AustLit

'‘A thing from the outside was inside her,’ writes Sarah Walker, conjuring one of her earliest memories. The thing in question is an enormous piece of bark, protruding from her kindergarten teacher’s outstretched hand, ‘under the elegant slip of her skin’. The image is carefully chosen, foreshadowing this essay collection’s interest in the intersections between our bodies and the world, and the breaching of these thresholds. Throughout The First Time I Thought I Was Dying the outside world gets in and insides are turned out. Walker’s lesson from that playground accident is that ‘constant vigilance is required’. Just a handful of paragraphs later, she tells us the revised lesson her adult self is trying to learn: ‘be not afraid’. This movement from fearfulness and control towards trust and acceptance is one that reverberates through the collection.' (Introduction)

'Researchers have shown that the less you know about something the more you think you know. There is even an apparatus for measuring this correlation between ignorance and confidence: the Dunning–Kruger graph.' (Introduction)

'In The First Time I Thought I Was Dying, the photographer–artist Sarah Walker brings into focus ideas about anxiety, control, bodily functions, and the uses of breached boundaries. The essays of this book are personal, and readers of confessional non-fiction will delight in their tone: equal parts jocose and sincere.' (Introduction)