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.
