Can You Tolerate This? Personal Essays Ashleigh Young (VUP, $30) In love With These Times: My Life With Lfying Nun Records Roger Shepherd (HarperCollins, $37) New Zealand’s DIY rock music tradition inspires affection and more than a little heartbreak in these two recent publications. Ashleigh Young’s Can You Tolerate This? is a collection of “personal essays”, many of which started life as blog posts. Despite this, there is an artfulness in the selection, especially in the way the colours of many of the pieces bleed together to create a remarkable portrait of the author and her family. Whether from Te Kuiti or London, face-down on a chiropractor’s table or cosmic dancing at a Bikram yoga sweat lodge, Young’s dispatches work by indirection, telling stories where the obvious markers are often omitted. Hers is a family, like many others, where the emotions are left offstage (due to “a combination of exhaustion and limited vocabulary”), all of which somehow amplifies them. The reader is left with curious parallels to ponder. Problems with eyesight stalk the family, as does excessive facial hair (on the female side). Young’s father flies a small plane into storms while the kids whimper in the back seat. Not ...
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