AustLit

'Drawing on personal experience and pop culture, Show Me Where It Hurts explores the isolation and frustration of living with chronic pain and mental illness, not to mention battling a medical system steeped in misogyny. “Pain – both physical and mental – is more than a number or shaded area on a chart,” writes Kylie Maslen. Her carefully researched essays demand the reader to see her as a whole person, one whose life is both similar to and different from theirs. She dates, enjoys swimming in the ocean, and has spent countless hours in waiting rooms, in hospital and resting at home.' (Introduction)

'Virginia Woolf wrote that when trying to communicate about pain as a sick woman ‘language at once runs dry’. How does one talk about wounds without fetishising their workings, and how in a society where pain is taboo does one speak of it authentically? In Show Me Where it Hurts, writer and journalist Kylie Maslen balances the difficulty of this equation: telling the story of her disability and having that story remain fundamentally unspeakable. The act of telling remains for Maslen ‘a rejection of language’, and yet the thing on the table for those suffering is ‘the desire to make ourselves known’.' (Introduction)

'Statistically, half of your friends live with some kind of chronic condition, so when we look to art and pop-culture, why aren’t anomalous bodies depicted in their everydayness? Why aren’t there more common sense discussions about the ableist society in which we live? Show Me Where It Hurts: Living with Invisible Illness is a tactile reaction to these questions.' (Introduction)

'One of the supreme, and indeed painful, ironies of pain is that it is so very hard to communicate, yet it always demands to be given voice. Not only as involuntary cry or anguished moan, but in visceral metaphor, as ‘knife’ or ‘burning’, or in memoir or narrative accounts that seek to ‘flesh out’ this terribly isolating state of being. These attempts at giving language to pain seem to invariably fall short. We may listen to, or read, accounts of pain and feel pained ourselves, but this feeling is mostly the sorrow of realising the other person and their suffering is unreachable, and that the pain cannot be taken away.' (Introduction)