Az Cosgrove reviews The Pulling by Adele Dumont
The Pulling
by Adele Dumont
ISBN 9781922585912
Reviewed by AZ COSGROVE
Ostensibly, Adele Dumont’s collection The Pulling (2024) is about the author’s experience of
trichotillomania, or compulsive hair pulling. Importantly, I myself have never experienced
trichotillomania, and I refuse to participate in the historical silencing that has too often been
directed towards those of diverse and marginalised embodiment—I know that chloroform ache
all too well. Instead, as Joan Didion writes in ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, I will write ‘How it
felt to me,’ (1) — I keep this sentence in a folder on my computer called ‘Good Words’, and I
open it when I need to remember that, like Dumont, I love words. With words, we can perform
magic. It allows us to articulate the inarticulable, to crack open the world. With words, we can
transform that serrated knife-flash that some of us see glinting in the eyes of our reflections into
something beautiful, iridescent. It’s miraculous, like water into wine. (Or, like the class at
Hogwarts I dreamt about as a kid before I grew up and JK became a massive TERF.) This
magic is what Dumont achieves in The Pulling, and it is the core function of Own Voices
literature, the category to which this collection emphatically belongs.
In parallel to her writing career, Dumont also works as an English teacher, and each
word of these essays feels deliberately chosen, the sentences like carefully placed
brushstrokes. In ‘Psychologists’ she writes how her father observes that she’s ‘always arranging
things into patterns’ (135). she describes how she carefully eats mandarins, ‘holding each
individual segment up to the light, like a jewel’ (136), dissecting the seeds with her teeth to
reveal their insides, ‘waxy smooth and immaculate’ (136).
In these essays, the patterns are made of words. They are arranged in golden spirals
that open up again and again. In the essay ‘Anatomy of Pulling’, for example, Dumont provides
scrupulous, almost encyclopedic, descriptions of individual hairs—‘some kinked like old wire;
some whisker-thin’ (38), their roots ‘pearl white and translucent, cleave[d] to the hair like muscle
to a bone, and the very tips as black as can be’ (42)—and the granularity of detail transports us
into a new world: one viewed through a magnifying glass, where hairs are as big as trees, and
the scalp is a vast ‘swathe of land’. In this world, even time is distorted, it’s usual linearity
replaced with an ‘eternal present’, as if told by a clock dripping from the wall. This is Dumont’s
own version of Wonderland. Worlds like this are created by damn good storytelling. Suzanne
Keen calls this “narrative empathy” (‘A Theory of Narrative Empathy’, 2006), and it is one of the
most sociologically potent functions of literature.
Occasionally, in just one or two graceful, tilt-shift sentences, Dumont renders vast shifts
in scale that hurtle us from a minute, Lilliputian world to one that is vast, geological:
‘If individual hairs are sufficiently resisted and survive this precarious phase, and achieve some extra millimeters of length, then they become the most endangered-feeling of all, like they’ve somehow outlived their prognosis, like storm clouds heavy with rain, like the temptation of overripe berries to birds.’ (39)
This cinematic style reminds me of writing by Virginia Woolf—aeroplanes and snail shells, words stretched, made thin, like streaks of cloud.
However, as a reader, I found myself unable to become fully immersed in this collection.
While the decadent style of writing was initially very effective in evoking the firsthand experience
of Dumont, I found that, after a while, it became a bit overwhelming, and I felt there was an
imbalance between the attention given to the microscopic and macroscopic. While we are
permitted brief glances of the world she inhabits—the vineyards where she spent much of her
childhood, the ‘slick’ (103) rooms of the hair clinic that she began visiting as an adult, where the
division between real and illusory is barely intact.
But for the most part, the story-worlds in these essays are largely bounded within Dumont’s fingertips,or just beyond, in her brain. I was left wanting more: I wanted to know the heat of the sun, the smell of ripe oranges. While Dumont gives us a thorough psychological description of her partner (mysteriously referred to as ‘M’), we aren’t given any details about what he looks like. Likewise, we don’t get much of a picture of the house they share. Is it brick or weatherboard? What is the colour of the carpet in the living room,or are the kitchen bench tops? It would be harsh to call this writing ‘lacklustre’, but it did lack a kind of three-dimensionality. It created a world without gravity—where a person can begin to forget the weight of their body, their flesh—an ironic impression for a collection, in the first place, about a bodily phenomenon.
The use of second person narration in these essays is notable. This style creates a
dynamic between the reader and narrator that is quite distinct from typical narrative structure,
and which must be carefully navigated, particularly in memoir. While I can appreciate how this
mode of narration can create a powerful sense of intimacy—take, for instance, Ursula K
LeGuin’s short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (1973), the beautiful novella
Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang (1998), and contemporary works of memoir like Katia Ariel’s
The Swift Dark Tide (2023) and Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran (2021) — I found that here it
often gave the essays an uncomfortably confessional tone, like the experiences of Dumont’s
‘second, secret life’ were sins whispered between the cubicles of a church confessional: ‘How
your face will pucker, your eyes narrow, like you’ve bitten into something unripe’ (37). However,
as someone who themselves has a body and experience that is unarguably other, I can
appreciate that this is an expression of the internalised shame (appropriately, a title of one of the
essays in this collection) that our rigidly normative society and culture inflicts on us.
After my brain injury, I remember swimming back towards consciousness and looking at
the pale, arachnoid thing that was my hand on the hospital bed beside me, thinking: how can
that possibly be my hand? I have learnt that this thing—that I know now to call “Otherness”—is
not singular, static: it’s highly individual, a thing curled differently in every life, like the coils of
acid inside each of our cells, in each strand of hair. These essays are stories of Otherness—and
these stories help us to better map the world, our culture, our minds.
‘I feel, I feel, I feel,’ (13, 51, 56, 167) writes Dumont, again and again, and the words
echo: ‘I am, I am, I am.’ (2)
Citations
1. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967: 134)
2. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, (1999:189)
AZ COSGROVE is a 27 year old trans wheelchair user and an emerging writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His work has appeared in such publications as Voiceworks, Archer, Overland. He is currently completing a Masters of Literature and also holds a Bachelor of Biomedical Science. In 2023, he was one of the ABC Regional Storyteller Scholars.