Can You Tolerate This?

Smart, funny, insightful and unexpected ... perfect summer reading * Jon McGregor, Guardian Summer Reading *
These are thoughtful, searching pieces, both open to the world and temperamentally uneasy. They handle their subjects with generosity and a restlessness that seeps in like floodwater * New Yorker *
This prize-winning collection of essays goes deep into exploring isolation, shyness and the limitations of the body ... all through [Young's] singular observations of the world, and of the tensions that define our lives * Elle 'Ultimate Summer Reads' *
Young's writing explores fragility and resilience with a visceral, bodily focus * Vogue '13 Books to Thrill, Entertain and Sustain You This Summer' *
Extremely charming ... She can be funny, self-effacing and romantic, but most impressive are her extraordinary powers of observation, as if God hotwired a microscope and a movie camera into her brain. With the most elegant, evocative prose, she invites us to move in with her and her family, and seems so wise about so many things I could hardly believe she was real. A wonderful book, an irresistible woman * Big Issue *
Wry, confessional, understated and often hilarious. Each piece lifts you up and deposits you in a place you never expected to find yourself. They startle with their immediacy and candour; they offer comfort even as they ask you to see things anew. Young is a sharp observer who revels in her sense of the absurd using precise language and striking images ... Young, like the best essayists, writes with humorous self-regard about her own lived small moments, which reveal as much about us as they do about her. The intimacy of her stories creates a connection, making even a foreign place feel like home * Washington Post *
Young’s voice is soothing, unsure and searching as she narrates her childhood in provincial New Zealand and pokes into the lives of those who populated it – her father, her brother, her chiropractor. Can You Tolerate This? asks its titular question at every turn, and the answer always seems to be yes * Paris Review *
Young shows how many ways we will bend but not break. And, moreover, that the ways we find to write about these transformative states of being might help us to make some sense of them; might develop a language that links images and experiences we have no other way of holding together … Young’s essays are insightful and exquisitely sensitive … that unfold carefully in language that is measured and nuanced * Emily LaBarge, The White Review *
In a book landscape of spectacle-driven nonfiction narratives, I am finding respite in Ashleigh Young’s perceptive and smart debut, Can You Tolerate This? It’s a collection of essays no less ambitious, sobering, or wide-ranging than the avalanche of social justice texts, but written with the tenderness and precision of a dentist who doesn’t use anesthesia * LitHub *
Compelling, exhilarating ... The essays center around the body, our first, last, and always home in the world, and the ways in which its limitations force us to find accommodations, force us to come to terms with our own strengths and frailties, as well as those of the people – all those other frail, strong bodies – around us. * Nylon *
From the first sentence of this collection onward, you know Ashleigh Young is here to deliver cool, compelling, surprising sentences, which add up to beautiful, unusual and memorable essays. I love this book * Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts *
Ashleigh Young has the brilliant knack of cutting to the chase while you're not looking, like some kind of reverse pickpocket slipping notes into your bag before dashing away into the crowd. I'll be savouring this book for many years to come, and slipping it into the pockets of unsuspecting friends * Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13 *
In prose witty and tender, Ashleigh Young sings the body problematic, as well as the questions of how to live in it: both with others and in solitude. This book made me feel less alone * Melissa Broder, author of So Sad Today and The Pisces *
Reading Ashleigh Young’s essays is like meeting an old and much-loved friend at the end of the world after you've been wandering in the wilderness for days, a friend who's so wise and funny and kind and makes you feel so much better about everything that you start thinking, gosh ... I guess ... I guess the apocalypse is actually kind of okay ... * Emily Berry, author of Dear Boy and Stranger, Baby *
Tender, witty, and endowed with a penetrating emotional acuity, Ashleigh Young's evocative essays gaze out into the world, searching it for moments of connection and clues to the true nature of our curious, fragile humanity. This is a book to hold close and fall in love with * Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine *
Yes! This is what I've wanted essays to be – character studies, maps, shrines, elegies, these forms that are mysterious, synaptic creatures. At the center of each of Ashleigh Young's tender studies of isolation and place there is a heart, how it pulses * Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines and Green Girl *
Calling to mind both Joan Didion and Anton Chekov, Young is relentless in her examination of herself and endlessly curious and compassionate in her consideration of the world. Can You Tolerate This? offers a glimpse into this extraordinarily promising writer’s quest to seek in the small accidents of her individual life the outlines of a much larger reality * Windham-Campbell Judges’ Panel *
In this stunning and unforgettable collection, Young grapples with the question so many women face on a daily basis: how much can our bodies take? A fierce and unsentimental look at the power and pain and beauty and struggle that are the costs and benefits of being embodied * Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of the Turning World *