A Year in Reading: Lynn Steger Strong
Maybe because of how much I miss human interaction, maybe because I’ve lost my faith in so much else: I believe in books, at least the ones that feel like primal screams, in ways I never have before.
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Shells: Picking Apart Pain and Womanhood
They were being strong, but not in the way I’d been taught to be strong as a woman: not quietly, apologetically, not while staying in their place. They were being strong against the systems instead of within them. They were saying, doing, wanting out loud—asserting, not apologizing or disappearing afterward.
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On Sheila Heti and (Not) Motherhood
Heti’s project seems to be to push the limits of the Female, to upend the necessity of Mother, to suggest whole worlds that might exist beyond the making of other smaller versions of ourselves. But what her book also does is remind us of the limits, both of our bodies and our thoughts.
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The Mourners
I spent years of my life thinking I would be a member of a room like that by dying. That I would be the thing no one was talking about, all anyone was thinking. I spent years imagining what those rooms might be like with me not there.
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