The Argonauts

I've never read anything quite like this book. I think I liked it overall, but it may be a book I will have to read again to try to fully understand.

At first it took me a while to get into this book, partly because of the writing style, and partly because the author spends some time quoting other authors, which confused me at first. However, as I delved deeper into this book, I realized this book was a self-reflective text in a way that no other book I had read before had been. It was honest and true and I felt the author's emotions and thoughts. I liked that the book was a narrative that takes you from point A to B, but rather skips around, because that's how all of our thoughts are, and it was more powerful to hear them this way. I think this is a must read for really anyone just because of how amazingly honest it is about her experience as a female.

This book is everything. Visceral personal memoir and queer theory.

"Many people doing all kinds of work are able to take pleasure in aspects of their work," Sedwick once wrote, "but something different happens when the pleasure is not only taken but openly displayed. I like to make that different thing happen."

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.

Woah. This is a lot. I wouldn't know where to start reviewing it. Probably you should read it, but if you do please don't blame me for telling you to read it.

Intelligent and heartfelt meditations on motherhood, sexuality, gender, marriage and love. Sometimes the academic references went a little over my head, but other times I nodded frantically for paragraphs at a time. Most accurate description of childbirth I’ve ever read. Brave, original and quite romantic.