Can You Tolerate This? - Personal essays

Author(s): Ashleigh Young

NZ Biography

An Elle Ultimate Summer Read' 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? In this spirited and singular collection of essays, Ashleigh Young attempts to find some measure of clarity amidst the uncertainty, exploring the uneasy tensions - between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation - that define our lives.


Product Information

Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-Fiction Winner of Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2017 - General Non Fiction. 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.

'This is a brave, sometimes confronting, always intriguing, often compelling and distinctly unusual book. The essays are consistently entertaining in a way that is rare in literary nonfiction of any kind. The voice is one which readers will fall in love with.' -Martin Edmond 'Some of Ashleigh Young's personal essays feel to me like beautifully told short stories - they just happen to be true, or true-ish.' -Bill Manhire

Ashleigh Young works as an editor in Wellington and teaches creative science writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her poetry and essays have been widely published in print and online journals, including Tell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction, Five Dials (UK) and The Griffith Review (Australia). Can You Tolerate This? is her second book; her first was the poetry collection Magnificent Moon (VUP, 2012). She gained an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2009, winning the Adam Prize. She blogs at eyelashroaming.com.

General Fields

  • : 9781776560769
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
  • : 0.285763
  • : August 2016
  • : 21.00 cmmm X 14.00 cmmm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Ashleigh Young
  • : Paperback
  • : 824.92
  • : good-very good
  • : 224