Can You Tolerate This?

Essays

By: Ashleigh Young

Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld

A dazzling - and already prizewinning - collection of essays on youth and aging, ambition and disappointment, Katherine Mansfield tourism and New Zealand punk rock, and the limitations of the body.

Youth and frailty, ambition and anxiety, the limitations of the body and the challenges of personal transformation: these are the undercurrents that animate acclaimed poet Ashleigh Young's first collection of essays. In Can You Tolerate This? - the title comes from the question chiropractors ask to test a patient's pain threshold - Young ushers us into her early years in the faraway yet familiar landscape of New Zealand: fantasizing about Paul McCartney, cheering on her older brother's fledging music career, and yearning for a larger and more creative life. As Young's perspective expands, a series of historical portraits - a boy who grew new bone wherever he was injured, an early French postman who built a stone fortress by hand, a generation of Japanese shut-ins - strike unexpected personal harmonies, as an unselfconscious childhood gives way to painful shyness in adolescence. As we watch Young fall in and out of love, undertake an intense yoga practice that masks an eating disorder, and gradually find herself through her writing, a highly particular psyche comes into view: curious, tender, and exacting in her observations of herself and the world around her.

Can You Tolerate This? presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions - between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation - that define our lives.

©2018 Ashleigh Young (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“A lovely, profound debut that spins metaphors of its own creation and the segmented identity of the essayist, that self-regarding self.” (Alice Bolin, New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice)

“An edgy, vibrant portrait of electricity in language and the body in crisis... In exacting sentences [Young] probes the body's mysteries... She sees to the marrow of our humanity with a kind of MRI vision. In Young's hands the lyric essay transforms into something rich and strange, a sea change of form. Can You Tolerate This? is an assured debut from a prodigiously talented, empathic writer.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

“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 candor; they offer comfort even as they ask you to see things anew... 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)