Gulp, Swallow: Essays on Change
About this eBook
What happens when who you are is different to who you imagined you'd be?
When her son was three, Brooke Boland was diagnosed with depression. She went back to find where it all started – the panic attacks, the dissociation – in the early days of motherhood. When she found it difficult to read or write.
In this wide-ranging collection of essays Boland moves on from the person she was and writes to understand who she is now. She swims with sharks, falls in love with a rabbit, and watches her father fight for his life. She is a newcomer in a small regional town and a mother, but what else? She writes about family and friends, life and mortality, memory and forgetting, and along the way she finds her voice again.
This book is for anyone who has felt unmoored. It is about the unremarkable in-between, the way we try to build a home from nothing, the dirty dishes and the loads of washing. The uncertainty and the love. But written in sparkling prose with a sly and wry tone that is illuminating about the everyday as it pitches for a rich and fulfilled life.
About the author
Brooke Boland lives and works on Yuin Country in regional NSW. She is a freelance writer interested in embodiment and identity and has a PhD in Contemporary Women's Writing from the University of NSW. Previously, she worked as a casual academic, teaching undergraduates at UNSW and Victoria University. She now works part time as an arts journalist, writing profiles and reviews for various publications. Her essays have been published by Meanjin, , and the Sydney Review of Books. Gulp, Swallow is Brooke's first book.
