Desire

by Jessie Cole

What to do with the intensity of longing that occasionally arises? Sometimes I hug my pup so hard he growls. When my pup growls, I realise I need to find some other way of letting off steam. It’s easy to imagine I could just touch myself and be done with it, but no matter how many times I make myself come, that feeling of wanting doesn’t subside. A friend has a term for the need for touch—‘skin hungry’. Lots of people live without sex, but I find it a kind of deprivation.

What does it mean to be awakened? To want? To love? Jessie Cole is in her late thirties when she meets a man twenty years older than she is. They become lovers. Both passionate and companionable, fraught and uneven, their relationship tests her fears and anxieties. Through their interstate affair, through bushfires and the pandemic, she learns about herself, how her initiations into womanhood shaped who she is now, and how the shadow of family trauma still inhabits her body.

Jessie Cole has written an unabashed, thrilling exploration of the very nature of desire, a story about vulnerability and strength, loss and regeneration. A memoir of the body, Desire is a visceral book in which feeling and longing are laid bare.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography

272 pages, Paperback

Published August 2, 2022

About the author

Jessie Cole is a writer. Her first novel, Darkness on the Edge of Town, was shortlisted for the 2013 ALS Gold Medal and longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award. Her second novel, Deeper Water, was released in 2014 to critical acclaim. Staying, a memoir, was longlisted for the 2019 Colin Roderick Award and shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Her latest memoir, Desire, A Reckoning, was released in 2022. She lives in northern New South Wales.

Reviews

[Sheree | Keeping Up With The Penguins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A glance at the blurb might have you think that Desire is simply the story of a love affair with an older man, but that’s not what this is. The intensity of Cole’s descriptions – of both the internal and external world – will take your breath away. These vignettes read so smoothly, you’ll lose track of time. It's a poignant and potent read that will have you pensive for days after you turn the last page.

My full review of Desire is up now on Keeping Up With The Penguins.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had visceral responses to this book – I fainted on the tram after a difficult birth scene and I wept uncontrollably at the death of a beloved pet. But neither response even begins to contain my thoughts and feelings about this book. This is a memoir of close introspection and raw honesty. Cole lays herself bare in all the ways that’s possible in memoir. But what captivated me is not necessarily her story itself but how she chose to tell it. Narrative vignettes form a fragmentary structure that somehow feels full, complete and alive. As I like to say about good books, there’s blood in its veins. And the prose! Sarah Krasnostein describes Cole’s writing as dancing across the page and that’s exactly how it read to me. Her sentences sashayed and shimmied and I couldn’t absorb them quickly enough. This is a book of desires and climate change and trauma and need and how absurd it is that we obsess about only some of these things while ignoring others. It was many things but what it was more than anything is beautifully written.

[Tara June Winch · Rating 5 out of 5]

gorgeous

[Text Publishing]

The following book reviews have been shared by Text Publishing – publisher of Desire

‘Jessie Cole is peerless in Australian letters; for me, she is the master chronicler of hidden psychic spaces. Her exquisite new memoir compels, startles and affirms the arterial centre that is desire.’
Ellena Savage

‘A gorgeous journey of a writer seeking out the inaccessible part of herself, of those she loves, and who love her back, and of the forest that holds them all together. Desire is a book of intellectual and emotional depth, exploring the flesh and nerves and sinew — as a mother, a lover, a friend and soothsayer. A tender joy of a book, about life and death, and of all the great pulls in between. Raw and fascinating writing that shimmers with truth and beauty at once. A confession, a lament, a celebration — I cannot recommend this enough.’
Tara June Winch

‘Luminous with honesty. Revelatory.’
Nikki Gemmell

'Jessie Cole is a delight. I don't know how she does it. She drags the gnarliest anchors from the heaviest depths and throws light on the hardest of places — her prose shimmers with warmth and breathtaking honesty. Desire is about the mystery of our bodies, how the wiring can get crossed, connections lost and one woman's delicate unstitching to find herself.’
Anna Krien

'A love story about one woman’s efforts to escape the clutches of trauma on her own terms.’
Readings

