by Fiona Wright
THE WORLD WAS WHOLE
FIONA WRIGHT
The World Was Whole
FIRST PUBLISHED 2018
FROM THE WRITING AND SOCIETY RESEARCH CENTRE
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© FIONA WRIGHT 2018
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9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR ASHLEIGH, ZOEY AND MIA
ALSO BY FIONA WRIGHT
NON - FICTION
SMALL ACTS OF DISAPPEARANCE
POETRY
KNUCKLED
DOMESTIC INTERIOR
CONTENTS
To Run Away from Home
The Everyday Injuries
Back to Cronulla
What It Means for Spring to Come
Relaxed, Even Resigned
Perhaps This One Will Be My Last Share House
Slipstone, Clingstone
The World Was Whole, Always
A Regular Choreography
When Hearts Are Thin
A Gravity Problem
Little Heart
Much as That Dog Goes
Notes on Sources
Acknowledgements
TO RUN AWAY FROM HOME
For years when I talked about the place where I grew up, when I talked about that first home that’s supposed to be the most important of them all, I would talk about a deepest, darkest suburbia, about a one-road-out inaccessibility, a ninety-minute, two-trains-and-a-bus commute into the city, as if these things were important, as if these things were unusual, or aberrant, in a city like Sydney, so sprawling and unruly. When I talked about Menai, the place where I grew up, the story I would tell was one of flight, of leaving as soon as I was able (although in truth, I moved out only at the age of twenty-four), of finding my tribe, as if that’s a process that’s ever neat or complete. My parents built their house in 1980; it was the first on their street, which was named, like all of the streets around it, after a cricketer. I like to imagine them, ridiculously young, my father thickly moustached, my mother’s head haloed in frizzy curls, standing in the dirt outside the back door, grinning and holding shovels. They look excited, and in love, both with each other and with their new, own corner of the world. My parents still live in that house, although it’s bigger now, and our childhood bedrooms have become the study, the sewing room, the grandkids’ room, respectively. When I stay there overnight, I always sleep deeply, darkly, long, it is so quiet and so unlit. And then I drive away.
It used to bother me, deeply, darkly and for far too long, that I didn’t feel I fit there. I never did, but it was worst at the height of my illness, when my visits were fuelled by awkwardness and anxiety, so much so that I was barely present, even though I was physically there. I’d drink too much and talk too fast and eat too little, always caught up in the demands and constant calculations of my disease. I didn’t know what was happening. I blamed myself: it was me, after all, who didn’t fit.
But what I came to realise, slowly, was that the place didn’t fit me. This sounds like platitude, perhaps, but it was an important realisation: that our places and our built environments are precisely that – they are built, they are designed and planned, there’s nothing natural or inevitable about them. There’s nothing inevitable about our homes, about our cities, about the ways we move in and through them. We just forget to see this because we see our places everyday; and when we grow up within them, they shape our baseline expectations of the way things are, will always be.
I was still ‘living at home’ – that strange phrase that really means living in my parents’ house – when I first became ill, with a rare and complicated stomach condition, that saw me throwing up, without volition, almost every time I ate, that altered, abruptly and completely, my ordinary world, that eventually developed into the disordered eating and anorexia that I’ve spent years, since, trying to understand and overcome, through writing as well as through medical treatment. Illness is a state we do not think of as everyday, but it affects those of us it impresses itself upon every single day. Those baseline expectations I had to reset, and it’s hard, sometimes, not to long or grieve for my younger, healthy self, whose world was unruptured, who was still able to forget.
It was easy to forget, because I saw them every day, that the suburbs were invented. That even though the vast majority of this country’s population lives within the limits of cities like Sydney, these cities are new compared to the stolen land that they stand on, and their suburbs even newer. It is easy to forget, especially with our culture of historical amnesia, that the creation of these suburbs, at the turn of the last century, was a political act, and one designed to remedy the various ills that were believed to exist in crowded, inner-city terrace slums – poverty, illness, crime, fomenting socialism. With their gardens, their provision of light, space and air, the suburbs were intended to improve the lifestyle, and the moral and political character, of their inhabitants. Suburban homeowners, it was thought, were unlikely to radicalise, to want to tear down a nation in which they were quite literally invested. But the foreseen improvements were also physical, almost eugenic – the first chairman of the Australian Housing Board stated that children brought up in suburban conditions would ‘grow up taller, stronger, deeper in the chest’. A better human being with a better body was very much a part of the original suburban imaginary of a bigger space, cleaner air, private lawns. That this body was white went without saying.
