Sometimes you want your reading to feel like drinking a glass of clear cold water, and sometimes you want something more intense and complex (like a good fruit smoothie). This book is intense and complex, in a good way. A really enjoyable and thought provoking collection.
A collection of essays from 2003 to 2019 by a Canadian photographer, filmmaker and writer, including autofiction, journal extracts, day book entries and observations upon the need to produce work, as an artist. The collection includes essays that read as if they accompanied exhibitions of her photographs (Fifty Minutes, Les Goddesses and Hemlock Forest), but stand separate from the exhibitions, as discussions of the issues in creating the exhibitions, which can be very literary. The essays can be very critically self reflective and repetitive, but build something greater from these parts.

Near the end is an essay, The Problem of Reading, which discusses the dilemma of “what to read?”. I really enjoy essays about reading and this was no disappointment, and although not saying anything new, rounding up the usual suspects of Woolf, Calvino and Bloom, it was interesting in providing context for Davey’s approach to art.

Authors repeatedly quoted and invoked include:
• Freud
• Walter Benjamin
• Susan Sontag
• Roland Barthes
• Janet Malcolm
• Robert Walser
• Jean Genet
• Virginia Woolf
Although I only know of these authors’ names and may have read only a few paragraphs of their work, this lack of familiarity didn’t detract from the book for me.

There are some photographs, which sometimes appear to relate to the text, but these are small, so that they seemed to be there to symbolise photographs. ( )

So, so good. Davey is writing at once about art, sex, womanhood, politics, memory and despair, weaving it all together seamlessly and without affectation. Her honesty is consistently piercing, often in a way that is both intellectual and emotional.

I really don't think it's an overstatement to say this book has changed me – it's definitely changed the way I approach art-making, compelling me to reconsider, among other things, the relation between the personal and the artwork. Her methods (note-taking, threading together different thinkers, etc.) have also made their mark on my own research and spewing of thoughts onto paper. Perhaps most importantly, this book has reminded me of the importance of risk and honesty, and has made me determined to pursue these ever elusive qualities.