![]() ![]() Insofar as I have differed from this standard, I have felt myself to be somewhere between uninteresting and unspeakable. Desire, failure, fear, ambition – all have been housed in male bodies. I have learned almost all I know about the world, about myself, from books, and it has been a joy, a work of love but the consequence is that I have learned it from men. This is what literature offers us: the chance to take the specificities of a particular experience and to use them to articulate that which is universal. Her work is extraordinary but still – my second thought – is there really only space for one pregnant body in all of literature? What Nelson does (and I had wanted to find a way to do) is to use pregnancy as a device to examine other things – in her case, queer family-building, embodiment, love. It was only very recently that I read The Argonauts, Nelson’s account of her pregnancy, and afterwards – when it was too late, because my own book was already being printed – I wondered if perhaps she had said all there was to be said. ![]()
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