Read a Q&A with Jenny Valentish | Everything Harder Than Everyone Else

Jenny Valentish is a journalist who teaches white-knuckle first-person writing. Her addiction memoir Woman of Substances took a big-picture look at how addiction and treatment is gendered, and became reading material for university courses and addiction clinicians alike. Her fourth book, Everything Harder Than Everyone Else, draws on her longstanding love of immersion journalism – or ‘journalist as human guinea pig’ – to better understand the lives of her interviewees.

Today, Jenny Valentish is on the blog to answer a few questions about her new book. Read on …

Jenny Valentish (Photo by Diana Domonkos).

Please tell us about your book, Everything Harder Than Everyone Else!

JV: Everything Harder Than Everyone Else immerses itself in the worlds of people who push their bodies to extremes, from performance artists such as Stelarc, to the Las Vegas female bare-knuckle boxer, a scientist whose private mission is to test his disgust response by eating what most would consider to be inedible, and a porn star who is also an MMA fighter. Through their endeavours I explore the psychological reasons why some people are able to endure pain and discomfort more than others. I also had a parallel mission, of training in Muay Thai kickboxing and having my first amateur fight, with my ego threatening to become my gnarliest opponent.

Where did your interest in writing about this subject come from?

JV: I’d been thinking about the nature of endurance. It’s something that came up when writing my book about women and addiction, Woman of Substances – the sometimes bloody-minded desire to flagellate the body and also to go one harder than everybody else. I knew that endurance running attracts a lot of people who have a history of addiction, and so it made me wonder about other kinds of acts of endurance, and what the backstories were of people in those pursuits.

Why do you think certain people become so obsessed with pushing their bodies to extremes?

JV: My interviewees were generally interested in pressure-testing themselves. What can they withstand? Can they withstand a physical pain comparable to emotional pain they may have felt in the past? If so, does that make them stronger and better able to face whatever life throws at them in the future? Also, of course there’s a great deal of pride and accomplishment attached to being able to do things that others couldn’t, wouldn’t or shouldn’t. And lastly, there’s the chemical cocktail of endorphins, endocannabinoids and opioid peptides that is the reward for withstanding discomfort.

When do you think the drive to test our limits becomes unhealthy?

JV: I wouldn’t presume to say! In many cases, if a behaviour to push the self physically isn’t expressed in such a way, it might be expressed in another, perhaps more harmful way. Some of my interviewees have found really productive methods of managing things like agitation, anxiety, addiction and trauma, or an obsessive nature. As ultra-endurance athlete Charlie Engle put it (a man who was once an enthusiastic partaker of crack cocaine before he committed to running), “Balance is overrated. Very few people who’ve actually accomplished anything big have balance in their lives. If you’re not obsessed with it, then why are you doing it?”

Can you share a story from your book that’s stayed with you?

JV: In one chapter, I shadowed a Perth bodybuilder, Karen, as she prepared to compete. I was guilty of some rote preconceptions about what constitutes a bodybuilder when I began this research. Whitened teeth gleaming in rictus grins; sucked-in stances; stripper heels and posing pouches; skin as brown and gristly as a pork scratching. But in pushing past the peacocking caricatures – which in any case are only true of competition day – I come to develop a real respect for the pursuit. Bodybuilders are often problem-solvers, striving to bring order to chaos. Karen grew up with very inconsistent parenting and was sexually abused by a trusted adult. Bodybuilding offered a rigid framework of reps and sets, and macros and micros, to which she had to comply to see gains – in muscle, but also in wellbeing. With this came relief from the unpredictability she’d come to fear in childhood. As I accompanied her to her massage appointments and coaching sessions, and then to the competition itself, she talked to me about how bodybuilding essentially saved her life. “I thought that bodybuilding would really make me feel very powerful,” she said. “I realised I needed to do something to fight. I needed to create some victory for myself.”

Why was it important to you to write this book?

JV: I generally write books because I need to make sense of something or get something out of my system. There’s always a weird chicken and egg thing going on. This time around I wanted to let off some steam and use my journalism credentials as a hall pass to hang out with some really interesting people and – often – have a go at doing whatever it is they’re doing. To that end, for this book, I had a livestreamed kickboxing fight, was put to sleep by a black belt, tried performance enhancing drugs and was thrashed by a BDSM dom. I feel better now.

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey towards becoming a writer?

JV: I started with self-publishing a fanzine (music magazine) when I was 16, had my first column (in cult style mag Dazed & Confused) when I was 18, then got staff jobs as a features editor, sub-editor and editor at various British and Australian magazines. My first book didn’t come out until I was 34, by which point I’d been trying, with various aborted manuscripts, for about 12 years. As a wise writer once told me, “It’s not a waste of time, it’s practise.”

What is the last book you read and loved?

JV: Kathryn Heyman’s Fury, a memoir about the novelist’s young adulthood in which she’s exposed to an endless barrage of sexual harassment and sexual assault, without having the language, conversations or context about such things that we do now. With no respite, she just ran as far as she could go – to Darwin – and then decided she still wasn’t far away enough, so got a job on a fishing trawler out in the Timor Sea. At first I thought all women should read it. Then I thought all men should read it. So basically, everybody should read it.

What do you hope readers will discover in Everything Harder Than Everyone Else?

JV: Professional athletes are a useful lens through which to contemplate the human experience as their experiences are so heightened. They’ve embarked on a career trajectory that is stratospheric, but also short-term (unless their chosen sport is lawn bowls), and there are a lot of lessons to be extracted for the transition periods in our own lives. I found this particularly pertinent in 2020, when we were all in limbo and suffered identity loss to a degree. With any great loss comes the gift of reinvention, because rebuilding is far more likely to happen when everything is in rubble.

And finally, what’s up next for you?

JV: More Muay Thai fights and back to bouncing ludicrous book ideas off my agent.

Thanks Jenny!

—Everything Harder Than Everyone Else by Jenny Valentish (Black Inc. Books) is out now.

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Everything Harder Than Everyone Else

Why Some of Us Push Our Bodies to the Extreme

by Jenny Valentish

There is a part of human nature compelled to test our own limits. But what happens when this part comes to define us?

When journalist Jenny Valentish wrote Woman of Substances, a book about addiction, she noticed that people who treated drug-taking like an Olympic sport – forcing their bodies to the edge with an all-or-nothing commitment – would often hurl themselves into a pursuit like marathon running upon getting sober. What stayed constant was the need to push their boundaries. Everything Harder Than Everyone Else is...

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