That the body and the home are linked is nothing new, of course; it’s quite probably an inevitable consequence of the categorical distinction we still make between the body and the mind, where the physicality of the body, unthinking, untameable, animal, is important primarily because it is the thing that carries, or houses, our rational, remarkable minds – it is the home, that is, for who we are. And yet, as Gaston Bachelard argues in The Poetics of Space, the places that we move through often, that we inhabit, also become inscribed upon the body as habits of movement: that instinctual grasping of a door handle in the dark, the collapse into a favourite chair where we know it will catch us, and at what height. And in return our bodies shape our homes, leaving their traces in shed hairs and skin cells, indents in mattresses, scratched floorboards and the stains left by spilled drinks.
The feeling I have when I visit my first home – that originary suburb with its wide roads that pass my primary school, the playground where I scarred my knee, the shopping centre where I got my ears pierced – is never quite one of congruence, although it still feels like it should be and I still wish that it would be. Because if we carry our homes within our bodies, as Bachelard suggests, just as we house our bodies in our homes, I don’t know what this
means for those of us whose bodies are contested. Whose bodies feel unnatural, uncomfortable. For those of us who cannot be at home, as it were, within our flesh.
A few years ago I was recruited – I’m not sure why – to take part in a market-research focus group for a homewares company, held after hours in the over-designed Surry Hills offices of an agency tasked with re-working their brand. They’d chosen only women; three groups of about a dozen each, most of whom owned their own homes. They told us we were ‘making the future’ and showed us a ‘brand story’ called ‘aspirational living’. The women in my group professed to love shopping for figurines, vases, cushions, candles, lamps, knick-knacks, throws, rugs, prints and kitchenware; they said that homewares give a house ‘a sense of character’ and make it ‘your place’, that they ‘like pretty things’ and ‘rooms with warmth’, and it wasn’t hard to see that they were also talking about themselves, or, at least, their visions of themselves as they’d like to be seen. They stuck the words ‘welcoming’ and ‘belonging’ to an oversized post-it note on the wall, and one woman, with long hair and sinewy brown arms, added ‘not clinical, not sterile’. And I was thrown immediately back into my body, which I was still, so many years since I first sought treatment, dragging along to clinics twice a week, which still only menstruated sporadically, which still had so little cushioning or soft furnishing, as it were, which, by this reckoning, could not be a home.
The agency laid out pizzas for our dinner and I sat at the long table, unable to bring myself to eat; one woman questioned me about my diet, and called me disciplined and good. I don’t want to be either of those things; I never did.
It was women’s bodies, unsurprisingly, that were most immediately implicated in the ideals of suburbia, perhaps because it was women who were made responsible for the suburban home and its management: women who, in the new suburbs, now lived the entirety of their lives outside of the city, and inside these new spaces. They were responsible for what came to be known, in the 1920s, as ‘home economics’, the efficient and careful management of the home and the bodies within it – and cooking, feeding and eating were the activities in which this efficiency could most frequently be practised and displayed. A poorly managed body was symptomatic of a poorly managed home; overweight was inefficient because wasteful, underweight because more likely to be sickly or weak. A woman’s body was required to be as tasteful and ordered as her furnishings and garden, as much a part of the aesthetic upkeep of the house as well-laundered curtains and matching upholstery.
A paint pamphlet from the early 1950s advised ‘that bedrooms be painted in colours that match each woman’s complexion, providing a suitably flattering background for an intimate area of the house’; it provided swatches and suggestions for brunettes, blondes, redheads, or ‘those with blue-grey hair’.
A 1950 issue of House Beautiful asked, ‘What is your house saying about you? Does it form a suitable background for you, your manners, your ambitions and values? Does it show that you are sure of yourself as a person of character or importance, or does it show that you are worried because you’re not someone else?’ The body of the anorectic speaks so often of this very anxiety, of insecurity; of fear of failure or rejection or not being good enough. It is a body that wants, if not to be somebody else, then to not be itself any more. It is a body that wants to run away from home.
What I remember most about the year when I first became ill was an overwhelming sense that my own body had betrayed me, betrayed my will. My body was refusing to cooperate every time I tried to eat, every time I tried to do something that I’d previously taken for granted, that I’d only ever thought of – if I’d thought of it at all – as natural and neutral, something that simply was, would always be. I was nineteen, and still living in Menai. For months, my doctors couldn’t find a reason to explain the vomiting; I saw round after round of specialists and watched them shrug their expensive-shirted shoulders and refer me on to someone else; for months, even medicine was being defeated by my body.
But what I remember most painfully about that year was that as my body shrank and sharpened, I recognised it less; as it began to ache and murmur, it moved beyond my reckoning. My body felt strange and hideously uncomfortable, but also strangely fascinating – and somewhere, later on, once my eating had become pathologically restrictive, I relished this. My body was different, very often an affront, and I had to adapt myself to accommodate its demands. Whatever my body had become, I no longer knew it. It was no longer safe, no longer forgettable, no longer my home.
