Fierce Appetites: Lessons from my year of untamed thinking is a collection of personal essays by Irish medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle. Sub-(sub-)titled Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in My Present and in the Writings of the Past, the book was published in 2022 by Penguin, and (appropriately enough) I’ve read it during Cathy‘s Reading Ireland month ’23
Part memoir and part deep-dive into medieval Irish poetry, it meditates on the interconnectedness of time and place, and describes a year in Boyle’s life, the pandemic year of 2020, which opens with her father’s death in January.
“My brother poured seventeen sachets of sugar into his black coffee. I muttered to him, ‘If dad dies while you’re adding all these fucking sugars I will never speak to you again.’
We walked back to the ward. Dad had died…”
There are 12 chapters, broken down by month, containing personal meditations on 12 topics, such as grief, motherhood, travel, lockdown, nature and time, and interspersed with quotes from, and analysis of medieval poetry and history. She finds connections, parallels and contrasts with the past as she passes through that weird, pre-vaccine COVID year, a year in which she turns 40. In that birthday chapter, situated in August 2020, she quotes from a female-perspective medieval poem on ageing:
Ebb-tide comes to me, as to the sea.
Old age yellows me.
Though I may grieve at that.
It approaches its food gleefully.
I am Bui, the veiled woman of Beare.
I used to wear an ever-new tunic.
Today, attenuated as I am,
I have not even a cast-off tunic.
From here, in the same chapter, she notes that an ex told her that during arguments she would always come up with some ‘bullshit narrative’ to justify herself; she quotes James Baldwin (“the only real concern of the artist … is to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art“), adding that “this includes turning emotional chaos into bullshit narrative, to justify myself to myself, if not to you.”). Next she turns to the world of academe: “Academic hands tear texts apart in a hungry search for something that might pre-date Christianity; pre-date literacy. Stripping away words after word until there is nothing left but unspoken ideology. Bullshit narratives.”
Segueing between loosely connected topics like this could go wrong in less assured hands, but I found it all fascinating. And although the subject matters sounds erudite – and it is – the writing is also no-nonsense and sometimes very funny.
Boyle can be uncomfortably open, acknowledging upfront that she is an alcoholic from a family of addicts, and questioning her motives for her leaving her six-year old daughter in England with her father to pursue her academic career many miles away in Ireland. The rare but eyebrow-lifting accounts of her sex life are such that the Daily Mail would probably wheel out terms like “shameless”. And amid the confessional writing, she is clear-eyed, incredibly clever, emotionally raw and extremely good company.
“When I was very little, no more than three or four years old, I had already moved house so often, amidst so many permutations of my shifting family unit, that I told my stepmother that I didn’t know where my home was. She told me that my home would always be wherever my teddy bear was.
…
Today, Poodle lives in my bedroom in Dublin. He has a hole in his arse from when one of my brothers anally raped him with a pencil. His head has been sewn back on twice, badly, and sometimes stuffing falls out of his neck. But he is home.”
