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A lyric interrogation of life as a bored woman in the twenty-first century, for readers of Jenny Odell and Deborah Levy.
What does it mean to be a human in the late stages of capitalism? How does boredom change as we age, and what moves us from inertia to action? Does being a woman in middle age require magical thinking?
Shifting between autotheory, memoir, and shrewd literary and cultural analysis, acclaimed essayist Erin Wunker wades into the thick of these questions. Memories of unbelonging are given meaning alongside insights about the fashion statements of iconoclastic women artists, while the boredom of childhood summers is held in tension with the contradictory experiences of monotonous caregiving and intense love for one’s child. Using her own experiences as a springboard, Wunker gives voice to the friction between the anxieties and hopes that come with being alive in a hyper-mediated, ever-demanding world.
Praise for All the Waking Hours
Erin Wunker's All the Waking Hours drew me in immediately with its soothing voice and tone, bringing me back to the days of early motherhood. What a thoughtful inward and outward meditation on boredom and bother, but one that ultimately transforms into a meditation about time and mortality. These meditations invite the reader to travel along a thoughtful and intelligent mind.—Victoria Chang, author of OBIT and With My Back to the World
"A beautifully written, kaleidoscopic book that swirls through boredom’s fertile childhood pleasures, caregiving’s elations/tediums, and a late capitalist mediascape that encourages us to swallow the world, and its suffering, with a yawn. With great sensory attunement and a meticulously observant mind, Erin Wunker has written a very un-boring collection, a gift for wild, anxious, inconsolable readers, and a study in how to meet one’s private and public hours with greater curiosity, communion and wakeful intention."—Kyo Maclear, author of Unearthing and Birds Art Life
Praise for Erin Wunker's previous work
"The spiritual successor to Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me. The essays are air-tight, intertwining traces of memory and theory, the best kind of non-fiction."—Large Hearted Boy
"We live in dangerous times, where hard-won human rights and freedoms are in danger of being lost. Wunker’s book is a reminder that those on the frontlines of culture and language are doing brave and necessary work.”—Kerry Lee Powell for Writers’ Trust of Canada’s 2016’s Best Books of the Year
"A powerful plea for a feminism that is willing to kill any joy that derives from inequality and injustice. All feminist killjoys will want this book on their shelves!”—Sara Ahmed
"An honest, personal feminist work essential to this moment, when reminders of why we need feminism are all around us.”—Vagabond City
Erin Wunker teaches, researches, and writes in Mi’kma’ki where she is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University. She is the author of Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life (Book*hug, 2016) and The Routledge Introduction to 20th and 21st Century Canadian Poetry (Routledge, 2022). She is also the co-editor of Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader (Coach House, 2020), with Sina Queyras and Geneviéve Robichaud; Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Contemporary Canadian Poetry and Poetics (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015), with Bart Vautour, Travis Mason, and Christl Verduyn; and Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug, 2018), with Hannah McGregor and Julie Rak. Wunker lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and now resides in Halifax, Nova Scotia.