The History of My Body

The passing of seasons, days, hours, years, via my growth, perplexed me. Staring at my parents’ formal living room, the couches looked different to how I had previously remembered them. My home was forever misleading. This was not my furniture, my room, my kitchen; I had simply been dropped in here, without notice, by an indiscriminate stork.

The History of My Body is a meditation on childhood, adolescence and young adulthood by an emerging Australian female writer. This is a history of the merciless, well-worn path of encounters and accomplices: of family and friends, of education and confusion, of solids, liquids and gas. History traditionally pertains to fact, but the story of the body of Larissa Bird descries no such truth. In fostering a sense of objective revelation, Larissa disintegrates the formula for life granted to her from birth. The twisted deeds of her father, the ignorance of her mother, the depraved rationale of her early school education, their history remains as it was in their original encounter—a bewildering muddle of wild assimilation and the impossibility of rejection. Larissa makes no claim to know anything, and her story will probably be as elusive for you as it is for her. Your only escape from the History of her Body will be in her encounters with the fantastic secrets of Knowledge.

She admits no regret for stumbles into pretense, confusion and disarray. What is a history, but a series of forgotten events, illogical conclusions and muddled incentives? This book should be filed under fictitious memoir.