Australian novelist Jessie Cole’s first memoir, Staying, recounted an adolescence “bookended” by the suicides of her half-sister and father, and the aftermath of those appalling losses. In many ways, Desire: A Reckoning picks up where that left off. It charts Cole’s long-distance courtship with an ambivalent older man, as the “fortress” of her childhood rainforest home in the northern rivers of New South Wales is besieged by floods and fires, and her sense of safety is shaken once again. Themes ripple and recur from her earlier writing: a love of nature, a breathless hunt for – and terror of – intimacy, and an intensely vulnerable self, unsure of how much to say.
“Omission of truth has always felt like lying,” Cole writes. So she excavates the “stubborn areas of privacy” that cocoon how and what she wants, championing the value in being heard, however messy the result. This book was written “in close to real time”, she notes, “without the benefit of hindsight … a terrifying, highwire way to write”. There’s no obvious quest for larger lessons, or to tell anyone else’s stories too far beyond the ways they constellate around the author. It’s a book that pours itself on to the page: the warm, impulsive imprint of a brain in the throes of longing.
Cole’s focus is physical to start with: how she is “skin hungry”; the subtle barometric shifts that occur when we clock someone’s attention, mutual or otherwise – and the shifts in power that go with it. But as she details the hurdles her “recalcitrant body” throws up in response to sexual anticipation or stress, the book becomes less about desire between two people, and increasingly about Cole’s more private need for connection and care – and the parts of her that hurt when someone is unwilling, or unable, to meet it. (“It was in romance that all my woundedness surfaced,” she wrote in Staying.)
Her discombobulating encounters with “the man I desired” are told in a sequence of intimate, confiding vignettes. (He is never named, which adds, intentionally or not, to the sense he is there to be projected on to.) There’s a similar sensual hauntedness, an emotional nakedness, to that in Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, another book that grapples with sex less as a path to another person – or, say, pleasure – than to self-acceptance or fulfilment. Historically, this sort of yearning has been explored – and reduced – along lines that are horribly gendered (think of Flaubert, brilliant and cruel on Madame Bovary, “gasping for love like a carp for water on a kitchen table”). Cole may stake a sort of reclamation by telling it first-person – she’s far from the only writer to assume the hyper-personal confessional is the most authentic way to plumb lust, or pride, or grief. But it makes for anxious reading.
Cole writes with brutal honesty about the links we are prone to make between sex and self-worth, in all their disfunction. She is punishingly self-aware of her tendency to read “asymmetry of desire” as a sign someone is worthwhile, and of the temptation to ignore what else a one-sided interaction could mean. “His lack of interest in me wasn’t as relevant to me as my own feelings,” she writes. “The feelings so monstrous and consuming you’d prioritise them over all else, even the person at the centre of the feelings.” The book is a painful reveal of the lengths to which we all might go to avoid the clarity we’d prefer not to get. Knowing she might be less in love with the older man than with the idea of being loved doesn’t make being “faced with the dimming of [his] interest” hurt less.
Armchair psychologising is boggy ground, but it’s where Cole explicitly invites her reader to go – into her attachment styles, trust issues and “complicated grief, with all its somatic trappings”. There’s a lot of what the writer Steven Phillips-Horst recently coined “Tedcore” (see: The Body Keeps the Score, Esther Perel, all those attachment theory books): that “vaguely highbrow” genre of self-help creeping into the way we understand and discuss our emotional lives – and homogenise them, generalising over the nuances of deeply specific situations. As Cole turns to these frameworks to probe, with tender curiosity, her own emotional bruises, she unwittingly highlights their limits. No theory can make another person fully knowable; look too hard at these formulas for answers and you wind up pathologising yourself.
One legacy of trauma, Cole suggests, is a paralysing sort of vigilance – not only about external actors and factors, but also the murky depths of our own responses. “I was drowning in fear about how hard I would take this,” she writes of one particularly difficult moment; after the deaths in her family, she realises, all romance comes with “a feeling of impending doom”. As the climate crisis hits with increasing violence, the uncertainty of her emotional landscape spreads to her “homeplace”, where the “soft landing” of the forest will never be the same. While she may laughingly acknowledge the disconnect between these global and personal scales of distress, they are for her inextricably linked: “The promise of forever, of safety, has vanished.”
It’s not possible to be impermeable, in love, in the world. Cole is not trying to be; she wants to be part of the world, not transcend it. Her writing is propelled by the sheer joy of self-expression.
Desire: A reckoning by Jessie Cole is out now in Australia ($34.99, Text).
