A Study In Our Selves

By Max Pasakorn
Creative non-fiction/Neon Hemlock Press/Paperback/55 pages/$25/Book Bar
4 stars

Reading Max Pasakorn’s micro-memoir of questioning selfhood is like sinking your teeth into sticky toffee, as every line spills over with decadent images that tell of a deliciously complex mode of being in between worlds.

Early in the slim 55-page chapbook, Pasakorn writes: “I have learned to err on the side of caution; by which I mean, my kinship with caution is so tight, I feel her stroking my leg hairs into their flat places.”

But Pasakorn’s prose is no kin with caution, as the Thailand-born and Singapore-based writer, 27, has boldly deconstructed the language of memoir to speak about queerness, cultural identity, body image, migration and family dynamics in ways that stretch the genre’s antiquated connotations.

For example, he brings an eloquent, razor-sharp voice to critique the vapidness of gym culture (“They don’t understand how I could be round. I think they are too used to conversing with man-looking folk with deliriously repetitive topics like fitness regimes”) and hypercompetition (“My father was on the phone, asking me why I would want to live like a dog in Singapore when I could return home to live like royalty”).

These personal essays are interspersed with a more poetic series of floating sections, where an unnamed “self” tries to grapple with her existence: “self doesn’t seem to need food or water but self moves so the energy must come from somewhere maybe self has little mouths on her feet that feed off the dust mites in the room”.

A Study In Our Selves is Pasakorn’s debut chapbook, which won the 2022 OutWrite Chapbook Competition award. The voice here is at once assured and unruly, and the writer – an arts and humanities undergraduate at Yale-NUS College – is one to watch out for in Singapore literature.

Savour this linguistically charged chapbook in less than an hour, and you will start to see the edges of your self start to fray.

If you like this, read: Bluets by Maggie Nelson (Wave Books, 2009, $23.87, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3vK4lzQ). Made up of 240 short pieces that reveal personal and aesthetic visions of love, Nelson’s book is also an hour-long affair that plays with the essay form.