Can You Tolerate This?
by Ashleigh Young
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Pub Date 9 Aug 2018 | Archive Date 5 Apr 2019
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Description
'Beautiful, unusual and memorable ... I love
this book' MAGGIE NELSON, author of THE ARGONAUTS
In Can You Tolerate This? – the title comes from the question
chiropractors ask to test a patient’s pain threshold – Ashleigh Young ushers us
into her early years in the faraway yet familiar landscape of New Zealand:
fantasising about Paul McCartney, cheering on her older brother’s fledging
music career, and yearning for a larger and more creative life.
As Young’s perspective expands, a series of historical portraits – a boy with a
rare skeletal disease, a French postman who built a stone fortress by hand, a
generation of Japanese shut-ins – strike unexpected personal harmonies, as an
unselfconscious childhood gives way to painful shyness in adolescence. As we
watch Young fall in and out of love, undertake intense physical exercise that
masks something deeper, and gradually find herself through her writing, a
highly particular psyche comes into view: curious, tender and exacting in her
observations of herself and the world around her.
How to bear each moment of experience: the inconsequential as much as the
shattering?
Advance Praise
‘Young's writing explores fragility and resilience with a visceral, bodily focus’ – Vogue, 13 Books to Thrill, Entertain and Sustain You This Summer
‘Compelling, exhilarating ... The essays center around the body, our first, last, and always home in the world, and the ways in which its limitations force us to find accommodations, force us to come to terms with our own strengths and frailties, as well as those of the people – all those other frail, strong bodies – around us.’ - Nylon
‘From the first sentence of this collection onward, you know Ashleigh Young is here to deliver cool, compelling, surprising sentences, which add up to beautiful, unusual and memorable essays. I love this book’ - Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
’Ashleigh Young has the brilliant knack of cutting to the chase while you're not looking, like some kind of reverse pickpocket slipping notes into your bag before dashing away into the crowd. I'll be savouring this book for many years to come, and slipping it into the pockets of unsuspecting friends.’ - Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13
‘In prose witty and tender, Ashleigh Young sings the body problematic, as well as the questions of how to live in it: both with others and in solitude. This book made me feel less alone.’ Melissa Broder, author of So Sad Today and The Pisces
‘Reading Ashleigh Young’s essays is like meeting an old and much-loved friend at the end of the world after you've been wandering in the wilderness for days, a friend who's so wise and funny and kind and makes you feel so much better about everything that you start thinking, gosh ... I guess ... I guess the apocalypse is actually kind of okay ... - Emily Berry, author of Dear Boy and Stranger, Baby
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781526600356 |
| PRICE | £14.99 (GBP) |
Featured Reviews
Bridget S, Librarian
It is a long time since I read a book of essays, reading this made me realise that I have been missing out and that I should do far more reading of shorter forms of writing. Ashleigh Young writes the most beautiful sentences, they are deceptively simple. She draws you in and had me reading story after story, although they aren't really stories they are musings and wonderings and reflections. She examines her family and her past. Musings on her childhood anxieties and siblings are so personal and thoughtful that I became very invested in her life, I think because there was a lot of familiarity there. I recognised places but also the feelings she has as life in her household is described.
My favourite though was her musing on yoga. Her descriptions of the feelings of examining the feelings of the stretches and the introspection that yoga brings. Bikram yoga is extreme, I think. The idea of choosing to exercise in unbelievable heat is something I just couldn't contemplate yet to have Ashleigh Young describe it and almost meditate upon it, makes it close to appealing.
I've been trying to describe this book to friends and I have difficulty putting my finger on what exactly it is about it that I loved so much. I think it is connection. I was right in there with her throughout all the situations she describes. I was cheering her on in times of insecurity as she worried about her hairy arms and while her family was being terrified flying over my hometown in a storm. I adored the story of her mum learning to glide with it's really terrible ending.
This is a treasure of a book. Ashleigh Young I'll read all your books in the future.
Thanks to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishers for giving me access to this book.
