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Can You Tolerate This?
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
19 posts | 8 read | 20 to read
Can You Tolerate This? is a collection of twenty-one personal essays by Ashleigh Young. In this spirited and singular book, Young roams freely from preoccupation to preoccupation Hamilton s 90s music scene, family histories, a boy with a rare skeletal disease, a stone-collecting French postman, a desire for impossible physical transformation trying to find some measure of clarity amid uncertainty. How to bear each moment of experience: the inconsequential as much as the shattering? Her search takes us through poignant, funny and raw territories."
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review
Hooked_on_books
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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Bailedbailed

I usually love essay collections, but this one is reading as mundane in a non-compelling way to me. Apparently, my answer to the titular question is no.

squirrelbrain Oh dear...😕 4y
LeeRHarry I read a few of the stories but I never went back to it - that‘s probably quite telling 😏 4y
47 likes2 comments
review
Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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Pickpick

With a poet‘s quiet flair, these award-winning essays meander from personal relationships to body image to living a creative life. Ashleigh Young grew up in a small town in New Zealand, nurturing her rich imagination and paying close attention to people around her. I enjoyed viewing the world through her windows. #newzealand

44 likes1 stack add
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Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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Don‘t count on anyone else to remember anything; they‘ll remember it wrong or they‘ll remember it mercilessly. She must write it all down before it‘s too late. She doesn‘t need to use a pseudonym but might consider changing some names here and there.

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Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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I‘ve come to yoga without any knowledge of its philosophy. I have only a desire to free myself from an awkwardness that I experience as something continually toppling and rebuilding itself deep inside me, and from the stark loathing of my body I‘ve felt as long as I can remember; it encases me as seamlessly as my skin.
(Author photo: Russell Kleyn)

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Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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“Can you tolerate this?” he asks. You try to nod. You hadn‘t known that vertebrae could reach so far up, right to the back of the brain.
“Oh yes. The vertebrae go all the way up to the head, like a ladder. Humans are really just highly evolved ladders.”
[a visit to the chiropractor]

Erofan 😻 5y
35 likes1 comment
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Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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An artist has set up an online store that specializes in dolls of travelling freak show exhibits. The Julia doll is made from leather with little hairs painstakingly sewed into it “for a more realistically hairy effect.”
(Image of Julia Pastrana from Internet)

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Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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If the bearded lady Jennifer Miller could see me now, she would put her strong, veined hands on my shoulders and give me a shake. “Listen to me. Hair is power! That‘s why men don‘t want women to have too much of it.”
(Image: Tognina by Lavinia Fontana)

JazzFeathers Well, that's an interesting idea. 5y
Lindy @JazzFeathers Yes, isn‘t it? Fontana‘s Tognina comes up in the essay and I‘m glad I searched for an image because seeing it brings a québécois novel about a hairy girl to mind: 5y
45 likes2 comments
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Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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I leaned my bike against the fence and put its special bicycle raincoat on, which is always more difficult than I think it will be, like putting a pair of pants on a car.

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Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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The marae embodies the Māori proverb: He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata!
(What is the most important thing in the world? It is the people, it is the people, it is the people!)

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Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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I was wearing brown flares and a blue-and-pink-flowered shirt from the Hamilton Salvation Army. I felt good. Fashion from the seventies was reckless and daring, but also clever, and I believed that these qualities were somehow transferred to me when I wore the clothes.
(Internet photo)

TheSpineView I so remember the pink and green fad!! 5y
Lindy @TheSpineView Very ice creamy. 5y
Cathythoughts I remember having pink ( baggy ) dungarees 😳🤭 I loved them 😍 (edited) 5y
Lindy @Cathythoughts 😁🕺👍 5y
CouronneDhiver I don‘t hate that combo... interesting! 5y
44 likes5 comments
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Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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There was a particular set of statements the volunteer tour guides would repeat; these were deep within the narrative of the house. “She was ahead of her time.” “A radical in many ways.” “Very stylish.” “A truly modern woman who cast off convention.” And sometimes, conspiratorially, “She was very likely a lesbian.” #LGBT #NewZealand
(Internet photo)

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Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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It seems to me that the realest reality lives somewhere beyond the edge of human vision.
—Russell Hoban

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Lindy
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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His story has been fashioned as a beacon for others, especially for the plodders among us: he not only achieved something extraordinary, but did so as a simple postman who ignored the mocking of his neighbours.

Lindy Young‘s essay ‘Postie,‘ about a man in France who built a fantastical palace from stones collected during his daily deliveries of the post, had me rushing to the Internet to find out more. What a fascinating true story! 5y
DivineDiana Amazing story! 😲 5y
Lindy @DivineDiana It certainly is. 😜 5y
30 likes1 stack add3 comments
review
Shadowfat
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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Pickpick

This was almost a so-so for me. This is a collection of miscellaneous stories from the authors childhood and adulthood. I enjoyed the earlier stories but some of them were about topics or events that I didn't connect with. I picked this up because she's a New Zealand author and I saw it in a bookshop when I was there 😎

blurb
Jocelyn73c
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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"Every week she looks forward to Sunday afternoon because that is when the man will go for a long ride on his bicycle. She will have the house to herself then, and she will be able to work. Nobody will creep up on her, nobody will call out to her, nobody will want to read aloud to her passages from a book or a newspaper article." Wow, do I identify with this!

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shutupsmalls
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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I think this is my favorite cover of the year so far

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Liberty
Can You Tolerate This? | Ashleigh Young
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Afternoon reading: Rebecca sold the hell out of this on this week‘s episode of All the Books! And it‘s out now! 🧡💗💚

LeeRHarry I‘m slowly making my way through this one - the French postman story is fascinating! Great NZ author! I nearly fell off my chair when I realised I‘d gotten to a book before you @Liberty ! 😆 Love your work! (edited) 6y
CouronneDhiver Awesome! Hey - do you know if the $500 book riot prize winner has been announced? 6y
Liberty @CouronneDhiver I do not, sorry. It has been a couple weeks since it ended, so I‘m going to guess they have probably been notified. There‘s a new contest now though! 6y
Rachaels-book-adventures As a fellow kiwi I can not wait to get my hands on this 😍 6y
105 likes8 stack adds4 comments