'Written in skilful fragmentary narrative, this sensory experience of self-and-world is tender, vulnerable, brave and raw...Desire: A Reckoning is deep life-poetry, thrumming with vitality and unpretentious symbolism. Masterfully patchworked moments pull the reader’s consciousness through a world of poignant aching and vanishing safety nets in this relevant reflection on self-embodiment. This book will appeal to lovers who have suffered through the exquisite terror of wanting, and will resonate with anyone who has ever sidestepped a rug to avoid having it ripped out from under them.’
ArtsHub

‘Desire is propulsive, honest and tender; it will hurl you back to your own worst heartaches, whether you want to revisit them or not.’
Guardian

‘[Jessie Cole] writes with a simultaneous tenderness and directness which places difficult emotions centre on the page, and forces the reader to confront the complexity of our inner lives head on… Cole’s sheer command of language captures your attention so well that pages virtually fly past. I devoured this book from the first page, completely entranced.’
Zoya Patel, Canberra Times

‘[A] book that pours itself on to the page: the warm, impulsive imprint of a brain in the throes of longing...Cole writes with brutal honesty about the links we are prone to make between sex and self-worth.’
Guardian

‘[Jessie Cole] mines the delirium of her heart—replaying scenes of painful, emotive rumination on the page…[Her] writing is so elemental, you will find yourself unsealed by her evocations…Cole seems to have performed the ultimate act of love in writing this book…she has turned that love into a work of art.’
Jessie Tu, SMH/Age

‘Desire sketches a life’s spaces and textures…Cole writes about [the body] with a direct and curious gaze.’
Felicity Plunkett, Saturday Paper

‘[An] intricately observed, forensically honest examination of the inherent contradictions and emotional high-wire act of romantic relationships… Like most good memoirists—and Cole is an excellent one—her reflections are truly brave…and generous.’
Jo Case, InDaily

‘[I]ntimate, lyrical…[and] rich with vivid detail.’
West Australian

‘A remarkably contemporary memoir…Desire is a powerful, tender book of loss and longing, attempting to grapple with both inner pain and external tragedy. It’s a vulnerable work that moved me to tears more than once. But despite it all, there are moments of hope, even at the end.’
Lisa Featherstone, Conversation

‘Some books you rip through as if your life is going to end tomorrow. That’s how I felt about Jessie Cole’s remarkable memoir Desire: A reckoning. I read it in one visceral session. Reckoning is the perfect subtitle: both a noun and a verb, an account and an action. This raw, pulsating, liquid-hot book is written in real time, as Cole evaluates and calculates the costs of her present affair with an older man. At the same time as her body twitches and her anxieties lurch, both onto her lover and onto the page, Cole is forced to tally the price paid for living in a forest, on a flood plain, in the age of anthropogenic climate change. The feelings are big, the ideas are big, the effect is lush and generous and unsparing.’
Clare Wright, Australian Book Review

[Kirsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written memoir that, at times, broke me into tiny pieces.

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

I adored Cole's first memoir and was so pleased to see her signature luminose prose made a return to this one. Cole falls for an older man and confronts her lifelong habit of forming relationships with "ambivalent" men. The book has been written in real time, and this gives the reader a real sense of being along for the ride. I love the way Cole writes about sex, desire and skin hunger and would have liked more of this. Halfway through she discovers attachment theory which forms much of the basis of analysis of her relationships including with her father who died by suicide. While I love a bit of attachment theory myself and could definitely relate to the excruciating and crazy-making experience that is yearning for more than an avoidant partner can give, attachment theory has its limitations. I appreciated that this book is less overtly influenced by The Body Keeps the Score (listed in Cole's further reading) than many other memoirs dealing with trauma and embodiment. I started to switch off at the end when the focus turned more ecological, but that's more a reflection of my own resistance to reading about climate change or the pandemic (I read to escape these horrors!).

[Chris Waterford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have loved all of the author's books and her writing just seems to keep reaching another level---and her courage and her honesty to so nakedly put it all down on paper. It was an extraordinary book that I hated coming to the end of. Some sadness too at her unresolved quest for the perfect love. Her writing makes my reading heart sing and dance with joy. Brilliant.
9.5/10

[Anne Deane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed and appreciated this book because the “story”/reflections were alive “in the moment” - the author recording her experiences and reflections on desire in her long distance relationship as she evolved each part of it.

I admire Jessie Cole’s openness, vulnerability and respect of her then partner - with no identifying details being either offered or relevant to the purpose of the writing.

