Touched by Kim Kelly

Kelly’s novella begins with the sense of touch, the relaxed warmth of an arm across her body in the bed, the sense of safety and peace. Further on in the text, she considers the different meanings of ‘touched’, from gentle fondness to being a little crazy in the head. The craziness in the head is what her memoir explores, the panic attack that assailed her over a period of three days preparing for her graduation day, from her hairdresser appointment to the grasping of the valedictory parchment. All passed in a heightened state of anxiety, a fear from which she would have preferred to retreat.

Touched is a record of her thoughts and feelings across those three days, but it is more than a memoir. She interrogates the whole question of anxiety, what it is and where it comes from: the anxiety of deep-rooted trauma in a Jewish family, the anxiety of a parent’s fears, the anxiety of a child’s imagination, and the anxiety of not being deserving enough of the good things life brings. But above all she lets us in to her personal experience of the fishhooks that catch her, and the steps she takes to breathe through the moment and to continue on.

The novella is a memoir of Kelly’s personal truth. She takes us into her thoughts, her exploration of words and their meaning, the world of philosophical ideas, and the feelings that alternately overwhelm or sustain her. She is a person who has courageously and unhesitatingly become a kidney donor to her partner, but is stricken with nerves at the idea of a book launch or a graduation ceremony. Touched is not a self-help book, but it offers the opportunity to empathise and experience ‘compassionate understanding’.

Kim Kelly’s Touched is one of this year’s winners of the 20/40 Publishing Prize awarded by Finlay Lloyd.  She was a previous winner in 2023 with Ladies’ rest and writing room a fictional account of two women each struggling in their own way, adrift in 1920’s Sydney post-war celebrations. It is an equally insightful description of inner turmoil.

Themes: Anxiety, Panic, Love.

Helen Eddy