Body Friend

Reviews

A compelling and deeply insightful reckoning with illness, intimacy, estrangement and control, Body Friend is a novel of rare grace . . . Her sentences are a tonic, offering the clarity and exquisite pleasure of swimming in calm, cool water. At once a feverish investigation of the body's limits and a hypnotic account of city walks, swimming, and friendship. I loved the intimacy of these pages. Never before have I read a book with such a compelling investigation of illness and pain, recovery and rest. Brabon writes with unwavering insight and intelligence; Body Friend inspires me to better understand my own friendships, my own life in a body. I tore through it. I will be thinking about this book for a long, long time. Body Friend is a deeply intimate tribute to the fragile and porous self, written in prose of rare clarity and tenderness. I felt everything reading this book. Beautiful, razor sharp and infused with an intelligence that cuts to the bone. Utterly absorbing, entirely one-of-a-kind . . . Body Friend is an acutely observed exploration of chronic pain, revealing an uncommon richness and resonance behind experiences that so often feel dull and deadening. Beyond that, it’s an insightful and fresh meditation on the dualities we all negotiate between mind and body, control and submission, devotion and guilt, hope and despair . . . Insistent, rhythmic, immersive . . . Reading it feels like a plunge into cool water, both bracing and relieving, as intimately familiar as it’s surprising. The gift of this book will stay with me for a long time. Katherine Brabon distinguished herself with her first novels . . . but she has surpassed these and reached an early career pinnacle . . . Body Friend is a sculptured, sensory reflection on pain . . . The plot unfolds artfully and with precision to surprise and exceed readers’ expectations. Recommended for discerning readers of nuanced fiction. Body Friend is a kind of ghost story by stealth, an account of devotion, obsession and chronic pain that reveals a netherworld inside this one. It is told with such delicacy, with such a tender and insistent voice, that it becomes—uncannily, thrillingly—luminous. Brabon writes some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read, and this book is both muted and raw, like pain itself. A love letter to a body, to relationship and connection, and to water, Brabon explores what we need and how we need it with astonishing wisdom and candour. Body Friend is a remarkable and unflinching work that highlights, quietly and profoundly, the tedium and horror of living with chronic pain, but that also shows the lengths we go to understand ourselves, and to survive. Brabon’s writing is important, and brave. This is a novel of experiential heft and eloquence, which gives shape to the complexities of chronic pain. An unforgettable study in intimacy. Expect to be wowed. [An] elegant literary tale . . . Body Friend’s pitch-perfect conclusion offers intimacy, knowledge, and, perhaps, a precious glimmer of understanding. The novel’s emotional core is heated by lyrical musings on the body and its relationship to language and narrative . . . This is an illuminating reflection on what it means to live with pain. I’ve never read anything like Katherine Brabon’s Body Friend. This book is a gift, an examination of a life in pain that isn’t at all painful to read. Brabon's fearless and clear-eyed exploration strips some power from pain and illuminates parts of the human experience that have yet to be written about—the virtue demanded from patients by the world and by ourselves, as well as the complexities of friendship. Katherine Brabon’s Body Friend is a tender ode to the recursive mysteries of the body and the need to find ourselves in other people. The narrator’s pull between Frida and Sylvia, between effort and surrender, haunted and compelled me. This book speaks to you with a delicate, iron grace, endlessly returning. Expand reviews