Dangerous Ideas about Mothers by Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson
UWA Publishing, $29.99 pb, 246 pp, 9781742589909
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An essay at the heart of this collection, ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ by Maria Tumarkin, is not as insistent as its title suggests. Tumarkin, interested in ‘fissures and de-fusion’, troubles the awkward spots in her analysis. While reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) – which places ‘motherhood and queerness side by side’ with autotheory and what Nelson calls ‘post-shame’ autobiographical writing – Tumarkin describes being ‘beside herself’ with exhilaration.
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