chronic illness, who worry they’ll be perceived as lazy or unproductive. From the narrator’s perspective it’s much more fraught, as she has internalised those societal expectations of a body, including a more complete and linear narrative of illness, as well as Frida’s quite strict approach to dealing with her disease.
This is where the novel and the double character can allow for these complexities to play out across the narrator’s internal narrative. She initially speaks of rest and control in terms of ‘devotion’ — almost a belief system the doubles subscribe to, and they compete for the narrator’s full devotion. In some ways, this adherence to or disobedience towards belief is a ‘plot point’ of this otherwise quite lightly plotted novel.
The novel puts me in mind of the theme of ‘the double’, which of course is a recurring theme in literature. But often, you find ‘the double’ as a sort of sinister figure – Dostoevsky’s The Double is a classic example. In your novel, though, the protagonist has two doubles, and they are not sinister. They are rather pathways to self-understanding and enlightenment. I have in mind this passage: “Maybe we don’t know a person all that well, but in the mirror of them we know ourselves. I’d begun to think I should like to find them all, these other ones, my doubled and tripled and multiplied versions, my internal mirrors” (p. 79).
Can you elaborate on this? Do you think there’s a deeper self-knowledge that we can only attain via these others? Are there parts of ourselves that would be inaccessible, unless we were to encounter them in a suitable ‘double’? How does this connect with the idea of pain and illness as educational?
That’s very true that often ‘the double’ in literature is one of binary ways of being - good or bad, light or dark. And this fascinates us, of course: that idea of our underside, our potentialities not yet accessed or unleashed.
In Body Friend, I was interested in the double figure not in those ways but as you say: a potential pathway to self-understanding and, if not more so, a way to explore fragmentation and fluidity in identity. These elements have struck me about the experience of chronic illness and pain. We all feel a bit like ‘a different person’ sometimes - even that phrase interests me. Different from what? Is there some fixed aspect of our identity that if we depart from, we feel unmoored and unrecognisable to ourselves?
ALEX MORAN is a research fellow in philosophy at the Université de Fribourg and a research associate at Stockholm University. He is also currently a visiting scholar at Princeton University. He is the co-editor of Is Consciousness Everywhere?: Essays on Panpsychism (2022) and of Objects and Properties: New Essays in Metaphysics (forthcoming, OUP), and the author of In Praise of Mischief (forthcoming, Reaktion Press).
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