THE FIRST TIME I THOUGHT I WAS DYING

2021

A collection of essays about bodies and control.

We live in a world that expects us to be constantly in control of ourselves. Our bodies and minds, though, have other ideas.

In this striking debut, artist and writer Sarah Walker wrestles with the awkward spaces where anatomy meets society: body image and Photoshop, phobias and religion, sex scenes and onstage violence, death and grief. Her luminous writing is at once specific and universal as she mines the limits of anxiety, intimacy and control.

Sharp-witted and poignant, this collection of essays explores our unruly bodies and asks how we might learn to embrace our own chaos.

Winner of the 2021 Quentin Bryce Award.

Out now from UQP.

REVIEWS

‘Breathtakingly good. Darkly funny and deeply true. I was furious when I had to interrupt my reading to put the book down and live.’
— Virginia Gay

‘The First Time I Thought I Was Dying blew me away. In this unparalleled age of self-surveillance – a peak moment for body-estrangement – Walker reacquaints us with the true sorcery of the senses, and with the inner life awakened by loving the body in all its animal unruliness. The essays in this collection are engrossing, unflinching, vitalising and wise.’
— Rebecca Giggs, author of Fathoms

‘A stunning portrait of a body as captured by the eye of a true artist. Walker has found just the right words to describe its mystery, and how we live within it, in all its gnarly and wonderful glory.’
— Jacinta Parsons, author of Unseen

‘In these essays Sarah Walker outstares shame, outwits the spectre of self-commodification and outclasses so much of contemporary writing on bodies and embodiment. An unafraid and thrilling book.’
— Maria Tumarkin, author of Axiomatic

‘As soon as I started reading Sarah Walker’s book, I knew I was in the presence of a special writer. There’s a freshness and immediacy to the voice, and an incisiveness and intelligence to the writing, that captured my attention throughout … This is an insightful, timely and brave book that excavates the many ways that social conditioning and gender stereotyping impact on how we experience our bodies and our minds.’
— Dame Quentin Bryce

‘Walker is a Walkley-nominated essayist and multimedia artist, but this collection of essays is her debut book. And what a remarkable debut it is: a triumph of informed thinking, simultaneously bold, nuanced and deeply reflective. For the reader, it is transformative…Pleasure is also part of thinking. This thought-provoking and engaging book reminds us of that.’
— Maria Takolander, The Saturday Paper

‘Didionesque and subtly shaded with detail … Encountering writing of this calibre, you find yourself surreptitious, furtive, smiling. “Oh, that’s a nice sentiment,” you say; “now there’s some good phrasing.” You draw your pen downward, acquiescing to the margin’s blank white invitation. By the end, I realised my pen had carved a highway of black along every page.’
— Declan Fry, The Age

‘Walker’s writing is part of a broader upsurge among contemporary Australian essayists to redress this silence: to honour the reality that, in Woolf’s words, ‘All day, all night the body intervenes’…The personal and the global are woven together with skill, the one seeping into the other.’
— Adele Dumont, Sydney Review of Books

‘This is an essay collection in which the most difficult and abject parts of being a human in a body are examined with full and unflinching frankness ... contains a robust academic backbone of references, quotes and reflection ... formidable and intimate.’
— Books+Publishing

‘The essays of this book are personal, and readers of confessional non-fiction will delight in their tone: equal parts jocose and sincere … The forms of beauty celebrated here are unconventional, and the book is remarkable for that. Walker sees the ostensibly ugly anew.’
— Kate Crowcroft, ABR

‘With her debut collection, Walker has succeeded in writing something that feels both timeless in its humanity, but also firmly anchored in the current cultural moment ... a powerful essay collection that is both literary and immensely relatable.’
— Readings

‘‘Walker somehow manages to make these very difficult, very real topics highly readable ... perceptive and eye-opening.’
— Jemimah Halbert-Brewster, Underground Writers

MEDIA

Interview on ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program, Tuesday July 27th.

Interview on ABC Radio Sydney’s Focus program, Tuesday August 3rd.

Interview on ABC Radio Melbourne’s Afternoons program, Tuesday August 10th.

Interview on RRR FM’s The Glasshouse program, Wednesday August 11th.

Interview on Better Words podcast.

Online artist-in-conversation with Carody Culver, hosted by Avid Reader: