Shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize
Katherine Brabon – Body Friend
Fiction · Ultimo Press
About the Book
Late in the summer five years ago, when I was recovering from a surgical procedure, I met two women within a few weeks of each other and I saw both of them regularly, always separately, for some months afterwards. Summer did not give way easily that year, and even so we must force our bodies down to sleep in the heat, and even if experience does not give itself up easily to representation, I will lay it down anyway; frame the raw and exigent weeks, the untrustworthy months after the hospital, render it and them, Frida and Sylvia, as closely as possible to reality—or whatever is the feeling of a life and mind lived inside a body.
A woman leaves the hospital after an operation and starts swimming in a pool in Melbourne’s inner suburbs. There she meets Frida, who is uncannily like her in her experience of illness. Soon after, she meets another woman in a local park, Sylvia, who sees her pain and encourages her to rest.
The two new friends seem to be polar opposites: Frida adores the pool and the natural world, Sylvia clings to the protection of interior worlds. What begins as two seemingly simple friendships is challenged by what each woman asks of her, of themselves, and their bodies.
“This is a novel of experiential heft and eloquence, which gives shape to the complexities of chronic pain.”
– 2024 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Katherine Brabon
Katherine Brabon is the author of the critically acclaimed works The Memory Artist, The Shut Ins and Body Friend. She has been listed for multiple literary awards and her short form work has appeared in Vogue, Australian Book Review, The Australian Financial Review, The Saturday Paper, Island, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald. She lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.
Further Reading
Reviews
“The novel moves with a syrupy slowness, capturing a nostalgia for the freedom of illness during childhood, the sick days and care, the ability to be free from responsibilities.” Bec Kavanagh, The Guardian
“Body Friend is beautifully intertextual. Drawing on Sylvia Plath’s poetry, Susan Sontag’s prose, Francesca Woodman’s photography and Peter Paul Rubens’ art.” Elli Fisher, ArtsHUB
Body Friend is a sensitive narrative about grappling with a sick body and the difficulty of balancing movement and rest.” Elena Perse, Meanjin
Judges’ Report
In her 1930 essay “On Being Ill”, Virginia Woolf lamented the deep inexpressibility of pain. “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear,” she wrote, “has no words for the shiver and the headache.” Katherine Brabon’s Body Friend is an assured rejoinder. A gentle novel of ungentle things.
The narrator of Body Friend lives with/in/through chronic pain. She exists in that hushed and lonely realm that so many of us know – alienated and erased by a culture that treats bodies (and brains) as machinery to be “fixed”. Two new friendships offer her comfort: the first is with Frida, who swims laps alongside her at the pool; the second is with Sylvia, who offers tea and placid conversation. Frida pushes the narrator to her limits. Sylvia honours those limits. The narrator is torn between these women and their duelling philosophies of care. Can the two friendships co-exist? Is it possible to feel whole in a world that is determined to see you as broken?
There’s no grand crisis in Body Friend, no red urgency – it is serene and meditative, rich and honeyed. This is a novel of experiential heft and eloquence, which gives shape to the complexities of chronic pain by giving it human form. It is also a tale of friendship – the deep solace of mutual recognition.
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