An experimental Australian novel that dismantles the conventional language of illness.

Cardboard follows a young woman navigating anorexia, psychiatric treatment and institutions. Drawing on Fiona Place's own experiences, the novel moves between prose, poetry, lists and fragments, exposing the cruelties of a world in which bodily autonomy, everyday freedoms and even access to writing materials become conditional upon weight gain.

The narrator struggles to make herself understood in environments where her behaviour is continually observed, classified and translated into clinical meaning, often without anyone recognising what she is actually trying to communicate. Place is acutely attentive to the bureaucratic absurdities of psychiatric care, the impossible demands of perfection and the difficulty of developing a language for distress that has already been named by somebody else. A formally inventive, darkly funny and deeply uncomfortable work of Australian feminist literature, concerned as much with power and self-expression as with the experience of illness itself.

Local Consumption Publications, 1989. Australian paperback edition. Good vintage condition, with visible rubbing and surface wear to the covers, light edge wear and age-toning to the pages.