Desire: A Reckoning by Jessie Cole
A person could be forgiven for assuming a memoir with the title ‘Desire’ would be a no-holds-barred peek behind bedroom doors, especially when the back-cover blurb asks thequestion, ‘What does it mean to be awakened? To want? To love?’ While that’s true to a certain extent, the ‘desire’ of Jessie Cole’s memoir title is much more nuanced than that.
Cole has experienced one trauma after another since she was 12 years of age, and as a result, her body often reacts in involuntary ways whenever intimacy is on the cards. Her body commando-rolls away from a looming kiss. Her tongue swells up at the thought of an upcoming date. She gets conjunctivitis, migraines, body tremors, hives, ‘strange compulsive behaviours like twirling my clothes into balls and rubbing my belly’. In addition, her safe place has always been the forest she lives in, but that sense of safetyhas come under attack by Australia’s increasingly vicious cycle of floods and bushfires (the image of a metal shipping container floating down the river and becoming wedged on top of her favourite rock, unable to be shifted, is one of many that eloquently convey the heavy sense of dread Cole experiences in the world). But despite her body’s defence mechanisms, Cole is determined to connect on a deep, sensual level with an older man she finds compellingly attractive.
In the end, this memoir is less about Cole’s desire for a single man, and more about her desire to be able to wrest back control of her body. Her desire for the world to start caring more about our climate crisis and do something about it. Her desire for her internal and external landscapes to align in a more compassionate way. This is a love story about one woman’s efforts to escape the clutches of trauma on her own terms.
