For a homeless person, home is the street and the moveable blanket or bedroll. Ultimately, the only home remaining is the body. Fiona Wright is not homeless, she has been un-homed by her body’s betrayal. Whether she can ever feel that she fits again is the primary theme of her second collection of essays, The World Was Whole. That her body was once fitting and knowable, that the world was once whole, is suggested by the title, which comes from Louise Glück’s poem ‘Aubade’:

A room with a chair, a window.
A small window, filled with the patterns
light makes.
In its emptiness the world

was whole always, not
a chip of something, with
the self at the centre.