AustLit

'In Imperfect Lee Kofman dissects her life-long relationship to the scars on her body. She tells of the calamities that scarred her: a haphazardly administered heart operation in the Soviet Union when she was ten years old left her with ugly scars on her chest; a week later she was run over by a bus, leaving her leg stippled by scar tissue. She traces her relationship to her own scars and to a multitude of secondary texts; she interviews other people about their experiences, seeking to understand how what she terms our ‘Body Surface’ moulds our lives. Disentangling her flesh from metaphor in an effort to study her relationship with it, to redefine its paradigm beyond tired axioms of self-love. ‘Reality is messy, way messier than is possible to sum up in manifestos of pop-psychology advice,’ she writes.' (Introduction)

'My skin is white, or rather it is a soft, warm pink, which is the colour of the skin of the most dangerous and successful pillagers in recent times. I descend from them. I am them. Nothing is random. I am capable of killing another person but I would prefer not to. I would prefer not to survive an apocalypse.'  (Introduction)

'‘One of the many things I regret about writing And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) was that I didn’t set it in Australia. It could just as easily be set in Wangaratta rather than an imaginary part of the American South. I don’t know why I didn’t do that. I wish I had. For sure that book comes from growing up in the country, from living a life in country Australia. It’s not from listening to murder ballads. The river was the sacred place of my childhood and everything happened down there.' (Introduction)

'There’s an ache that comes from somewhere in my middle-lower back and which feels emotional at its root. Like whatever it is that keeps me standing and breathing and conscious is giving up. I live with depression, and I know the feeling of low mood descending, and this ache is not quite it. The ache isn’t only mine, either; it goes beyond my edges and is shared by people around me. It feels widespread, not just within my local community, but perhaps distributed generationally.'  (Introduction)

'‘The novella has a fundamental relation to secrecy’, write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. ‘Not with a secret matter or object to be discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable.’ A little later in A Thousand Plateaus, they clarify what they mean by linking ‘the form of the secret’ to a moment of perceptual disturbance: ‘You enter a room and perceive something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has not yet been done. Or you know what is in the process of happening is happening for the last time, it’s already over with.’ From this scenario, it’s easy to extrapolate that, for Deleuze and Guattari, the novella is principled on a particular experience of time, one that is marked by a feeling of belatedness – of finding ourselves in the position of having to ask, ‘What happened? Whatever could have happened?’' (Introduction)

'The cold is a living thing in this old house. It snakes under doorways, through glass thin with age, wraps itself around my legs, creeps into my toes, stiffens my fingers and hardens my nose.' (Introduction)