The Binge

Discovery isn’t invention: before the colonizers arrived, every land they invaded did, in fact, already exist. Discovery is just finding your way to things that have always been there. So I didn’t discover M. A. C. Farrant, who’s been alive since 1947 and publishing since the 1980s. I just started reading her books. And while connecting with something (or someone) new can strike us so astonishingly, and exuberantly, that it feels like a revelation, any such discovery is simply self-discovery — as if some unknown, entombed piece of who we are has been chiselled loose and is falling neatly into place.

I have the writer Gary Barwin to thank for recommending M. A. C. Farrant to me in December 2024. The first book that I read, a week into 2025, was a collection of very short stories, The Days: Forecasts, Warnings, Advice. I loved it, and over the following year or so I read nearly twenty of her books, concluding with her memoir, My Turquoise...