For Love and Hunger

The year that I first became ill was also the first year that I studied Australian Literature. Actually, I was studying a lot of literature, as a kind of salve to the media subjects that I had enrolled in, thinking at the time that I might like to be a journalist. One of my literature subjects was a course on nineteenth century German prose, riddled with novels about hysterical women, sanatoria and destructive unconsciouses. My Australian Literature lecturers talked about the shock of recognition; the German lecturers were more concerned with accusative declension and pluperfect tense...