Body Friend is my third novel, and it was a very different book for me to write. My first two novels were inspired and informed by research, travel, and inquiries into other time periods and places. With Body Friend, my material was much closer to home. It draws on my lived experience of chronic illness and pain to create a work that is fiction, but the closest to my lived reality than any of my other work.  

In this sense, the book showed me how literature can be seeded in things we think we don’t want to write about, or that other people don’t want to read – the repetition of chronic pain, the limits of language, simply a body moving through a room and a city. I recall saying to a friend, when I was first writing fiction, that I did not want to write a book about illness and my own experience, for reasons still obscure to me. Perhaps I did not believe my experience to be “enough”, perhaps it was confronting, or I was too close to the worst periods of my illness to approach them with any notion of the aesthetic or literary. I think I had also internalised narratives about the body which suggested that my illness, arthritis, was something abnormal, even embarrassing, for a young woman to have. 

The book showed me how literature can be seeded in things we think we don’t want to write about, or that other people don’t want to read – the repetition of chronic pain, the limits of language, simply a body moving through a room and a city.