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A review by liralen
Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright
5.0
This quiet book of linked essays packs a punch. I forced myself to take my time with Small Acts of Disappearance—I do have a tendency to race through books rather than savour them, and I could tell early on that this was one I was going to be sorry to finish.
Wright's work is meditative but manages to avoid the sort of navel-gazing that leaves the reader eyeballing pieces of lint. She deftly sidesteps the pitfalls so common to eating-disorder memoirs, focusing not on the chronological facts but on the questions behind them. But even then Wright goes a step further, pinpointing the first when—when she developed a digestive problem and started to involuntarily throw up many of her meals, and subsequently cut back her intake—and investigating that, but then, in later essays, walking it back even further. What about before then?
There aren't easy answers here—just an acknowledgement that such answers are hard to come by, and Wright's still working to figure it out. Altogether a win of a book.
Wright's work is meditative but manages to avoid the sort of navel-gazing that leaves the reader eyeballing pieces of lint. She deftly sidesteps the pitfalls so common to eating-disorder memoirs, focusing not on the chronological facts but on the questions behind them. But even then Wright goes a step further, pinpointing the first when—when she developed a digestive problem and started to involuntarily throw up many of her meals, and subsequently cut back her intake—and investigating that, but then, in later essays, walking it back even further. What about before then?
There aren't easy answers here—just an acknowledgement that such answers are hard to come by, and Wright's still working to figure it out. Altogether a win of a book.