The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic…. [Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.

I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it.

When or how do new kinship systems mime older

nuclear-family arrangements and when or how do they radically recontextualize them in a way that constitutes a rethinking of kinship? How can you tell; or, rather, who’s to tell?

as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.”

gained an outsized faith in articulation itself as its own form of protection.

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The

They seemed to make a fetish of the unsaid, rather than simply letting it be contained in the sayable.

“pluralize and specify.”