There was something about the raw honesty and that had me experience this book as a “sacred” space (of exploring and reflection) that I was invited to hear. Because of this it seemed trite and distancing of me to go to a head space of trying to analyse what was going on for her. Sure, she had reflections that implied awareness of “attachment” theory, but this was her story I was invited into and it had me staying with the life in that and reflecting on my dance with desire in my own life.

A read I am grateful for. 8.5/10

[Kayte Nunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adored this and read it far too quickly - I shall re-read and savour it. Lyrical, moving and beautifully written. Brava!

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This book got me, right in the heart. So much of this book reminded me of me. I felt such a resonance with her words, it was a kind of cathartic comfort. I read her other memoir a while back, and have downloaded both novels. I love this woman’s writing so much!

[Lisa Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful! A deep, wise, and lyrical emotional dive.

[Lisa Jewell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brave. I felt myself cringing in recognition. Especially regarding attachment living. The pain of being left by suicide is palpable within the pages of Desire. The idea we are important enough to keep anyone else grounded/ in our sphere is a setup for anguish. I know this not because I've lost a loved one to suicide but because I'm hardwired in my mental state (severe separation anxiety). No matter how I try to detach, I can't. Even if I lived on an island I would still be mentally attached. I don't have any answers. I really don't, even after years of reading, listening and then reading more. Acceptance is the state I'm aiming for. And I can only hope my loved ones will continue to put up with me.

I feel for Jessie. I truly do. Brave, brave woman.
I'm not sure about the title: Desire. It feels other.

[Cristina Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, honest , rings true. I will seek out more books by this writer.

[Marianne Webb · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really tried to like this book after good reviews from siblings but in the end gave it away as didn’t want to spend my time on a book I was not enjoying when there are so many more great ones to read

[Joanne Osborne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extraordinary memoir told with such intensity and honesty… a deeper understanding of how life traumas can have ongoing effects in our lives. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt this moved from high emotion to high emotion, and I think I couldn’t relate as a reader. It was a bit too much feeling for me.

I did read it while wearing Le Labo’s perfume Gaiac 10, and the smell and the descriptions of the forest setting did mingle in a lovely evocative way.

[Gretchen Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've ever desired 'too much', this remarkable book will make you feel seen. It's a love story, not only with a central figure, but also with the forest Jessie inhabits, and as the love affair falters, so does the landscape, assaulted by fire, and flood. It's also very funny, ironic, and deeply reflective - a reckoning indeed. I love the open heartedness with which Jessie shares her story with the reader. It's such a generous gift.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first I thought this was a novel, and got a little tired of the emotionality of the heroine. I changed my mind when I realized it was a memoir; the passages about her child birthing were extremely well written. So were the sections on the floods. But I got a little tired of the “my lover” and the mutual misinterpretations. “We both felt confused about the years between us. That the meaning of the age gap … should continue to be so problematic.” Well, if they want to make age problematic that’s their business, but it’s none of mine. I increasingly got the feeling of being an unwilling voyeur to something private. She mentions how something a reviewer, on Goodreads presumably, said about her earlier memoir had really got to her. My reaction was: don’t write memoirs if you don’t like what people conclude about you. She even says: “This is not the book I want to be writing.” Then it is not the book I want to be reading. Perhaps it would have been better if it was a novel as I had originally thought. Or still a memoir but without all those tears and emotional bleeding on display.

[Bradley McCann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A chat with Jessie Cole is never wasted or without pearls of wisdom, and reading "Desire" is like one long, exquisite conversation. A moving, fearless memoir that I highly recommend. Loved it.

[Jillwilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Initially I thought this book was quite rambly and a bit self indulgent but I really warmed to the topic that Cole was trying to explore which is – what helps us to take risks in terms of starting a new relationship? Why might one want a relationship over being single? What’s the place of desire in our lives? What challenges does this quest bring? I read it because I really liked her first memoir that described her adolescence “bookended” by the suicides of her half-sister and father, and the impact of those deaths on Cole and the rest of her family. In the book she notes that it was written “in close to real time, without the benefit of hindsight … a terrifying, highwire way to write”.

After a long time alone, at the age of 38, she meets a man from another state. “Her discombobulating encounters with “the man I desired” are told in a sequence of intimate, confiding vignettes. (He is never named, which adds, intentionally or not, to the sense he is there to be projected on to.)” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...).

