Can You Tolerate This?
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019
WINNER OF A WINDHAM-CAMPBELL PRIZE 2017
'I love this book' MAGGIE NELSON
'An essay collection unlike any I’ve read' New York Times
In Can You Tolerate This? Ashleigh Young ushers us into her early years, coming of age in a small town in the faraway yet familiar New Zealand, 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.
Ashleigh Young is the author of the award-winning essay collection Can You Tolerate This?, as well as a critically acclaimed book of poetry, Magnificent Moon. The recipient of a 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction and an Ockham New Zealand Book Award, among other honours, Ashleigh Young is an editor at Victoria University Press, and teaches creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
www.eyelashroaming.com
@Ashleigh_Young