Scribe Australia, 30 January 2024
Scribe UK, 15 March 2024
‘Adele Dumont’s The Pulling is a compulsively readable, frank, and disquieting memoir. Dumont wields Ernaux-like precision to analyse and contextualise the obsession that has made and unmade her life. The writing is candid, fearless, and profound, and it takes on questions most of us lack the backbone to face. Dumont asks what is more real, our lived or unlived lives? Are we ourselves even in our deepest compulsions? The Pulling calls to mind the unsettling clarity of Yiyun Li and Linn Ullmann. I could not put this book down.’
ELLENA SAVAGE, AUTHOR OF BLUEBERRIES
‘The Pulling is an intimate and intricately crafted book, a meditation on privacy and the intensity and complexity of interiority, and the ways in which we might maintain this against and within — without losing — the world. It resists the easy narratives and language of illness, and all that these reduce, and is interested instead in the fascination of compulsion, what it offers and might mean. Dumont’s writing is both vulnerable and fierce, critical and beautifully detailed, and generous above all else.’
FIONA WRIGHT, AUTHOR OF SMALL ACTS OF DISAPPEARANCE
‘As a lifelong trichotillomaniac, who has never seen my furtive self reflected back in literature, I devoured this astonishing book in one greedy sitting. But even if you have never been a hair-puller or plucker, or skin-picker, nail-biter, or pimple-popper, yet know the pleasure and concomitant shame of self-soothing, by whatever means, you will revel in the humanity, compassion, and insight of Dumont’s stunning prose. The Pulling is a memoir that tears away at the quotidian ignominy and pain of “bad” habits, peeling back layers of individual, family, and cultural dis-grace and dis-ease. Rich, remarkable, uncomfortable, and compelling. I loved this book in equal measure to how much I have loathed myself for the corporal crutches the child me learned to steady herself upon in a shaky world, not of my making.’
CLARE WRIGHT, AUTHOR OF THE FORGOTTEN REBELS OF EUREKA
'A startlingly powerful book... restrained and brilliant... a deeply literary response to a complex illness and a complex life'.
TEGAN BENNETT DAYLIGHT, THE DETAILS
Reviews
'Impressively unsettling... Dumont manages to maintain a curious softness in her writing despite such hard subject matter - a fearless precision and an elegaic quality that is perhaps borne from having peeled away the layers of shame and familial forces that shape us all'.
SIAN CAIN, THE GUARDIAN
'Engrossing... there is a compelling Lawrentian rawness to the way [Dumont] depicts her condition and its possible origins'.
STEVEN CARROLL, SMH
'The canon of illness and disability is being written in real time and The Pulling is a timely and poetic addition'.
FIONA MURPHY, THE SATURDAY PAPER
‘A fascinating and shockingly honest work of autobiography, exploring secrecy, obsession and the ways invisible illness can shape our lives.’
MICHAEL WILLIAMS, QANTAS MAGAZINE
'Dumont writes so beautifully and with such precision that I read her memoir in just a couple of days'.
FELICITY ROBINSON, PRIMER
'... a plea for acceptance and a strong aversion to glib solutions...There is a sharply intellectual quality to this memoir, written by a deeply reflective young woman. By the last page of the memoir, I felt I was indeed Dumont’s intended reader, her stranger, her “you”'.
JANE TURNER GOLDSMITH, THE CONVERSATION
'The beauty and power of The Pulling resides in how artfully Dumont balances two sometimes competing concerns — filling a gap and sharing a secret... Readers with trichotillomania will surely be drawn in, as will any of us who have or have had a compulsive habit dating back to childhood that began, as it did for Dumont, as “just something that I did”. '
ZORA SIMIC, INSIDE STORY
'Where the reader may flinch, the author does not. I have never read anything that so vulnerably details the difficult experiences of a mental health condition...'
SAM VAN ZWEDEN, KILL YOUR DARLINGS
'Australian authors are doing the work that the mental health industry cannot – questioning the validity of recovery and uncovering what lies between diagnosis and ‘cure.’... Dumont and her cohort do not shy away from the uncomfortable and confronting'.