The Argonauts

One happy thing that can happen, according to Sedgwick, is that pleasure becomes accretive as well as autotelic: the more it’s felt and displayed, the more proliferative, the more possible, the more habitual, it becomes.

I find it irresistibly interesting when people are cathected onto their bad style rather than simply oblivious to it (a description that may apply to us all; I sense the risk increases with age).

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?

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

Winnicott notably describes “the primitive agonies” not as lacks or voids, but as substantives: “fruits.”

This comes as no real surprise—my mother and her entire family line are obsessed with skinniness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness.

My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.

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

“pluralize and specify.”