All the Waking Hours: Essays

By Erin Wunker

Part cultural critique of why we bother or don't bother or are bothered, and part memoir that flies in the face of boredom, for readers of Jenny Odell, Moyra Davey, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Deborah Levy.

Boredom and bother are uncanny twins, two points on a continuum of what it is to be a human in the late stages of capitalism. Erin Wunker asks how boredom changes as we age, what moves us from inertia to action, and how being a woman in middle age might require magical thinking. Memories of unbelonging are given meaning when held alongside the fashion statements of iconoclastic women artists. The boredom of childhood summers is held in tension with the tedium of caregiving and intense love for one's child--and the anxieties and hopes of being alive in a hyper-mediated, always-agitated world.

Shifting between autotheory, memoir, literature, and shrewd cultural analysis. the essays in All the Waking Hours eflects on some of what Sianne Ngai might call "ugly feelings" in hopes of finding--amidst a heap of boredom, bother, concern, and care--a way to build a life of sustained curiosity.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1998336336
• ISBN13: 9781998336333
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Assembly Press
• Length: 162 Pages