Wood Would
Dora Dunham was back in the countryside. Her mum had just died, and she had returned to her childhood bedroom, which seemed almost aggressively unchanged, as if the room had signed a contract with time and refused to participate.
The smell of home was exactly the same. It felt unfair, somehow. One of the most important people in her life had left the earth, and yet the air still carried the same scent of old wood, laundry detergent, and whatever invisible thing makes a house feel like the place that made you. She cried knowing that the body she had hugged, loved, and spoken to had disappeared. But she also knew, with a certainty that surprised her, that only the body had left. Her mum’s soul, her thoughts, her light remained here somehow, lodged in the architecture of memory and habit. This much she believed, even if her mother now existed in another world, as Isabelle Graw might say.
Across the room, her old books stared back at her. Thomas Bernhard. Kathy Acker. Sylvia Plath. Their covers looked strangely alive, like former classmates encountered unexpectedly at a train station. Funny how history develops. The fiction of lived experience. An age-old tradition, really. It made her slightly furious to remember the last comment she had read online, something about autofiction being a sickness of girls who write. What did that even mean? Why did people always sound so frightened when women turned their lives into material?
She sat down at her old desk overlooking the neighbouring garden. Opening the drawer of the oak-effect desk, she found old photographs and laughed softly. These had been her first artworks. Someone had once told her that you could already see, in a person’s earliest work, the trajectory of an entire practice. Dora smiled at the thought.
The photographs showed objects arranged inside a ballet pointe shoe, against a plain white background and shot from above on a digital camera she still used to this day. The objects themselves were fragments of autobiography, an attempt to retell her own history. Looking at them now, she laughed at the almost manic determination with which fifteen-year-old Dora had tried to coerce a narrative into existence. A voice of a generation drifted through her mind.
One photograph showed a lipstick placed inside a ballet shoe. It referenced the family story about the time she painted her sister’s bedroom wall at the age of three, the lipstick standing in for the event itself, a small exercise in turning language into image, word into concept. Dora liked to think it proved she had already been an artist, even then. But she couldn’t remember if the memory belonged to her or if it had simply been narrated back to her so many times that it had settled into her consciousness like fact. Was memory just a story that had survived multiple revisions? Did she actually remember standing there with paint aka lipstick on her hands, or did she remember the version of herself that others remembered? Did she remember the event, or only its retelling? Sometimes it seemed impossible to separate experience from mythology, especially when the mythology happened to be your own.
The uncertainty reminded her of all those manifestation conversations online, where people insisted that the mind couldn’t distinguish between imagination and physical experience. Self-authored histories. Maybe that really was the sickness of the girls who write. She liked the thought more than she probably should have. If she made the work today, she thought, she would probably put a phone inside the ballet shoe. Something vaguely kern girl about that. She liked great stories, great symbols, great icons. She liked structures too: the way stories could dramatise, gloss over, distort, or rearrange reality without necessarily betraying it.
She had never believed in the phrase based on a true story. Her mum always said reality television was the only thing that could be real because nobody could possibly invent stories that strange.
Then she started crying.
The bad memories arrived all at once. The absence of her mum. The absence of light. The feeling that hope itself had become inaccessible. She suddenly understood why she needed symbols like the ballet shoe and the lipstick. Small portable monuments to optimism.
She curled up in her old teenage bed. The walls still carried celebrity posters and those strange Chinese-symbol tramp stamp graphics that had once been everywhere, each supposedly translating to hope. Pain moved through her body without warning. Endless pain from nowhere. Or maybe from somewhere else entirely. Another world. It flooded her.
Dora hated it.
She opened TikTok.
A video of someone engraving a perfume bottle. Another titled, “I’m going through things only Trisha Paytas would understand.” Then a man explaining how to paint convincing wood grain, followed by a tutorial on building the perfect vision board for the new year, followed by cavicular explaining his skincare routine.
It was exactly what she needed.
Gradually she stopped crying. The light from her phone illuminated her face in the darkened room. She lay in her teenage bed opposite the plastic oat-effect desk, which she now realised she could probably paint herself thanks to the wood-grain tutorial. Deep down, she knew she would have to confront her pain eventually. At some point in the future. But she also knew that the pain made her creative. It made her notice things other people didn’t. She preferred productivity to healing, at least for now. Better to stay inside the pain and make something from it. Better to become a voice of her generation.
A generation convinced of the doom embedded within engineered realities. A cohort mourning the disappearance of anything that felt unquestionably real. It reminded her of the quote: it doesn’t have to look real, it just has to feel real. Maybe that was what her generation was about. Vibes. Feelings. The refusal to accept a world without patterns, linear stories, or plans.
She closed her eyes and thought of her manifesto ballet shoes. Then she realised something unexpectedly comforting. Her mind would remember them her way. Not as they were, necessarily, but as they felt. Maybe that was the same thing. Maybe every memory was a kind of trompe l’oeil, a carefully painted illusion convincing enough to become reality.
Outside, the countryside settled into darkness. Dora let the thought linger for a moment before sleep arrived. She drifted off thinking about trompe l’oeil realities, the strange human desire to paint depth where there was none, to mistake representation for truth, and to find comfort in the difference.