Can You Tolerate This? Personal Essays by Ashleigh Young

Personal essays find unexpected depth in ordinary experience

Excellent Condition - Covers lightly scuffed with minor corner wear and an award sticker.

Ashleigh Young moves between memory, observation, and imaginative inquiry in a collection of essays that begins with personal experience and opens towards stranger possibilities. Growing up in New Zealand, family stories, bodily change, and encounters with other people provide subjects through which larger questions gradually emerge. The writing is attentive to small details and unusual connections, allowing humor and unease to sit close together. Rather than offering a single account of a life, the pieces explore different ways of looking at what a person notices and remembers. Can You Tolerate This? invites readers into a reflective, curious voice interested in the distance between familiar appearances and the surprising experiences they can conceal.