First autotheory book? Combines autobiography, memoir, critical theory. It’s a way to bring in the personal while grounding and making accessible the heaviness of trauma with the context of theory
The book is rooted in two main events: Harry’s T procedure and Maggie’s pregnancy.
Takeaways
- Articulation itself is its own form of protection
- The inexpressible is contained in the expressed
- Repeating is inevitable. Dependency is inevitable.
Quotes
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
- Pleasure becomes accretive and autotelic
- The more it’s felt and displayed, the more proliferative, the more possible, the more habitual it becomes
- “Sometimes the most paranoid tending people are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate richest reparative practices”
Roland Barthes:
- “Whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you’, its meaning must be renewed by each use, as the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.
Anne Carson:
- leaving a space empty so God can rush in
Adam Phillips / Barbara Taylor, “On Kindness”:
- The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic…dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.
- “Corollary habit: deriving the bulk of my self-worth from a feeling of hypercompetence, an irrational but fervent belief in my near total self-reliance.”
Alice Notley’s Disobedience
- We are made of star stuff. What is made from where.
Annie Sprinkle:
- “there is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, nothing impervious to my alchemy*
Other quotes:
- Is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.
- The pleasure of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.
- Writers wanting to express themselves as they desire
- Hungry for permission
- Want guarantee against bad consequences Writing of book undos knot and hands its strands tot he wind