John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century art critic, once wrote that ‘we require two things from our houses, that they give us shelter, and that they speak to us about ourselves’. We ask the same two things, I think, of our bodies when we dress them, decorate them, try to manipulate their size and shape. Whatever my body had become, I realise now, it was speaking for me, and it was saying, I am different and I am awful, and I am not like you.
One of my school friends recently bought her first home in Gymea Bay, a tucked-away suburb on the Port Hacking River, fifteen minutes drive from the place that we both grew up in, and accessed from the highway through a series of twisting roads that follow the curve of the water and drop away to untouched bushland on one side. A short walk from my friend’s house, the main street of Gymea Bay curls past a primary school and a petrol station, past a cluster of shops – a newsagent, a chemist, a butcher, a café – to a small park with a woodchip-strewn playground. Some mornings, I visit my friend and her small son, so we can walk up to the café and then run riot on the park’s old climbing set, the plastic of the slippery dip melted in places into thick scars by bored teenagers with cigarette lighters. The café walls are painted butter yellow, and the staff – who are all family – are almost exclusively and gloriously golden-haired.
One morning, we were joined at the café by one of my friend’s neighbours, with her toddler in tow. This woman had also ‘bought in Gymea Bay’, to use her phrase, in the last year. She talked about people buying ‘knock-downs’ in neighbouring streets, houses which had been built by the first generation of suburbanites, but were now creaky, old-fashioned, and run-down enough to be unsalvageable; about recent auctions, about the houses that were currently being renovated on her street. She talked about how she was planning to make her house larger and more light-filled, to change the layout of the bathroom, the front façade. As we walked home, past houses where builders were still active, the piles of bricks and concrete pavers on the front lawns, we paused in front of a beautiful red-brick house that was up for sale, trying to guess what the interior might look like, how much money it could conceivably reach at auction.
But what my friend’s neighbour was talking about, when she spoke about her house and the changes she was dreaming up, was not quite aesthetics and not quite commerce; rather it was comfort, a sense of homeliness (each time I visit my family home, I walk barefoot on the carpet that’s thick and creamy as Greek yoghurt), of making something tangibly her own. What this home might say about its occupants would be that they are comfortable and comforted – not anxious, not unsettled; that they belong.
Renovation, in the last twenty years, has become as much a trope of suburbia as lawnmowers, Hills hoists and Sunday car-washing were for the generations that preceded mine: it’s no longer just about keeping house, but remaking it, physically marking our dominion over our domain. For sociologist Fiona Allon, renovation is always about desire, about chasing a different kind of suburban dream. Renovation is transformation, ‘the formula behind many fairy tales’, whereby an old fibro ugly duckling can be changed into a modern and well-feathered swan. We can redesign our houses to tweak what they might say about us, add and subtract – according to our will – from their forms. But as well as this physical desire, Allon points out a desire that is linguistic: the language of real estate, of looking at and buying houses, is not much different from the language of the body, of beauty and of sex. Recent listings of houses in Gymea Bay include
d phrases like ‘unrivalled charm’, ‘a stunner’, ‘stylish and elegant’, and my particular favourite, ‘just what you’ve been waiting for’. In either case, we want, and we aspire.
More insidious, I think, is the similarity between the languages of houses and of bodies: renovations are ‘makeovers,’ or more gruesomely, ‘gutting the place’; houses in poor repair but with solid structures are said to ‘have good bones’. One of those Gymea Bay properties was even written up as ‘generously proportioned’, as if the bosom in which it could hold a family might overspill a C-cup. It makes sense that this is a language designed to appeal to the emotions – because home is nothing if not an emotional idea, and investing in a house is an investment of the emotions too – but it’s a strange, and strangely prevalent, personification, as if finding a home were like adopting a new member of the family. It sits uncomfortably too within the cycles of change, of seemingly endless transformation that’s so obvious in places like Gymea Bay and in the rapidly gentrifying inner suburbs where I now live, not to mention the increasing unaffordability that is locking so many people out of this ideal entirely.
Transformation, desire and fantasy are also at the heart of the way we talk about changing our bodies, about dieting and fitness, renovating our physical appearances. Changing the body is supposed to change the very self it carries, at least according to the rhetoric of the diet industry: a video testimonial from one diet company website says, ‘it helped me become the person I was inside, that I never let out before. I’ve transformed myself from being someone who I totally don’t recognise now, to an amazing, confident, happy person.’ A changed, pared-back body will present the person who we really are out to the world; will allow the body to speak to us of our authentic self, alchemised, made over. Another testimonial states, ‘I now know the person that stares back at me in the mirror. And I like her!’