Not Yana

Pregnancy is 'enlivening' at its literal and figurative sense

Everything I have just written: I have lost sight of times without number… If you don’t take in experience there is no change. Without change the connection within oneself dies. As that is unbearable, life is an endlessness of “remembering” what I already know. So where does that leave me? In perpetual struggle.

-Vivian Gornick

On the morning of my 24th birthday Sadie makes me whipped cream by hand and we listen to Tom Waits in the kitchen and I think that I could live like this forever, really, this could be my life forever and I wouldn’t complain. I know that I felt this way because I wrote it down, right there, in this document — I left the kitchen as it was happening

There was a moment, I felt a hug from my future. From myself. As I am now doing, for my past self who I can see is in her field trip bus. Worried about things that I still am working through right now. I did not even know then that these are issues then. As that might be the case, I am making progress and something about that moment of a hug tells

even when i am ostensibly at my lowest, i am still filtering my experiences through the eyes of a consumer; the desire to editorialize our own experiences (to romanticize the unseen, to live for our biographies) has become an autonomic facet of womanhood as unavoidable as breathing.

-Rayne fisher Quan

There it is again: that matrix of ancient human suffering that persistently defies my attempts to categorize it. There it is again: the allure of easy cultural criticism, promising to smooth down those agonies into a comprehensible and vaguely cathartic shape.

-Rayne Fisher-Quan

as if writing or thinking about your body as a woman is just another thing you can do, an “obsession” as morally neutral and freely available as any other, and as if the only possible factor problematizing one’s engagement with that obsession is that it’s not seen as respectable enough by masculine society. This isn’t satisfying to me, somehow.

-Ra

It is inarguably true that there is nothing intellectually or artistically inferior about exploring the body and the self (and truer still that men write about their bodies and themselves all the time, but they often get to pretend they’re writing about something else when they do and are generally taken at their word — whereas a woman could publis

I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new.