First Book Club: Jessica Friedmann reads from Things That Helped

Jessica Friedmann’s Things That Helped (Scribe) is the KYD First Book Club pick for May. In her collection, Jessica navigates post-partum depression following the birth of her son, touching on many other facets of her life along the way. Here she reads from the first chapter.

For our interview with Jessica Friedmann, listen to the latest Kill Your Darlings Podcast. You can stream the episode above, or subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, or through your favourite podcasting app.

Things That Helped is available now at Readings.

Editor’s note: This piece contains discussion of suicidal ideation. If you or someone you know needs support, please contact Lifeline (13 11 14) or Beyond Blue (1300 22 4636).

TRANSCRIPT

Meaghan Dew (KYD): Hi, I’m Meaghan Dew, and I’m afraid I can’t welcome you to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast, because I’ve already done that this month. What you are welcome to, though, is this reading from Jessica Friedmann. Her debut essay collection, Things That Helped, is the KYD Book Club pick for May.

Jessica Friedmann: In the beginning there was the river, wending its way around the top of the suburb, then snaking out protectively towards the south. The water was deep and cold and full of silt, and in the months after I had my baby I would often dream of going down to drown myself in it.

At dusk the river’s parklands were beginning to empty out, the cyclists and joggers wary of the cold and the settling night. Old men who squatted on their heels reeled their fishing lines in, carrying their lures home in scrubbed-out paint buckets. Soon it would be dark; soon a cloistering silence would descend on the leaves and grass, broken only by the rustle of the wind and the steady drone of the highway, as persistent as seawater or the beat of a heart.

I thought of the water as I listened out for the baby’s breath, in and out, lightly broken, sometimes, by a hiccup or a snore. We had made the walk to the river’s banks a hundred times over the summer, Mike sometimes breaking off for a run while I saw how many native grasses I could name. Now, in the deep of winter, it ran through my thoughts nightly, bringing a cool little rush with it, a rush of relief. We kept the heating on at home, trying to fend off the drizzle and damp, and ran it through the night for the baby’s sake’, though in truth he seemed alright – a hot little furnace running hotter in his sleep.

Through the tide of hormones surging within my body, and the little runnels of blood, and the sour tang of my breasts, I lay awake, listening, and thinking of breath and of water. I had broken my relationship with sleep; it was no longer safe. If I did drift off, the baby’s shrills of noise let down my milk and sent a hot flush of sweat through my body before my brain had a chance to catch up, and I would wake sticky and panicked, and sure that something was wrong. The sickening Wrench of waking was awful, so I lay in bed playing possum; it was better to be passive, to let the baby suckle me without protest and then settle him down to fall asl