The man she meets is at least twenty years older than Cole. He is kind but detached and Cole is not certain what she wants out of this relationship, or of what he wants. As one reviewer writes “Cole’s memoir pithily explores how relationships are a narrative, a process of meaning-making:
Each person in a romantic relationship creates meaning from their experiences. The story that emerges, like all life stories, is an imaginative one, built around the real. In harmonious partnerships, is each imaginative vision just more closely aligned?” )
https://jameshwhitmorereviews.com/202...) Cole and her lover saw each other intermittently, though each time, it was Cole who instigated their encounters. She was on the margins of his life. Nobody in his circle knew about her. One night, years after their first sexual encounter, he introduced her to his friends as “a friend”. Whenever she was around him, she made herself small: she “tried hard not to make ripples of disturbance in his environment.” So the tension in the book circles around the man’s response – will his ambivalence shift into something else, what is it that Cole wants or will settle for? At one stage she wonders: “What if ambivalence felt safer to me because my father chose to leave me?”

I liked this comment from a reviewer: “Armchair psychologising is boggy ground, but it’s where Cole explicitly invites her reader to go – into her attachment styles, trust issues and “complicated grief, with all its somatic trappings”. There’s a lot of what the writer Steven Phillips-Horst recently coined “Tedcore” (see: The Body Keeps the Score, Esther Perel, all those attachment theory books): that “vaguely highbrow” genre of self-help creeping into the way we understand and discuss our emotional lives – and homogenise them, generalising over the nuances of deeply specific situations. As Cole turns to these frameworks to probe, with tender curiosity, her own emotional bruises, she unwittingly highlights their limits. No theory can make another person fully knowable; look too hard at these formulas for answers and you wind up pathologising yourself.” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...).

Cole is still living in the extraordinary house that her parents built up in the Northern Rivers region of NSW. Nature, in all its beauty and fierceness has a big place in the book as the region is first threatened by bush fires and then inundated by floods and the physical certainties and protections of Cole’s location are thrown in the air. This happens in parallel with Cole’s relationship – making it really hard for her to feel grounded. She writes really well about nature: “Everything in the forest is the forest. Systems of care, systems of connection and community. Like the roots of the trees, intertwining. Tending nature, we are tending ourselves. The neighbour’s cows got in and trampled my flower garden. It looked wrecked, but in the days that followed, some of those plants, miraculously resilient, began to reshoot. The virus showed us how quickly we could change.”

It feels like a very honest book about women and relationships.

[Bree T · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been reading Jessie Cole’s books for…..about ten years now. I don’t even remember how I discovered them but so much about them has stuck with me over the years. Particularly her last book, a memoir about navigating the devastation of suicide in her family. I read that one over four years ago now and the rawness of the writing has stayed with me. I didn’t actually know about this book until just recently, after it was published and it’s another memoir, although this one is very much a memoir of adulthood.

It takes things that I don’t think I cannot even comprehend, to bare yourself in the way writers of memoirs do. To open up your pain and joy, your your experiences good and bad in life, for others to read. In many cases it is offering up the most intimate of information to strangers, including like in this one, your relationship with sex.

But although this book explores in quite intricate detail, Cole’s relationship with her body, sex and a long-distance relationship, it is also so much more than that. Her first memoir detailed her childhood growing up in the forest and now she’s an adult still living in the forest in a house that sounds honestly, unbelievable! A house that seems part of the forest and therefore, all the dangers that come with it. I think most will agree that the last few years have been a rollercoaster ride for most people and I remember the fires of 2019 vividly, because where I grew up and my family still live, were surrounded by them from about September on. That fire season was brutal but this year has been brutal in a very different way: flooding. There are areas that have flooded multiple times this year, including up and around the part of the state where Jessie Cole lives. This book deals with the threat of both fire and flood and the ways in which you are vulnerable to the whims of the weather patterns in ways that I think everyone can relate to at the moment, no matter where you live. We are currently in the middle of such a huge rainy season – well to be honest it’s more like a rainy year, and where I am there hasn’t actually been floods so I can’t imagine what it is like for people to watch their houses go under even once, let alone multiple times.

