By David Coventry
Simply put, Performance is a memoir detailing David Coventry’s experience of living with ME (Myalgic encephalomyelitis), a debilitating illness that has a way of defying diagnosis, treatment, causation, and sense.
But Performance can’t be simply put. It is a memoir, but also a novel, a work of autofiction, and a space in which time misbehaves and memory is either unreliable or purposefully deceptive or wasn’t even a thing in the first place.
The strands go everywhere: a climbing accident in Canterbury, the science of ME, what it’s like being a writer at a writers festival, a breakup, touring with the future bass player from Beastwars, a hitched ride that ends with so much it never really ends, a twin David, “the David who feels knocked out of my body, kicked sideways by the hammer of the disease,” who seems to have shadowed him since a medical event some years prior.
It’s an immersion in the experience of chronic illness, which sounds like a downer, but it’s not that either. As David writes, “at best, my life senses itself, feels itself as a thousand pieces of fiction.”
Laura Williamson
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