Body Friend unfolds across the days following an operation, during which the novel’s unnamed protagonist meets two women also in recovery, Frida and Sylvia. Their presence is a relief to the protagonist, who sees her own chronic pain reflected in them and feels an immediate intimacy with each, a feeling that gives her an “inexplicable certainty” that she knows their experience and vice versa. In her third novel, Vogel prize-winner Katherine Brabon uses the inversions of these women to draw out specific, contradictory aspects of her protagonist and to explore the complex realities of a body in pain.
Despite the deep and instant connection the protagonist feels with each woman, Frida and Sylvia are polar opposites. Frida finds strength in exercise and encourages the protagonist to join her on daily swims, both pushing themselves towards the goal of recovery. Frida’s presence in her life is energising and compulsive – “her words were golden to me; I never spoke to myself like this.” She tries to keep up with Frida’s obsessive commitment to swimming and physical therapy, convinced that their bodies must continue to reflect each other. But on a day when the protagonist is exhausted by this determination and cannot push through the pain of her body, she meets Sylvia, who encourages her to rest, to go slow. With Sylvia, the protagonist eases into her pain, allowing her body the time it needs to rest – until she becomes frustrated with the pace and once again seeks out the pool and Frida.
These two women seem unable to exist simultaneously and are limited to the space of their encounters – the protagonist never swaps numbers with them and never introduces them to her boyfriend, Tomasz. She only tells each woman about the other towards the end of the book, and feels guilty then, as if she’s revealed something forbidden or unfaithful.
Like Frida and Sylvia, the book takes place mostly in liminal spaces that reflect the state of convalescence – the pool, the balcony, the park and the sea baths – all slightly offset from the spaces the protagonist inhabits in her “normal” life. In this space between illness and recovery, the novel moves with a syrupy slowness, capturing a nostalgia for the freedom of illness during childhood, the sick days and care, the ability to be free from responsibilities. Brabon refers to this at one point as our “subterranean longing” to slow down; the urge to call in sick for a day, a month, forever, and ease back into being cared for.
Body Friend echoes other recent books acknowledging invisible or hidden pain, the economic and social pressures on people with chronic illness, and the gendered realities of care. There has been an exponential growth in personal testimonies, from writers such as Kylie Maslen and Molly McCully Brown. But there’s a vitality missing in Brabon’s deeply interior, fictional reflection of illness. Body Friend is clearly a personal work, as Brabon alludes to in the book’s acknowledgments, but the events of the novel feel frustratingly distant.
It’s not the pace of the book, which is slow but deliberately so; a kind of ficto-critical decision to have the book’s form reflect its content. As far as the pace goes, the Frida in me is frustrated at the lack of drive and energy, but the Sylvia in me is more content to let the experiment of the work unfold as it does and to relish in the book’s obvious cleverness, the poetry of Brabon’s observations.
But there is an anecdote one of the protagonist’s friends tells when she agrees to meet them for a rare drink. In it, the friend shares the story of a time she created a fake online profile so that she could “view her real profile from the position of a stranger”, and suggests to the protagonist that she too might need a fake persona who can reflect herself to herself. The protagonist is unconvinced that this will help her to know herself better, arguing that this project would only allow her to know her projected self. This anecdote speaks to the book’s project and is why it makes it so challenging to read: if Sylvia and Frida are projections of the protagonist then all three remain frustratingly unknowable. Body Friend should feel deeply personal, but instead it seems almost hidden behind its own cleverness.
There’s a lot to think about after reading Body Friend – the significance of small intimacies and the realities of chronic pain, but also our own expectations of a novel that refuses our thirst for plot and is instead content within its own liminal space to go at its own pace.
• Body Friend by Katherine Brabon is published by Ultimo Press in Australia, $34.99