But as I mentioned, a lot of the book details with Cole exploring her complex feelings relating to sexual relationships and her own body. She details her first teen relationship and how she became a young mother, including an incredibly terrifying birth experience where I feel Cole nails the disconnect that can happen during childbirth, how you can be there but also not there in terms of understanding something. There’s details of break ups and other relationships before her meeting a man quite a bit older than her when she is in her late 30s. He lives in another city that seems quite far away and their relationship is limited to times one of them can take time to visit the other (mostly Cole, who seems to do around 95% of the work). I think there are moments in this connection that people will relate to as well, the push-pull factor, is he interested, is this going to happen, what does it mean, can we make this work etc. No matter your age you are vulnerable every time you step into something with someone new and Cole lays every single piece of that bare in this book, every thought of insecurity and worry, detailing how her body tends to betray her with anxiety at the thought of a new sexual relationship. I could relate to that deep anxiety and overthinking of things, although I don’t get the sort of physical response that she does, I get a huge anxiety response to certain new situations and meetings etc that makes me nauseous to the point of being incapable of doing anything. If I were ever not married anymore, I suspect I’d live the rest of my life alone probably. I’d never attempt to date or have a relationship in 2022 and beyond.

Once again, the writing in this book is just so vivid and beautiful, so raw and honest but also so intimate as well. When I read this, I felt like I was sitting down listening to her speak, having a conversation almost, about her life and her thoughts and feelings on different things. There’s just such a connect and so much I found relatable even in circumstances that are quite different to mine. Some experiences transcend that and there was a lot in this book where I was like ok, yes I feel that, it’s so comforting to know that someone else does too.

A new Jessie Cole book is always a pleasurable reading experience, and this one was no exception. I really will have to buy a copy so that it can join all the others on my shelf.

[Prue Mansfield · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh my goodness, what a difference between my view of this book, and the general readership. A memoir, about a woman about 40. There is a suggestion she has suffered some sexual trauma in the past, while unconscious. That is why her body reacts with severe symptoms, swollen vagina and face, splotches, muscle discomfort, rashes, when she becomes sexually aroused. She starts a relationship with a man she names as 'her older' lover. He is 20 years older.
I struggled with the book, and the life it described. Maybe I dont know enough about such matters. I know our body retains trauma. But she doesnt know it even happened, cannot recall a situation where there was the opportunity. I found her character very unappealing. It was repetitive, and frankly boring. Is 'being brave' enough to cause a book to be published I wonder. And once again, someone acknowledged as an early supporter, giving feedback on the book, was quoted on the cover, I do not like that, hardly impartial.

[James Whitmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I'll always be drawn to writing about the thing I least understand," writes Jessie Cole early on in this delicate memoir. The thing in this case is the desire of the title, but over the course of the book it becomes something more: belonging, connection, the places where we are best able to understand ourselves. Read more on my blog.

[Lana Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy to read, fascinating look into the dynamics of anxious-avoidant relating. I enjoyed the honesty of Cole's description of this period of her life, and the way she weaves explanations of her behaviours and thoughts into the narrative, adding a layer of understanding for people who don't recognise themselves in the main characters, and a sense of belonging for those who do (I recognised aspects of myself in both of them!).

[Elisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first it seemed like a book and story about a live affair with an older man. In reality the concept of desire goes far beyond that and beyond a romantic or sexual desire, it’s a desire for happiness, contentment and love (both the giving and receiving) but not just from a person, from family, pets, nature and home etc.

[Arlene · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is probably the most depressing book I have ever read. I was looking forward to an inspiring read about female desire - and instead felt like I was dragged through 172 pages of doom including fires, floods, pandemic, suicide, and an immature woman’s angst about her inability to attach to others. What a disappointment and a miserable start to my 2024 reading. Things can only get better.

[Sharyn Munro]

Very readable, often lyrical, and so candid as to be almost confessional, but I was uncomfortable with the intrusion into the older lover's privacy. Perhaps in these days of reality everything it is not unusual. I'd have preferred a fictionalised approach.

[A J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jessie has such a beautiful writing style. Not my usual cup of tea but I had to finish it for the story and writting which was terribly sad at times and what a struggle she has been through. A very honest and personal book.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling read. Raw, brave and unflinching self reflection.

[Bec · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The only way was through"